Page 2 of Mafia Bride
All I’ve ever wanted to do was be a nurse, and learning about minimizing shock and stopping bleeding never feels like studying. It’s natural, like an extension of my body.
“I think I’m just going to go home.” I shoulder my satchel. “You’ll be okay without me?”
“Willyoube okay withoutme?” She waggles her brows, and I smile. We’re talking about two completely different things, and we’re both going to be just fine.
* * *
The examthat evening is less a breeze and more a light wind, but I finish early and get on the bus home over the river to Secondo Vasto—Little Vasto, after the part of Naples we’re all from—where I have lived since being brought to America when I was five.
My friends roll their eyes at my poor study habits, so I was good and double-checked my work even though I knew I got them all right. Some things are serious enough to stick the first time you hear them. The difference between life and death isn’t something you should forget.
I love Scarlett and all my friends, but they don’t know the real me, anyway. Not really. They accept I’m reserved about my family and life across the river and leave it at that. They stopped asking why I don’t date or hit all the parties a long time ago, because they couldn’t understand why—in this day and age—I’d be so invested in keeping my virginity indefinitely for a man I didn’t even know yet.
Americans just don’tgetthe old world.Napoli. How different things are there. Zio and Zia—Italian for aunt and uncle—have high expectations for me, and I can’t let them down. Families don’t work that way where I’m from. My sister died of pneumonia in a southern Italian backwater because the hospitals are too far away. I’m all my Z’s have left. Disappointing them isn’t an option. Besides, they pay for my schooling and are sending me off on the most amazing summer vacation.
So, even though I feel more American than Italian, I keep the customs of my forefathers. If I didn’t have to please my Z’s, I’m pretty sure I’d become a boy-crazy, party-loving, Miss Apple Pie faster than a bald eagle dives for prey.
It’s perfect today. Mild weather, bright sunny skies, a cool breeze. Sounds just like my summer plans in Greece, except maybe hotter and with more tanning oil. A place where I can find a beautiful man, one real man, to whisk me away from here. Not like these slobs on the bus, but someone romantic and cultured and rough all the same. Impassioned and intelligent. A man who can’t take his eyes off me.
If such a man exists in Europe, I’m going to find him. It’s my summer of summers, where I’ll be swept off my feet by a beautiful stranger. And then we’ll part ways, tragically, in the heat of August. He’ll beg me to marry him and I’ll tearfully put him off to finish school, and one day, he’ll show up in Secondo Vasto because he couldn’t live without me another minute. I’ll get my nursing degree while he works, then we’ll get married in a traditional Italian wedding with all the trimmings and have babies.
It’s not so much a fantasy as a plan. Now all I need is the man to help me pull it off.
* * *
Sometimes I think livingon campus would be worth it just to not have to switch buses three times and walk a mile and a half twice, every single day. But Zio and Zia are paying for tuition already. Adding a dorm room would be too much to ask, even if it does feel like I’m stepping through a time portal every time the last bus crosses the river. Secondo Vasto is frozen in time, into something clean out of Italy in the 1940s.
Every piece of timber and every slab of brick pulses in the rhythms of home. The house I grew up in with my sister is more a part of me than the country I was born in. The concrete stoop has my handprint at ten embossed into it next to the choppy printing of my name.
Violetta Moretti. The letters are worn down but ever present.
And next to it, forever immortalized by the size of a fifteen-year-old’s hand and the name,Rosetta Moretti,is my sister.
She was always the romantic dreamer, Rosetta. She said I’d understand one day, when I was a woman. She was almost five years older—now she’s over five years deader, and I’m still no closer to understanding how pneumonia could steal her so completely.
I step on my handprint, leaving Rosetta’s exposed and beautiful. Her name still stands brightly in the sun. I don’t think I’m the only one who gets out of the way so as not to cover her name. One tiny piece of my sister still standing in this cruel world.
“I’m home!” I drop my bag on the old worn couch and kick off my shoes. Normally, my aunt and uncle are bustling around, cooking or reading, waiting to grill me about my day. Especially on test days. “Zia? Zio?”
In the kitchen, a bottle of wine sits open next to a simmering pot of sauce. I turn down the temperature on the stove and keep moving. Eventually, my ears pick up sounds of life and I follow them to Zio’s office.
He’s crying. My zio, who started building houses with his bare hands, and now runs a contracting company with a hundred employees, isn’t just crying. He’s sobbing.
I knock gently on the door as I open it, almost afraid to see. “Zio?”
I do not see my uncle. Instead, I see a ghost of my past. Someone I never thought I’d see again. Someone who haunted my dreams for years until I purged them from my veins and my eyes and my memories.
Santino.
He’s standing over my collapsed, sobbing uncle with a frightening amount of dominance. Thick eyebrows shade onyx black eyes. Brown hair sweeps back across his intense forehead, so not even the fullness of his lips can soften the brutal angles of his cheeks and powerful jaw. He’s angular, sharp, powerful. And etched into every line is something intensely unforgiving.
“Zio?” I say softly, because it’s the only thing my brain can snap together, and speaking more loudly could break some fine membrane between him and sanity.
“Go,” Santino says, his hand up between us as if he can’t bear to look in my direction.
I’m transported back to the day I was 12 and he walked into my life. The same terrifying power. The same dark shroud covering daylight. The same black hole sucking the life out of the room until the only thing standing is him. Santino.
I can feel my heart in my throat. Every emotion I thought I’d erased comes roaring back. He’s better looking than I remember him; time has been exceptionally kind.
