Page 84 of Mafia Bride
“What’s in there?”
“Boring.” She closes it and moves to the next, but I’ve already learned that though I like Gia, she and I have different aesthetics and life values, so I pull it out and flip the lid.
It’s full of photographs. The top one is of two people I don’t recognize standing on the seashore in a black and white world. I flip it over. Tiny gray AGFAs run diagonally across the white side, and 1963 is written in blue ink.
The old world existed in a time before digital.
“I like this,” Gia says. I glance up. She’s holding a blue glass egg that’s nice enough.
“Me too.” Agreeing with her makes her smile, and she puts it to the side so she can reach for the next box.
I flip through the pictures. Santino’s easy to pick out in each.
One of a group of sweaty boys, arms draped around each other like they just got done winning a ball game or a brawl in the dusty field behind them. Even then, Santino had a handsomeness a layer of dirt couldn’t hide. The straight line of his nose and fullness of his lips are traits he carried from childhood in one hand, the cockiness, he carried in the other.
In the next group, he sticks out immediately. All the boys are in suits with worn cuff edges and crooked ties, holding big white candles. Confirmation. That would make him twelve or thirteen, which meant I was...I frown, doing the math in my head.
I wasn’t even alive then.
“You okay?” Gia asks, glancing up from another ancient artifact shaped like a terra-cotta horse with the head cracked off.
“Yup.” I flick the confirmation photo to the side.
The next picture’s just him in a courtyard between four apartment buildings, standing at the rim of a limestone fountain. He’s a young man now in jeans and a T-shirt that’s two sizes too big. His hair unfolds in the wind, and the shirt sticks to his body on one side.
He’s wiry, angular, ready for violence. When did he join the mob? When did this become his life, when only a few photos before that he looked so young and happy?
There’s a stretch of babies I don’t recognize. Grown men around a dinner table. A meal overlooking the beautiful Kodachrome countryside.
All of these are from Italy. No family, no events, are documented from his time in the US.
There’s nothing here he values. Even the photos of himself prove the point.
I flip through the rest quickly, and freeze at Santino’s features again because this time, they’re knife-like in their intensity and definitely not because I’ve memorized them.
He’s next to a young man of the same age with a scar on the side of his mouth. He looks vaguely familiar, like I’ve seen another photo of him somewhere. They stand on either side of a man that takes my breath away.
Not because I’ve memorized him, but because I didn’t have to.
That dimpled chin. The wide-set eyes. The hundred subtle ways I see him every time I look in the mirror.
I am him.
He is me.
The rage that boils in my heart belongs to the man who made me.
Of course Santino knew my father for a long time. How else was the debt incurred? Suddenly, unexpectedly, I’m face-to-face with the man who sold me.
My father.
I could blame Santino because he’s plenty responsible, and he’s alive to be blamed. The real fault, though? The real blame lies with this smiling, dimple-chinned, slicked-back asshole. The man who—in death—abandoned us and promised his first fucking daughter to a man nearly a decade and a half older. If we weren’t in America I probably would have been married the day after my first period. A child bride, stolen and erased.
A glob of regret and anger had been forming in my throat, and when the moment comes that I have to release it or choke on it, I spit on my father’s image. It lands right between his—and my—wide-set eyes, and it feels right. It feels like his penance.
“Violetta!” Gia cries dropping a handful of shredded paper as if shock loosened her fist.
The compulsion to wipe it off, apologize, be the dutiful daughter I never had a chance to be, nearly overtakes me before I swat it away.
