Page 83 of Mafia Bride
“Guess what I got?” she asks with half a laugh.
I look up from a book that could be a romance or non-fic about theCamorristi.
“An annoying habit of making me guess at what’s right in front of me?” I lick my finger and flip a page in a performative lack of curiosity.
“The café was slow today,” she says breathlessly, trying to keep up with her mix of Italian and English. “And so I borrowed these from Santino!”
She jingles the keys again, and I look at her sideways from the sink as I wash my hands. What do the keys open, exactly? Are they a way out? Is Gia delivering his trust on a little silver ring?
“What do you mean by borrowed?”
“Ugh! Girl!” She rolls her eyes. “Let’s decorate this museum of a house!” I’m barely done drying my hands, but she snatches the towel away and pulls me outside by the wrist.
The keys apparently open the garage, and inside the garage is a closet, and inside the closet are locked crates of things that haven’t been opened since Santino moved here from Naples.
Gia grabs a crowbar off the wall once we’re in, still babbling like a brook.
“Before you moved here he said…” Gia deepens her voice to sound like Santino as I open the closet. “Put things around. Make the house look like home.”
The light goes on automatically to reveal stacks of wooden crates stamped FRAGILE—STATI UNITI—FRAGILE.
Well, she failed, but I had to give them both credit for trying.
“I never got to these,” Gia says, straining.
The top of the first crate comes up with the squeak of steel nails and the crunch of pine under the crowbar. Inside, a painting of a seaside landscape and a gold statue of a naked lady in the other.
“Wow,” I say, blown away by how tacky it is.
“I know,” Gia says. “It’s beautiful.”
How the hell did I end up here, in a storage closet with a girl who admires this monstrosity?
Meanwhile, Scarlett is having the time of her life on vacation. Sunsets, parties, new friends laughing over drinks.
Taking the crowbar, I work on the next box, then the next while Gia assesses the value of the contents. When was the last time I went to get my nails or hair done? I can’t remember. What I do remember is the vacation of a lifetime I was supposed to go on to celebrate my first summer of adulthood.
How difficult can it be to convince Santino we should leave the country for a vacation?
Maybe if I phrase it right. We’d be safer. We could relax. We could learn each other as husband and wife without worrying about kidnapping.
“Violetta!” Gia cries, and I realize I’m sweating and panting with slick palms blistered by the edges of the octagonal metal. I’ve taken the crowbar to every single box, cracking them open with violent thrusts and tossing the lids away without looking inside the crates.
The crowbar drops against the concrete floor with a hard clank then two smaller clicks, until the tool settles and all we can hear is the hard rasp of my breath.
“Are you all right?” Gia’s afraid now, and that feels all right. Part of me wants her to be good and scared so I’m not the only one.
I wipe my brow with my sleeve. It comes back dark with sweat.
“Let’s see what we have,” I say, dropping to my knees in front of a crate the size of a coffin. “Something here has to not be gross.”
She kneels on the other side of the box and we pull the lid off together. The last of the nails squeak in protest before it’s completely off. Inside, a big, wooden box and three smaller ones rest inside a bed of shredded paper. They have simple silver latches, saving the crowbar a few minutes of work.
I unlatch the big one. Another statue. Not a golden woman this time, but a lidded jar with a horse painted on it. The blue glaze was cracked in an all-over pattern and the lid once had something protruding from the center, but it had snapped off at some point, leaving a flat circle of reddish ceramic.
“That’s interesting.” I reach in to remove it, but think better of even touching it.
“It looks old,” Gia replies, utterly disinterested as she flips the latch on a smaller box that’s the size of a toaster.
