Page 45 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
The food is the kind of thing men get sentimental about in prison. Some sort of braise that’s been worked since noon, bread that did not exist this morning, a salad with something in it that bites back. I eat all of it. Across the table my grandmother watches me not react with an expression that says I’m getting away with exactly nothing.
“It’s good,” I tell Cynthia when she passes my end of the table. Two words. Under budget.
“There’s more,” she says, three back, not stopping, and the loose curl swings against her neck. I return my attention to my plate with the discipline of a much better man.
Tasha and Roma conduct their usual proxy war down the middle of the meal, over the salt, over the bread, over whether he is constitutionally capable of producing a compliment. “He liked it,” Tasha announces to the table on his behalf. “Three helpings. From him that’s a standing ovation.”
Roma chews. Considers. “It was sufficient,” he says.
The table howls. Tasha throws a heel of bread at his head. He catches it without looking up, which makes it worse, then buttersit, which starts a riot. I watch the two of them not look at each other with tremendous concentration, and I file it under things I’m apparently the last to know about my own household.
After, the plates vanish, and somebody produces cards.
It’s meant to be a friendly hand among the young ones while the kitchen gets put right. Then Cynthia sits down at the table, cracks her knuckles like a longshoreman, and I watch my soldiers make the last free decision of their evening.
She doesn’t play cards so much as read mail. I know the skill from the inside, I’ve aimed it across a baccarat felt at a whale worth nine figures, and it’s still something to watch it turned loose on my own men. Kir touches his ear when his hand is good.
The Armenian kid breathes through his mouth when he bluffs. Sasha goes statue-still at exactly the wrong moments, a tell you could read from the gate. She gathers all of it inside two circuits of the deal, quietly, smiling, asking the boys about their mothers, and then she farms the table like it’s planting season. The pile of bills in front of her climbs past embarrassing into educational.
Roma won’t play. “I’ve driven her around this entire state,” he says, when Kir tries to shame him into a chair. “She watched me a full month before she ever knew my name. No.”
My grandmother plays exactly one hand. Every man at the table folds by the second card, out of an instinct considerably older than money. Yelena collects the pot without showing what she had, pats Kir on the cheek like a blessing, and goes to bed victorious. The boys look at each other like survivors.
“She cheats,” Kir whispers, awed.
“Obviously she cheats,” Tasha says. “She’s been alive seventy years.” Nobody asks for the cards back.
Near the end, Cynthia pushes Kir’s losses back across the table at him. All of it, the whole sad pile.
“Tuition,” she tells him. “Touch your ear again and next time I keep it.”
The table detonates. Kir proposes marriage on the spot, is told to get in line, and the line, I observe from my doorway, is currently every man on this property. By morning there won’t be a soldier here who wouldn’t step in front of something meant for her, and not because she’s the pakhan’s woman. Because she fed them, then beat them, then handed it back laughing. That’s how loyalty actually gets built. I’ve been saying so for years to men who nodded along and kept trying to buy it instead.
She looks up once, in the middle of the noise, and finds me in the doorway.
The look holds across the cards and the shouting. There’s a question in it she’s too proud to ask twice. There’s an empty chair at that table, and there’s a version of tonight where I cross the room, sit in it, let the boys deal me in, lose my own money to my own woman at my own table like a man with an ordinary life. I can see that version from here. He looks happy. He looks like someone I knew a long time ago, before the desert taught us both what happens to men who sit with their backs to the door.
I go to my study instead, because the version of me in that chair has something enormous to lose, and somewhere south of here, Gleb Morozov is awake too.
She comes by the study later. Not to chase me. She has a plate in one hand, the last of the dessert, a thing with peaches that has nobusiness existing this far from an orchard. She crosses the room without asking, sets it down on top of the maps I’m supposed to care about. Right on the routes. A plate of peaches on top of the war.
She looks at the wall of charts for a moment, then at me.
“You missed a good night,” she says.
“I was there.”
“You were present.” Her voice stays even, but the words have fresh edges on them, cut to my measurements. “It’s different.”
Then she’s gone before I can spend a fourth word, the door clicking soft, her steps even all the way down the hall. She doesn’t chase. God help me, I think she knows exactly what the walking away does, and she does it anyway. I sit in my study listening to a woman not chase me, aching like a struck bell. The report writes itself. She matters more than anything on this desk, and I keep choosing the desk.
I eat the peaches alone over a map of my own city. I scrape the plate. If anyone asks, the plate never existed.
Here’s the part I can’t get to sit still. I’ve sat across from men who wanted me dead and ordered the wine. Nothing in that résumé covers a plate of peaches set down on a war map by a woman who then leaves, on her own, without asking me for one single thing. Provision is supposed to be my language. She keeps answering in it, fluent, casual, like it costs her nothing, and every dish is a sentence I don’t have three words to answer.
Then it’s the small hours. The house settles around the last of the card game breaking up, a young man’s laugh somewhere, a door, then nothing. I sit with the screens, with the silence out of LosAngeles, and the silence has a texture I remember from a harder decade. The held-breath kind. The kind that comes right before. I check the cameras. I check the gate. I check the quiet again, and it gives me nothing, which is exactly what it gave me an hour ago, which is exactly what worries me.
Upstairs, a woman who beat my soldiers with their own faces is asleep under my roof, two words and a nod closer to me than she was this morning. South of us, an old man is finished deciding something. I can’t prove it. I just know the quality of his quiet, the same way I know a rigged deck by the deal.
