Page 2 of Thanking Her Brother's Best Friends

This made me chuckle. Chloe Nguyen was a direct import from Japan, where she'd grown up with her African American mother and Asian father.

Now twenty-seven, she moved to Boston five years ago to study culinary arts and wound up apprenticing under me. The day I hired her, I knew she would be much more than just another employee.

Her acumen was sharp, her tongue sharper. You don’t get people like that often. She showed me parts of myself that I couldn't bear to bring out. Because I... even with everything I'd achieved in my thirty years on this Earth, I was inadequate.

Nothing could convince me otherwise.

There was so much I still had to do. So much I needed to build for the fire in my heart, the song in my veins, my son. I needed to make an empire for him.

And time just wasn't long enough.

The Southie I'd grown up in belonged to working-class Irish Americans.

It was one of the oldest American neighborhoods, and the people who made it home were mostly immigrants who needed to flee from the potato famine that struck Ireland in the 1800s.

Imagine living in a neighborhood where every damn person is somehow connected to the other. You literally began your conversations by saying, "Do you know... ?" It was expected that each of us had to be related to someone from the other end of town.

Living in Southie branded me the day I made my appearance in Greenwood Hospital on the Lower End.

In 2014, a news article debated the possibility of changing "Lower End" to "Broadway Village".

I grimaced at the thought.

You could try to take the classism out of the name, but you couldn't take it out of the minds of the people who defined my childhood. Even at the time, the city side of South Boston was undergoing gentrification at lightning speed. One day, it would go on to become one of the highest-valued realtor locations in Boston.

My childhood was spent in the West Side, or, like I said, the Lower End. This little stretch was dominated by housing projects. My family lived in a row house near a traffic circle separating Old Colony from Old Harbor.

I was the youngest of five children.

I did not know much about my father, but from what I'd gathered—and word travels quickly when you're in a town where everyone knows each other—he was a gifted student who met my mother at South Boston High.

He had the mouth of a Boston cabbie and a reputation for being a notorious charmer.

And my mother, bless her soul, was always soft when it came to men. She liked to think that her validation depended on the men in her life finding her beautiful.

There were days I worried I'd inherited that from her. On those days, Chloe was my refuge.

Anyway, Dad died a month before I was born. Again, I only heard what had happened, but it was an overdose. But Mom used to tell me he was a good man, never had an affair, and never had eyes for anyone but her and the children.

I liked to believe that. I liked to believe that he was the singular manly angel in her life before it went to shit because each guy she brought home after that routinely abused her and us kids.

When I finally escaped, I thought I'd never forgive her.

But there are occasions when I feel I may have been a little too hard on her. She was the product of poverty, multiple jobs, and running after kids she didn't ask to have. It couldn't have been easy.

I was glad I didn't feel the same way for Oliver, though. To me, he was my sunshine. Maybe part of the reason I clung to him so hard was because I could never get pregnant again.

"Hey," Chloe said, her soft voice jolting me out of my golden hour flashback. "You okay?"

I shook my head. "Yeah, no. I'm fine. Just had to go back for a minute there. But I'm alright now. I can't wait to tell Dave the news."

She grimaced. "Sure. I'm happy he gets to know he's living with a prodigy. But don't get your hopes up, okay? You know how he is."

Chloe, like everyone else in my team and life—barring my older brother, Ben—thought that I was wasting my time around Dave.

They believed I was destined for more incredible things. They could be right, but likely because they didn't understand the need. I had to think he would come around and see that my successes weren't hinged on his failing at life.

He'd come to a point where he honestly thought that he couldn't keep up with me because I was becoming too "common". That was what he liked to call people who made it on their own. He believed I'd do better if I stayed at home, cooked his meals, and tended to our son.

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