Page 102 of Mafia Bride
“I never knew him.” He lays half the wedges in his palm and holds them out instead of feeding me, which I appreciate. I don’t want to be fed right now, and he somehow knows it. “He joined the military to avoid me.”
He takes a moment to eat a little orange, and I avoid pointing out that it probably wasn’t personal. His father did avoid him, but he was probably avoiding responsibility, not Santino-the-Person.
I don’t think it’s a language barrier. He means exactly what he said. I let it sink in, occupying my mouth with the raspberry flavor of the tarocco.
“Avoiding me was his only smart move.” Santino eats the last piece and takes a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his fingers. “It saved his life.”
Foolish me to think Re Santino thought his father was avoiding his son because the baby was unworthy. His baggage wasn’t abandonment. It was theft of rightful vengeance.
“Is he alive now?” I ask as I finish my last wedge.
“He was killed.” Santino reaches for me, dabbing the corners of my mouth. “In Iraq. You heard of this war?”
“Shut up.” I snap the handkerchief away. “I’m sorry he died before you could meet him.”
“Mine should have been the last face he saw.” He collects the peels. “But I hope it was my mother’s. I hope he died alone, thinking about what he did, right before he went to hell.”
“I’m sorry, Santino.” I stand when he does and surprise myself by taking his hand. “About your mother, mostly. I’m sorry that happened to her, and that it left you feeling like this.”
He tosses the peels into a gray plastic bin and pulls me in the direction of the street the car is on.
“Morto un papa, se ne fa un altro,”he says.
One pope is dead, another is made.
A deeply Italian way of saying life goes on. What leaves us, returns in another form. What is now is eternally true, and no one is indispensable.
I didn’t agree. One pope dies and you don’t always know what’s going to take his place.
Life may have seemed set in stone to him, with predictable patterns and routines, but the stone could be broken, and you had to carve something better into another one.
My parents had been killed, and I’d been taken from this city, sent across the ocean, where I had to set new things into a stone that was destined to break. As I thought this, the visual angle of one of the streets that shot off from the piazza changed, and my brain’s old, dormant neurons fired.
MERCATO ROSETTA BELLA
My feet step in concrete. I stop so short, Santino jerks back.
“That’s his market.”
Santino could come or not, but I have no choice but to go to the market with my sister’s name on it. The world had changed, but the store hadn’t. The fruit looks better, and the sign is freshly painted. Maybe the wine stacked on the clean wooden casks is more expensive, but once I get in front of it, I know for sure this is the place.
“Did you know me?” I ask Santino, staring at my sister’s name on the sign. Our father must have opened the business before I was born, or he didn’t include me in the name because he knew he’d sold me away.
“You were a child.”
The cobblestones under my feet are gritty with the stuff of the street, and I wonder, is there a single cell of my mother’s blood in the honeycomb seams? One molecule of my DNA, a dead map for the making of me, right on this street?
“That’s not what I asked.”
I don’t hide my aggression. My voice cuts him apart without any fear of repercussion, because I’m not hearing his bullshit or his wavering. I’m not tolerating obfuscation or lies, even though I anticipate both. He’ll put up a wall between me and the truth, and I’ll bang my head against it. Again.
“I didn’t know you,” he says. The wall I expect does not appear. “I knew you existed.”
“Because of my father.”
“Because of your father.
“Everyone knows Cosimo.”
