Page 85 of Mafia Bride
I hand Gia the globby photo. She looks at it as if it’s made of shit, and maybe it is. I lay it on top of a box where she can reach it.
“Give that to your cousin,” I say. “The next time you see him at the café, and tell him I know.”
I walk out before she can agree.
I reject this marriage.
I reject this husband, his rules, and the culture that put us together against my will.
23
VIOLETTA
It was never Zio. My uncle didn’t have the power to trade, sell, or give me away. It was my father, and the more I think about that photo, the more I know he wasn’t some hapless victim of thecamorra.
He knew. Zio kneeled at Santino’s feet, begging for my life, because my own father used it like a stack of coins.
My father knew Santino as a young man, and that photo wasn’t of three men who happened to meet one another at a party. They were close, and the ties were warm, tightened with business deals and slave trades.
Spitting on my dead father didn’t bring as much joy as I’d hoped, but it was a tangible action, no matter how useless, against the man responsible for putting me here.
Because now I know it was him, and I’m losing my mind.
He’s coming home, and I have no idea what I’m going to say to him. Imagining his full cheekbones lined with my spit, I pace the edges of the backyard and find an unkept row of weeds.
I pull the dandelion leaves.
They’ll come back, and so will I. He can’t keep me anymore.
The deal is off. He can spank my ass red a hundred more times, but I’m never going to stop running any more than a dandelion will ever stop growing.
Storming into the kitchen, I decide to bake it all into a pie and serve it up.
There’s already a pot of Italian wedding soup on the stove, which is almost too ironic to be a fucking joke.
I find a few leaves of escarole in the crisper, capers in the fridge door, and enough 00 flour to bury the entire city.
“No, no!” Celia cries, shuffling in as I blanch the leaves, arms out to rescue them.
“What?” I ask as if I don’t know what her problem is, dumping chopped pinole nuts over the dark greens, waiting for her to claim I’m invading her territory so I can set her straight, because I’m done with being window dressing. Yes, I’ll run and run, but as long as I’m here, this kitchen is mine.
“You can’t put dandelion,” she says, arms crossed because this should all be obvious. She purses her lips into a tight line and shakes her head as if she’s having a seizure.
“Dandelion leaves work as long as you chop them fine and add a pinch of sugar.” I look over to check on her, then back at the sautéing vegetables. “That’s what Nana said.”
Celia stands over the ball of dough I’d started for the crust, unwilling to contradict anyone’s nana. Her neck breaks into hives, and her throat convulses with a hard swallow.
She’s afraid, and her fear just pisses me off even more.
“Was your father in a compromising position too?” I jab at the greens, because fuck this pie and fuck Santino for scaring every woman in this house. “Did Santino buy you as a cook before he bought me as a wife? Were you sold for protection? Was your father also so deep into the mob that he sold you off to get something else he wanted? Huh?”
Celia’s not answering, but as the leaves wilt, I keep asking questions that have nothing to do with her.
“Were you here when your precious Re Santino bought me? See, the way I figure it, Rosetta got sold first. She died and I can only imagine how pissed off the guy was…but not pissed off enough to fight the king.” Turning off the heat, I damn myself with truth. “No one wants the little one. The ugly one.La seconda scelta.”
I’m not sure what makes me angrier: the thought that my father was so incompetent that he needed to promise his daughter to be saved, or that my father was involved in such corrupt bullshit, he threw his daughter to the wolves because she was a depreciating asset.
Celia looks away, jaw set, then slides a knife from the block.
