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icebox and placed it in a pan to thaw. He moved slowly, as if most of his joints were as frozen as the fish, crushing garlic and basil leaves into a bowl. The young man asked why in the hell Maria had chosen him to fleece. Giuseppe didn’t understand his English. There was a pistol, shiny as tinsel, in the young man’s hand. This he understood. What the fuck did this
anciano
think he was doing? Ancient old man in pajamas holding a fish.
    In the old stories, in the Good Book which Giuseppe couldn’t read, the Lord made a man and a woman and kicked them out of paradise for being nosy. Later, in Giuseppe’s recollection, He sent a child to save us all. It was a strange plan when you thought about it. He gets with child a virgin, then appoints some old man to look after them.
    The young man said he needed Maria because she brought it in fast and because nobody ducks out on him. He laughed. You can buy it on the street next week, if I don’t kill you.
    The gun barrel was less than a yard from Giuseppe’s face. The flat was silent, save the ticking of a clock and the occasional bleating of ships on the bay. Giuseppe wondered what God might have up His sleeve. Was it time for him to die? Was it time for Maria and her little miracle to die? And at that moment the little miracle screamed.
    It was a scream like an ice pick in the head, like a siren to wake the dead out of hell. The young man covered his ears, and Giuseppe made like his old hero, DiMaggio, clearing the bases at Seals Stadium. He made like he was bringing down the house with one swing, with a fish as his hammer. The man’s shiny head cracked likea walnut against the door frame. Blood seeped from his ears and mouth. Maria knelt and picked up the pistol.
Gracias,
she whispered to Giuseppe.
    H e fitted into a large burlap potato sack, but it took both of them to carry him to the pier. Already the produce trucks were arriving with their many gifts from the fields and valleys of California, with dates and avocados, with oranges bright as the sun from the south. And the child on his mother’s hip pointed the way, singing in his own tongue as Maria and Giuseppe slouched under the weight of our world and trudged through the darkness to the water.

THE PENNY ARCADE
    Joe
    J oe would have been Giuseppe but for his mother’s trick. Giuseppe and Rosari Verbicaro’s first child, whom they’d named after his father, had died when delivered from the womb. The old midwives were as confused and distraught as the mother, and they searched their brains for reasons. Rosari was too young, perhaps. Rosari didn’t drink enough wine or nanny-goat milk. The mother had her own theory, which had to do with the name and the smoldering temper of her husband, and she insisted on giving the second, also a boy, his own name. He grew to be a beautiful but slow-witted lad, and Rosari succeeded in giving birth to five more after him, three girls and two boys, the last of which Giuseppe demanded to tag his name onto. Rosari nodded, but when the time came for signing the certificate, she smiled and wrote the name
Joe.
    By this time, English had invaded the household vernacular of all but the old man, and the children preferred calling the baby Joe, anyway. It took Giuseppe a few years to catch on. He sat at the table after a day of backbreaking work, stewed on homemade wine, while the children were laughing and fighting over the last servingof string beans. When he asked what the boy’s name was, Giuseppe or Joe, Rosari said, in Italian, What’s it to you, old-timer? It worked.
    Joe’s brothers and sisters were all taken out of school in order to work, either to haul debris for the old man or to sew at some sweatshop, but Rosari kept her youngest in class because she recognized his shrewd mind. Little Joe had a better head for math than his elementary school teachers. He discovered the Fibonacci sequence on his own, the wonderful pyramid of relationships, while doodling in his notebook during