Page 71 of The Woman with the Target on her Back (Grassi Family)

Also like my father, he was tall and kept himself in shape, though he had more of a swimmer’s build. He had dark hair in a buzzcut style, light blue eyes, and a mustache that I normally would have hated, but I found charming on his face.

Unlike my father, though, Chuck was a lot more easy-going. And he was more apt to listen than just tell you what you should and shouldn’t do, think, or feel.

I had to assume that he was dirty too. That he accepted bribes to look the other way. Money he desperately needed to write those alimony checks every month. But he never flaunted fancy clothes, jewelry, or cars like my father did. His house was even really modest.

I’m never there. What do I need a big house for?

“You know those weeks that feel like they go on for months?” I asked.

“Sure,” he agreed, nodding.

“It’s been like that.”

I didn’t specify that it had actually been in a good way.

He would assume I meant the shop, my dad’s injuries, the drive-by, all the stress associated with those things.

There was no way to know that what I actually meant was that I’d had a week of ease and happiness. And now it was gone. And everything felt… shitty.

“Work will help,” he said, taking a coffee cup that I passed toward him.

That was the answer with men like my father and Chuck. They were workaholics. Which, arguably, caused a lot of the problems they were trying to overwork themselves to get through.

But I understood the desire to just… get lost in something. I’d been getting lost in my work for years.

Whether it was healthy or not, that was exactly what I planned to do now too.

“Know what I find, kiddo?” Uncle Chuck asked as we finished our coffee.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“That everything kind of… works out given enough time,” he said.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

I mean, that was probably true.

My heart felt like it had been crushed in my chest. But if I gave it a few weeks, months, even years if that was what it took, it would eventually not hurt as much.

It wasn’t necessarily that the pain got smaller, but life grew bigger around it. Until, eventually, the pain was just a very small part of a much bigger life.

At least, that was the hope.

I didn’t quite believe it as my uncle drove me down the street toward work.

I felt myself tensing as we made our way past the soup kitchen.

“Don’t worry. A few of us helped them clean up and repair,” he assured me.

I couldn’t claim my father or my uncles were big on community outreach, but everyone supported soup kitchens, right? I mean, you’d have to be a monster to believe people deserved to starve to death. I’d even seen some local drug dealers and pimps drop off food donations, claiming that the soup kitchen was the only thing that kept them fed sometimes when they were kids, and they wanted to make sure other kids had the same chance.

“Hey, look at that. Good as new,” Uncle Chuck said as we parked out front of my shop. Right behind a marked police cruiser.

My dad was pulling out all the stops.

For all his flaws, he really did care.

He might often show it in a bossy and even condescending way, but it said something that he was going all out in protecting me. Even after almost a year of not speaking. And most of our interactions before then ending in bitter arguments.

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