Shepherd Avenue. Charlie Carillo

Only my father had picked up blue eyes, through some errant gene.

      Every pair of Vic’s pants looked tight on him but he insisted they were comfortable and kept wearing them, despite my grandmother’s warning that “They’ll make you sterile.” His hard belly bulged slightly, like an overinflated tire. His rump bulged in the same way. From time to time he patted his buttocks, rat-a-tat-tat, as if they were bongos.

      Vic’s room was sparsely furnished: a horsehair mattress on a platform bed, an army fold-out cot (for me), a crucifix on the wall, a photo of the Journal-American’s 1960 all-star baseball team (“I’m third from the left; that guy’s hat hides my face”), a Frank Sinatra record jacket tacked to the wall, and a Victrola.

      “Put that down,” he said. I’d picked up his athletic cup and put it against my nose, thinking that was where it was worn. He took it from me and gestured with it.

      “Listen. If we’re gonna get along we can’t be messing around with each other’s stuff, okay?”

      I nodded. “What is that thing?”

      He blushed. “You wear it here,” he said, holding it in front of his pants. “In case you get hit with a baseball. You like Sinatra?”

      “I guess.”

      “You guess?”

      “I don’t listen to music much.”

      Shaking his head, Vic put on a record. “If you hang around here, you gotta like Sinatra.” Music filled the room. Vic lay on his back, his stiff mattress crunching as he rolled with the music.

      “Look,” he announced when the first song ended, “I think you and me can get along real good. See, I’m a ballplayer, I need lots of sleep. Most nights I’ll probably go to bed earlier than you.”

      “What position do you play?” I asked politely.

      Vic’s eyebrows arched. “You know baseball?”

      “A little.”

      “I’m the shortstop. I play in between the second baseman and the third baseman.”

      “Oh.”

      “Hey, don’t go thinkin’ I can’t hit, just because I’m an infielder. I hit better than all the outfielders on the team. If you can call ’em outfielders. Now listen to this part, how he does this,” Vic said, leaping off the bed and cranking up the volume on the Victrola.

      Down the street the elevated train rode past, partially drowning out the music. Vic muttered “Damn” and lifted the needle off the disc to play the same part again, scratching the record.

      “Here it is,” he said solemnly.

      I forget the song but at a certain point my uncle was jumping up and down on the bed, singing along. When the song ended he stepped to the floor, pink-faced.

      “Like, I get carried away,” he said.

      Connie appeared at the doorway. “I heard you jump, all the way downstairs! You’re gonna come right through the floor.”

      “Sorry, Ma.”

      “Come on,” Connie said. “We’ll eat.”

      When she left, Vic grinned at me. He clasped the back of my neck and led me into the hallway, giving me a slight Indian burn.

      On the way in I’d noticed a beautiful dining room where I figured dinner would be served, but Vic surprised me by leading the way to a dark, rickety staircase. Our footsteps echoed as we walked down to the cellar. There were no banisters. I put my palms against the walls for balance, feeling the scrape of rough stucco.

      The basement floor was red and yellow tiles. There were windows along one wall, facing the driveway — you got a view of any approaching visitor’s ankles. A long table with built-in benches stood under fluorescent lights. My grandfather’s oak chair stood at the end of the table.

      This was the hub of the home. During Depression years the main floor of the Ambrosio house had been rented out to boarders, so the family had gotten into the habit of using the basement. It was roomy, and always cool in the summertime.

      Upstairs, the dining room might as well have been a museum — the mahogany table with its fitted glass top, a buffet table on wheels, heavy long-armed chairs. On the backs of those chairs there were doilies that stayed white year-round, and if you opened a cabinet door in the dining room there was a clicking sound, as if the long-untouched varnished surfaces had welded together. Trapped inside the cabinets were gold-rimmed teacups and saucers with paper tags still glued to their undersides.

      But that room couldn’t hold a candle to the character of the basement.

      For one thing, the floor wasn’t level, which Vic demonstrated by placing a baseball on it. The ball was still for an instant, then rolled to the opposite wall.

      “Enough with that trick, already,” Connie said.

      The ceiling was a network of pipes and cables, painted white. There were upright poles at strategic locations, supporting the house above us.

      A bowl of spaghetti sat in the middle of the table, steam rising off it and disappearing into the fluorescents. Connie worked it with a pair of forks.

      A cameo portrait of her would have displayed a slender woman. Most of her two hundred and twenty pounds hung way below her breastbone. She was fifty-five years old but her hair was black, save for a pair of white-gray stripes at either side of her part, like catfish whiskers.

      Those fleshy arms rose again and again over the spaghetti, curtains of fat dangling and dancing from her upper arms. I was reminded of the flying squirrel pictures I’d seen in my science book.

      Her guard was all the way up that night. “You hungry?”

      “Yes,” I said.

      “You didn’t eat so good when you and your father lived alone.” A statement.

      “Sometimes we ate out,” I said.

      “Mmmm.” She was confirming her own thoughts. She put a bowl of spaghetti before me. “You remember the last time you ate here?”

      I hesitated. “I never ate here before.”

      “Ah! You don’t remember!”

      Vic bared his teeth tightly. “God, Ma, he was a baby. Why do you bring that up?”

      Connie ignored Vic as she loaded his dish. “That was some fight,” she said. “I still get knots right here when I think about it.” She made a tight fist and held it near her stomach.

      “Forget the knots, let’s eat,” Vic said, winking and squeezing my knee.

      Eating noises. Connie pointed at my side dish. “He don’t like it.”

      I was poking my fork into something I later came to love: bread, raisins, capers, and cheese, mixed together and baked into half a red pepper. It reminded me of a little coffin and was too sharp a taste for my first day.

      “You don’t like it, don’t eat it,” Connie said, as if she didn’t mind.

      “This food’s gotta grow on you,” Vic said. “Eat a mouthful tonight, next time eat two. Before you know it you’ll love it.”

      I held my breath and swallowed a mouthful without chewing. It went down like a giant slippery aspirin.

      “I promise it won’t taste so bad next time,” Vic said. Already I was chasing it with a forkful of spaghetti.

      “You talk like my food’s poison,” Connie said.

      “Ah, quit acting hurt, Ma.”

      Connie pointed at him with a fork. “You. Don’t eat so fast.”

      She had a point. Vic ate with the speed of an animal fleeing predators. He held his fork in his right hand and a piece of Italian bread in his left,