I was pretending to sleep when my housekeeper’s three-year-old daughter painted my FACE with watercolors – and when I opened my eyes, I wasn’t angry at her, I was angry at every year I’d spent sitting in rooms that used to have a small voice in them.
The girl had no idea what I was. That was the only reason I let her stay.
Two months before Bea, I’d caught my accountant skimming. I didn’t yell. I sat in my office chair, eyes closed, while he explained himself. I counted his lies by the pauses between them. Seven pauses. Seven lies. Marco removed him that night. That’s how I ran things. Stay still. Let them show you who they are.
I’m Adrian Romano. Thirty-five. I run a construction firm in the western suburbs of Chicago that moves money for people I’ll never name. My father built this empire before his stroke. I inherited it the way you inherit a debt you can never pay down.
My son Matteo died nineteen months ago. He was two and a half. The house still had his sippy cups in the cabinet when my wife packed her bags a week later.
After that, I stopped letting anyone touch me.
Then Daniela Morales started cleaning my house twice a week. One Thursday she showed up holding her daughter’s hand. “My sitter fell through, Mr. Romano. I can leave if – “
The girl waved at me.
“Hi. I’m Bea.”
Three years old. Holding a stuffed rabbit missing one ear.
“She stays in the front room,” I said.
After that, Bea came once a week. She colored on the rug. She talked to her rabbit. She sang songs I almost recognized.
One afternoon I leaned back in my chair while Daniela vacuumed upstairs. Bea was on the floor with her watercolors.
I closed my eyes.
Small footsteps.
A wet brush touched my cheek.
I didn’t move.
Another stroke across my forehead. Then my nose.
Daniela’s footsteps came fast down the stairs. “Bea – oh God. BEA, NO.”
I opened my eyes. The girl held her brush like a trophy.
“You looked sad,” she said. “So I fixed you.”
I caught my reflection in the window. Blues, yellows, a green line across my jaw.
I looked like someone’s dad.
My throat closed.
Daniela was shaking. “Mr. Romano, I’m so sorry, we’ll leave – “
“Daniela.”
She stopped.
No one had touched my face in nineteen months. Not since I’d pressed my forehead to Matteo’s in the hospital, his skin already cool.
“You missed a spot,” I said to Bea.
She grinned and reached for my other cheek.
That night I sat in the bathroom staring at the paint I couldn’t wash off. Something kept pulling at me. Bea was the same age Matteo would have been. Born the same year. Maybe the same month.
I opened the drawer beneath the sink. Behind the razors, face-down, was a photograph of my son.
He would have been four.
The next morning I called Daniela. “Bring her Thursday.”
Silence on the line.
Then her voice dropped low.
“Mr. Romano,” she said. “There’s something about Bea’s father I need to tell you. I should have told you before I ever walked into your house.”
My hand gripped the counter until my knuckles went white.
“He worked for YOUR FATHER,” she said. “And the night he disappeared – it was the same night your son died.”
What I Did Next
I didn’t say anything for long enough that she asked if I was still there.
“I’m here,” I said.
The kitchen was quiet. Eight-forty in the morning. Gray February light coming through the window over the sink. I was looking at a coffee cup I hadn’t filled yet.
“Daniela.” My voice came out flat. “What was his name?”
“Esteban.” A pause. “Esteban Morales. He’d been working for your father’s operation for almost two years. Driving, mostly. He never told me more than that. I didn’t ask.”
I knew the name. Not well. A face that went with it, vaguely. Young guy, maybe twenty-six, twenty-seven. Quiet. Showed up when he was called. I hadn’t called him. My father’s people had.
“And you walked into my house knowing this.”
It wasn’t a question. She heard it the way I meant it.
“I needed the work,” she said. “And I needed to know. Whether you knew what happened to him. Whether anyone did.”
I put the phone down on the counter without hanging up. Stood there. Picked it back up.
“Thursday,” I said. “Come Thursday. Bring Bea.”
I hung up before she could answer.
The Name I Hadn’t Said Out Loud in Nineteen Months
My father’s stroke happened eight months before Matteo died. Left side. He couldn’t speak right after, couldn’t write. He ran things through Marco for a while, which meant Marco ran things, which meant decisions got made that I didn’t know about until they were already done.
That’s what I told myself.
I called Marco that afternoon. He picked up on the second ring, which he always did for me, never for anyone else.
“Esteban Morales,” I said.
Silence.
Not the kind of silence where someone’s thinking. The other kind.
“Who’s asking?” Marco said.
“I am. Right now. On the phone.”
He exhaled slowly. “That was your father’s call, Adrian. Before the stroke. Before everything.”
“What was the call?”
“Esteban was moving money sideways. Not a lot. Enough.” Another exhale. “He had a kid coming. He was scared. He made a bad choice.”
“Where is he.”
“Adrian.”
“Marco.”
The line went quiet for four seconds. I counted.
“Calumet area,” Marco said. “Two years ago January.”
January. Matteo died in January.
I’d been in a hospital room for six days straight. I hadn’t slept. I hadn’t eaten. I’d sat in a plastic chair next to a bed that kept getting smaller and I hadn’t known a single thing happening outside those walls. My father’s people had kept moving. The world had kept moving.
Esteban Morales had a daughter. She was probably two months old when he disappeared. She grew up not knowing him. She named her rabbit something I never asked about. She walked across my floor in socks with rubber grips on the bottom and she pressed a wet paintbrush to my face because I looked sad.
She wasn’t wrong.
What Daniela Knew and What She Didn’t
Thursday came cold. Ice on the front steps that I’d salted twice and it kept coming back.
Daniela came through the door with Bea on her hip. The girl was wearing a yellow coat with wooden toggle buttons. She saw me and pointed.
“You washed it off,” she said.
“I did.”
She looked disappointed in a way that was almost funny. Almost.
Daniela set her down and Bea went for the rug in the front room, already pulling her rabbit out of the bag. Daniela stood in the entryway not taking her coat off.
“Come in,” I said.
She followed me to the kitchen. I had coffee ready. I poured two cups and sat down at the table. She stayed standing for a moment, then pulled out the chair across from me and sat on the edge of it.
She was thirty-one or thirty-two. Dark circles she covered with something that didn’t quite cover them. Hands that were careful with everything they touched, like she’d learned to be careful.
“How much do you know?” I asked.
“I know he was moving money for your father’s operation. I know he took some.” She wrapped both hands around the mug. “I know he called me from a number I didn’t recognize, January fourteenth, two years ago. He said he loved me. He said take care of Bea. That was the last time.”
January fourteenth.
Matteo died on the sixteenth.
Two days apart. I’d been so far inside my own collapse that the world could have burned and I wouldn’t have smelled the smoke.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” I said.
She looked at me.
“I didn’t order it. I didn’t know about it until two days ago. That’s true.” I set my cup down. “It doesn’t change what happened.”
She nodded once. Her jaw was tight.
“I need to know where he is,” she said. “Bea’s going to ask someday. I need something to tell her.”
The Part I Hadn’t Planned On
I spent the next four days making calls I hadn’t made in two years. The kind of calls where the other person answers carefully and talks around everything and you have to hear what’s in the gaps.
Marco came to the house on Sunday. We sat in the office where I’d counted the accountant’s lies. Marco is fifty-three. Built like a retired linebacker gone soft. He sat across from me and he put his hands flat on the desk.
“You’re doing this for the woman,” he said.
“I’m doing this because it’s owed.”
“Adrian.”
“Her husband is dead because of decisions made under this family’s name. Her daughter is three years old. I’m going to find out where he is so she can bury him properly.” I looked at him. “That’s what we’re doing.”
Marco looked at his hands. “Your father gave the order.”
“My father can’t speak.”
“No.” He looked up. “He can’t.”
We found what was left of Esteban Morales in the Calumet area, like Marco said. I won’t say more than that. There are people who handle these things, and they handled it, and I paid for everything, and I made sure Daniela had a name to give the funeral home.
She called me the night after.
“How did you find out?” she asked.
“Doesn’t matter.”
A long pause.
“Thank you,” she said. It came out rough. Like it cost her.
“Don’t thank me.”
“I’m thanking you anyway.”
What Bea Did the Following Thursday
She came in with a new color she’d gotten somewhere. Orange. She showed it to me like it was a discovery she’d made personally.
“This one’s for happy,” she announced.
I crouched down to her level. She had her father’s eyes, I thought. Dark and direct. Not afraid of anything.
“Yeah?” I said.
She nodded very seriously and uncapped the orange and looked at my face with the focused expression of someone doing important work.
“Hold still,” she said.
I held still.
Daniela was in the kitchen. I could hear her moving around in there. The refrigerator opening. A cabinet closing.
Bea drew something on my cheek. A circle, maybe. A sun. I couldn’t tell.
“There,” she said.
She stepped back and examined me.
“Better,” she decided.
I sat on the floor of my own front room with orange watercolor drying on my face while a three-year-old girl with her dead father’s eyes went back to her rabbit, and I didn’t move for a while.
The sippy cups were still in the cabinet. I hadn’t been able to touch them.
That afternoon, while Daniela finished up and Bea was putting her coat on, I went to the kitchen and I took both cups down from the shelf. Held them. They were plastic. Blue. One had a small crack along the rim from when Matteo had thrown it off his high chair and I’d laughed and he’d laughed and my wife had said Adrian, don’t encourage him.
I set them on the counter where I could see them.
Not away. Not gone.
Just there.
—
If this one got you somewhere quiet, pass it to someone who needs it.
For more wild tales about children and unexpected events, check out My Daughter Drew a Picture of the Man She Called “The Bad One From Daddy’s Phone”, or read about a different kind of household drama in My Dog Lunged at My Pregnant Wife in the Nursery. I Put Him in the Garage..
