Page 7 of Mafia Bride
“I’m sure you did wonderfully.” Nana Angelina squeezes my hand. “Such big brains, those Moretti girls have.”
“Why don’t you help with the bread?” Zia gives my shoulder a tight squeeze. “You are so good at the bread.”
Bread’s easy. The vibe in the kitchen, however, is anything but. Everyone is too eager to help me, too complimentary on the way I knead and roll the dough. The way they look at me is...weird.
“Such technique!” Zia Donna coos, giving my waist a squeeze. “You’d never know it the way she’s so slender, Madeline. She’s a prize, indeed.”
My gut sours. This was the way they looked at me when they told me Rosetta wasn’t coming back from her trip home to Napoli. This was the way they treated me when they told me she’d died there. Pneumonia. No chance to recover. One moment I had a sister and the next I didn’t.
They didn’t look me in the eyes then, either.
I know what that look means. The weight of it. The feel of it across my skin.
Pity.
If they’re giving me the Pity Face, it must be something truly awful. Like the time Zio’s cousin Gino was here from the old country and took a deeply icky interest in me. I couldn’t escape his rough grasp as he praised my childbearing hips and slim waist. His anchovy breath put me off the little fishes forever.
“Who is coming to dinner?” I swallow fear and channel all the anxiety into cutting a loaf into manageable slices.
“Some of Zio Guglielmo’s business associates.” Zia tries to pull off a casual response, but I can feel the stress under it. Zia Donna and Nana Angelina share a look over a massive pile of finger cakes.
“How many? A hundred?” I look at the bread I’m cutting. The beige slashes in the top, spreading open like wounds, the layers of knife marks in the butcher block table Zio made for Zia decades ago. Rosetta and I did our homework at this table and ate together and colored pictures of unicorns and rainbows.
Our table hasn’t ever had this much bread on it.
No. One time. When I was a little younger than Elettra.
We’d only had that much bread on the day the devil came in the door and cut me open with his cruel eyes, exposing a darkness I spent all my discipline and rigor denying. I’d hated him for it.
“How much bread do we possibly need?” I babble nonsense to shut this shit out of my head.
“What if Re Santino wants more and we don’t have it?” Tiny Tina chirps.
The cruel, terrifying, beautiful, mysterious man in the doorway hadn’t shown up in years. Now he’s coming to dinner so soon after standing over Zio as he wept? And all Nana wants to do is muse about my waist size in comparison to my hips? Why is no one asking why?
Suddenly, the anchovy seems quaint.
I’m torn in two—terrified and curious. I can’t bear the thought of seeing Zio like that again. A man who never cries, a man who carves cement with his bare hands, weak and exposed. It hurts my heart just to think of it.
“I’ll get King Santino whatever he wants.” Elettra twirls her skirt with a saucy look on her face as hot as the strange feelings bubbling through my veins.
Zia Donna grabs Elettra violently by the arm and growls. “You shut your mouth.”
“Ow! Ma!” Elettra winces and tries to pull away. The whirling activity in the kitchen freezes, prosciutto and tomatoes practically floating mid-air.
“You want to be turned into a street whore?” She shakes Elettra viciously, danger etched into her features.
“Donna!” Nana grabs her by the shoulders and gently pries her hands away. But she’s hell-bent on proving whatever point she’s got and winds up scratching Elettra’s arm as she pulls away.
“I was kidding.” Elettra hiccups between sobs, cradling her scratched arm. “Ma, it was a joke!”
“That is nothing to laugh about!”
Zia catches my attention and tips her head towards the back half of the house, as she picks up a tray of antipasto. I know what she’s asking.
“Come, Elettra.” I wrap my arms around my cousin to hold her together as she cries. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
“I was just kidding,” she whimpers again as we go to the little downstairs bathroom.
