Page 14 of Mafia Bride
Santino shrugs.
“It’s a lot to say to someone you just met, no?”
“Not really. I mean, yes but maybe a little context?”
We have half a block to go, and he spends a chunk of that deep in thought.
“I think he’d be proud of you,” Santino says, finally. “Smart girl. Going to school. Good cook. Very beautiful.”
He ticks off compliments like pretty beads, and each one of them makes me blush just a little, except the last one, which makes my cheeks burn like hot lava. Rosetta was the beautiful one. In the looks department, I’m extra average, with a side of ordinary. My brown eyes are a little too far apart and the brows are black and arched. My nose is too big and my neck is weirdly long. I’ve never learned to manage my hair, which bursts into cowlicks when it’s short, and when it’s long, it can’t decide between curly and straight so it’s both.
“Well…” I start to deflect the flattery, but Santino’s got a shovel so why not dig himself a big old hole?
“You’d make a good wife,” he says.
“Excuse me?”
“What? You disagree?”
“Well, I’m not a generic good wife for any generic guy. I’m not a cupcake, or a…you know…a reliable car that’ll go 200 thousand miles for whoever happens to be driving it.”
“No, I don’t mean…” He tsks. “Violetta. Do you misunderstand me on purpose?”
“Do I? Based on your earlier statements, you want a smart wife, right?”
“Of course.”
“Very beautiful. One who can cook?”
“What can I say? I like to eat.”
This toxic male pig doesn’t deserve to make me smile that easily, but he has his own touching, backward charm.
“But why? Why is she a good cook? Because she enjoys feeding you? Or eating? Or does she hate cooking even though she’s good at it? Ask yourself those questions.”
“Or I can ask you? Why are you a good cook?”
Santino DiLustro always has a way to turn the conversation away from himself and back onto me. I’m not going to get him out of that habit in half a block.
“Cooking,” I say, surrendering the conversation to him. “Has two main considerations. Space and time. How many burners, and how long. Like a dance. This is the space, this is the rhythm. And you go! If you’re organized, it’s beautiful. The bread and the escarole come out hot at the same time, if you think on your toes and you’re organized. It reminds me a little of triage, actually.You have to arrange things in order of importance to give everything equal significance.”
We round the last corner.
“I was right,” he says. All of Santino’s crew are outside the house, waiting with the men of my extended family. Maybe he’d predicted they’d be outside, and he was right about that?
I steal a glance at him, and it almost hurts to look at him. I look back to my Zias. They don’t wave back but turn away. I should feel safe and at home, but it’s unsettling.
“Guglielmo,” Santino says.
“Please. Capo. My respects…” From the spirality of the intro, I can tell Zio’s about to work in some long explanation for I don’t even know.
“Basta,” Santino says like a teacher hushing a recalcitrant child. “She will make a good wife.”
“She’s too plain.” Zio bobs his hand down the length of my body like I’m a car with rust under the chassis.
“Uh, hang on—” I say to exert my own will on whatever’s happening here.
“I need your permission, Guglielmo,” Santino says, and I’m so stunned he’d ask anyone permission for anything you could knock me over with a feather.
