And page seven — Cordelia’s, not my mother’s — was the arithmetic.
Twenty years.
Fifty-eight hours a week, average.
Zero dollars of wages.
Zero dollars of Social Security credits.
Zero dollars of anything, because Vincent Costa had spent two decades telling the government I didn’t work there, and telling the dining room he was self-made, and both of those were the same lie wearing different clothes.
“Toni,” Cordelia said, in month nine, when the folder was done, “he’s going to call you a pack mule.
Or something like it.
He can’t help it.
He has to make you the thing that carried, so he can be the thing that built.”
“And when he does?”
“You stand up.
You show them the arm.
And then I put your mother’s building on the table, and we find out who carried whom.”
The judge — the Honorable Dolores Winfield, sixty-three, who had, I would learn, put herself through law school as a line cook — looked at the folder, and at my arm, and at Vincent, and said the sentence that ended the morning session.
