From Chapter Thirty-Two, “The New Parliament”
Decades after her childhood on Annin Street, Netta works in an Atlantic City casino count room. As the crew begins turning to her for help with matters beyond the money, she recognizes a role she first knew at home.
“I became what I became in that room, and I will name it, since no one ever named it out loud there either: I became the aunts. Not the bank; the standing. It arrived the way my jobs have always arrived, task by task, until one day it had a shape and the shape had always been mine. The new girls were sent to me to be taught the scale, and I taught them the way my people teach, I told them nothing and showed them everything. The disputes came to me, the roster grievances, the two women not speaking, and I poured the coffee and let them talk, and gave their words back to them with the raw edges turned under, the way a hem gives back a skirt. A christening gown wanted a hem; it came to the break room in a paper bag, and went home blind-stitched; and the whole crew knew what my hands knew, and nobody ever asked where a count-room manager learned finishing, because the break room had conducted its own quiet audit of me years before and closed the file. Person by person, at the Formica, on the late shifts, they had each told me their street, and I had told them mine, an installment at a time, the pad, the hems, the wagon; and Carmen G. spoke for the house when she put down her cup at the end of the wagon’s chapter and said, without one gram of surprise: Of course. We knew you were somebody’s before you ever said. A person who counts like that was raised to it.”