Chapter 9 - THE SUNSHINE ON THE REFRIGERATOR
Eight months later, the June sunlight poured through the tall bay windows of an old, sprawling yellow farmhouse in Oak Park, warming the wide oak floorboards and smelling of fresh-cut grass, lilacs, and the tray of warm cinnamon bolillo rolls Mateo and his wife Elena had brought over from Little Village twenty minutes earlier.
There were no marble foyers in this house, no society photographers from Crain’s Chicago Business, and no locked silver cabinets.
After the federal receivership and the Cook County State’s Attorney finished dismantling the corrupt wing of the Vance estate in February—following guilty pleas from Julian, my mother, and Lawrence Finch that ensured neither Julian nor my mother would ever walk out of state prison alive, while Richard and Amelia Brooks served eight-year federal sentences for bank fraud and criminal conspiracy—Marcus Sterling and I had restructured Vance Development from the ground up.
I had stepped down as CEO to become Co-Trustee of the newly established Arthur & Baby Arthur Vance Pediatric Foundation, handing day-to-day corporate operations over to an independent board while we converted my grandfather’s thirty-million-dollar Lake Forest estate into a free residential convalescent house for families with premature infants receiving care at St. Jude’s and Stroger Cook County Hospital.
In our sunny Oak Park kitchen, every single inch of the double-door stainless steel refrigerator was covered in bright crayon drawings held up by plastic alphabet magnets.
"Papa! Look!"
I turned from the coffee maker just as three-and-a-half-year-old Clara came running across the kitchen in her yellow overalls—not wheezing, not gasping, her cheeks pink and plump after Dr. Patel’s surgical team had successfully completed her airway reconstruction in April.
She held up a piece of thick construction paper where she had drawn four stick-figure children under a giant yellow sun, alongside a tall mama and a papa wearing a very large gold circle on his hand.
"Me, Maya, Leo, and baby brother Arthur in the sky," Clara announced proudly, pointing a purple-crayon-stained finger at the smallest stick figure floating right inside the yellow sun. "And Papa’s tick-tock."
I dropped down onto both knees on the warm wood floor and pulled her straight into my chest, kissing the top of her soft brown head while my throat tightened with a gratitude so vast it still humbled me every morning when I woke up.
"That is the best drawing in the whole house, sweetheart," I told her, reaching for a red letter C magnet to hang it right at eye level in the center of the refrigerator door.
Out on the screened-in back porch overlooking the big fenced yard where a wooden swing set stood under two maple trees, Mateo was sitting in a wicker rocking chair teaching little Maya how to braid sweet dough while his wife Elena poured strong coffee for Marcus Sterling and Detective Frank Kowalski.
And sitting on the porch steps in the warm morning sun was Grace.
She had gained back the weight she had lost during those three brutal years alone; the dark hollows under her eyes were gone, replaced by the quiet, steady warmth I had fallen in love with ten years ago when she was a girl who laughed at my terrible jokes in a coffee shop near UIC. On her left wrist gleamed her grandmother’s thin silver charm bracelet—now sporting three tiny engraved silver discs for Leo, Clara, and Maya, and a tiny silver angel wing for Arthur.
Sitting between Grace’s knees on the wooden step was Leo.
My son was wearing miniature blue denim overalls and holding the worn blue plush rabbit—which now had both ears again, after Grace and I had framed the four tiny hospital bracelets and the original blue cloth ear inside a cedar shadowbox hanging right above the fireplace mantel alongside my grandfather’s portrait.
As I pushed open the screen door with two mugs of coffee in my hands, Leo looked up at me with my own serious gray-blue eyes, tilted his head to the left in that exact familiar way, and held up his small left wrist, where a five-dollar plastic dinosaur watch was strapped securely over his cuff.
"Same, Papa," Leo said seriously, tapping his plastic watch face against my grandfather’s gold Patek Philippe on my wrist. "Tick-tock stay."
"Yeah, buddy," I said softly, sitting down on the wooden step beside Grace and pulling Leo onto my knee so I could wrap my other arm around my wife’s shoulders. "Papa’s staying right here. Forever."
May you like
Grace leaned her head against my shoulder, slipping her fingers through mine. On her left ring finger, there was no three-carat society diamond bought with blood money—only a simple, warm band of hammered gold we had picked out together at a neighborhood jeweler in Oak Park the afternoon we remarried in the courthouse garden last month, with our three children holding the ribbon and Mateo standing as my best man.
Out in the yard, Clara ran past the lilac bushes chasing a yellow butterfly, her clear, effortless laughter ringing out across the green grass—no wheezing, no rain, and no secrets left between us and the morning light.
