Prologue
New York City, 1890
Lower East Side of Manhattan
Maggie Molinaro was five blocks from the safety of her uncle’s garage when she noticed the gang of boys following her. Boys or young men? It was hard to tell, but they looked mangy and tough, and she shoved her ice cream pushcart faster on the crowded Manhattan sidewalk. The umbrella made wheeling the heavy cart awkward, and the boys were gaining on her.
“Hey, how about an ice cream, girlie?”
They wouldn’t have called her girlie if her father were here. Maggie had been working this pushcart since leaving school last year when she was fifteen, but this was the first time she’d gone out alone. Normally she and her father worked as a team, but not today, and the last mile home went through a rough part of town. Dilapidated tenements towered over the buckled concrete walks, making it hard to move quickly.
Jeering from the boys got more aggressive, and she picked up her pace, desperate to reach her uncle’s tenement. Uncle Dino sank all his money into his fledgling pushcart business, and he would scare those boys away.
She swallowed hard, regretting how she told Dino she’d be meeting her father at Washington Square, and it was okay to take the pushcart out alone. It was a lie. Everyone knew that if her father missed one more shift, Dino would fire him, and nobody wanted that. Until last year they all had shared a crowded tenement room, but she and her father had to move out because her dad complained Dino had too many rules.
Maggie didn’t mind Dino’s rules. Dino never had to lie or cheat to make rent. Dino never had to beg for scraps at the soup kitchen because he spent all his money at the pub. Someday Maggie wanted to buy a pushcart of her own and follow in Uncle Dino’s footsteps, yet everything would go sour if he had to fire her dad.
She tried to move faster, but other pushcarts crowding the walk blocked her progress. An arm landed around her neck as the stink of dirty wool hit her nose.
“I said, how about an ice cream, girlie?”
“I don’t have any left.” She mashed the palm of her hand against the top drawer to protect the cashbox. The loan on the pushcart was due tomorrow, and no matter what, she had to protect the cashbox.
The arm around her neck tightened. “Check it out, Jamie.”
One of the other boys opened the cart’s lid and reached a dirty hand into the cold compartment. “Lookee here,” he said, grabbing a few bars of ice cream and tossing them to the others. Then he reached down again and grabbed a lump of melting ice.
“Catch,” he said, lobbing it at her face. She gasped and batted it away. The ringleader lunged for the cash drawer, but she got there first and slammed it shut.
“You’ve got what you wanted, now leave me alone,” she said, her hands beginning to shake.
“You think we got what we wanted? Think again.”
An old man selling pretzels from a nearby cart stepped forward. “Leave her alone, lads.”
They circled in closer, and her mouth went dry. She shouldn’t have tried to do this without her dad, and now the boys had circled her cart, bracing it in place. The ringleader tried for the cash drawer again.
“Get your hands off my cart,” she ordered, trying to sound strong.
“Leave that girl alone,” a woman scolded, but she was wheeling a baby carriage and moved along quickly. Other pedestrians looked on with disapproval, though no one helped as the jackals swarmed her cart. She pressed both hands against the cash drawer, but it didn’t take them long to wrench her away. A gloating boy grabbed the cashbox, tucked it under his arm and sprinted away, but they weren’t done.
“Okay, stand aside,” the ringleader said and grabbed the handles of the cart. Understanding dawned.
“No!” she shouted, clutching a handlebar with both hands, holding on for dear life. The ringleader pounded on her hands. She didn’t care if he broke her fingers, she wasn’t letting go.
“Help! Somebody please help me!”
Nobody came forward, and the boys kept shoving the cart down the street. She hung on, trying to dig her heels into the pavement, but it didn’t work and she was dragged along with the cart.
“Send for the police,” the pretzel vendor called out, and the ringleader upped his game. He punched her in the jaw. While the pain made it hard to see, she held on. One of them kicked her legs, and the ringleader drew back to punch her again. She couldn’t let go of the cart to defend herself and the blow knocked her down. Her face smacked the metal rim of the cart before hitting the pavement.
“Help!” she screamed. Blood streamed into her eyes, blurring her vision. By the time she scrambled to her feet, the boys were a block away with the pushcart. She ran after them but stumbled on a crack in the walk and went down sprawling. They had everything. She was never going to catch them. The pretzel vendor put an arm around her.
“There, there, it’s going to be okay,” he said.
No, it wasn’t. Uncle Dino still owed two hundred dollars on that cart. The payment was due tomorrow, and he wouldn’t be able to pay.
Everything hurt as she struggled to her feet. Grit embedded in her palms itched, but her forehead hurt the worst, pulsating like a white-hot knife across her eyebrow. Blood stung as it dribbled into her eye. A lady from a nearby shop brought her a lump of ice wrapped in a rag to hold to her forehead.
“Oh dear, I’m afraid you’re going to have a scar from this,” she said. “Such a pretty face you had.”
Maggie didn’t care about a scar. All she cared about was how to tell Uncle Dino that she’d lost everything.
Pain throbbed with every step on the long trek home. The ice in the rag melted, the cut still bleeding after walking the five blocks to the garage in a back alley, where other street vendors locked up their carts overnight.
Dino was inside, wiping down his cart and happily singing a church hymn, his Italian accent still strong. He stopped singing when he saw her face. He dropped the rag and ran to her.
“Oh, bambina, what happened?” He led her to a bench, and her aunt rushed to her side. Maggie would give anything if she didn’t have to tell them. She couldn’t do it.
“I’m sorry” was all she could choke out.
“Somebody got the cashbox?” Dino asked gently. She nodded, and he cringed a little, probably thinking he’d only lost a day’s income when it was so much worse. Her stomach hurt at the thought of telling him. Her lungs seized up and she couldn’t speak.
“Where’s your father?” Aunt Julie asked. Maggie couldn’t look at either one of them, instead staring at the concrete floor.
“He was drunk,” she whispered, still not able to look up. Dino didn’t deserve this. Dino had worked hard all his life and done everything right, yet he needed to know.
“They got the cart,” she choked out, and Dino groaned as if he’d been shot. Then he hugged her. He hugged her!
“I’m so sorry,” she sobbed. “I’m so very sorry.”
“Shhhh,” Dino soothed. “We’ll figure something out.”
The bank had little mercy, insisting that Dino was still responsible for the loan on the stolen cart. Her uncle asked for an extension on the loan, and the bank gave him two weeks to make up the shortfall or else their other cart would be repossessed.