Page 86 of Mafia Bride
“When Nino left me,” she says, pushing the ball of dough to the center of the counter. “I had a choice. Work here”—she cleaves the ball in two—“or live with my father.”
She rolls her sleeve past the elbow, and when she can’t roll any more, she yanks it over half her bicep to reveal dots of furled skin the size of a pea. I’d seen this kind of wound before. I’m trained to know what they are, and when observed in children, they’d prompt an immediate phone call to the authorities.
“He doesn’t even smoke,” she says with a snarl. “But he buys them for when I disobey. Or burn the gravy. Or when my husband finds someone prettier. Or when he thinks I look too much like Mama.”
She pulls down her sleeve, then wipes her eye with the cuff, taking a brave sniffle before dropping the knife to lift the lid of the soup pot with one hand so she can stir with the other.
I don’t know how these life debts work, but they destroyed my life, and the culture that allowed the debts also allowed Celia’s father to burn her with cigarettes.
I want to go back to missing my father instead of hating him, but that’s over now.
I’m through. Done. Ruined.
With the slam of the front door, Santino’s home.
Men.
Fucking men.
Show up for the food and little else.
Has a man ever choked on Italian wedding soup? Because I want to wish for the possible, and right now, I’d pretend I’ve never heard of the Heimlich maneuver.
“Celia,” I say softly. “You’re safe here. I don’t want to take your job, but you have to go now.” I look at her and though she’s six inches taller than me, I’m looking down on her. “Right now.”
She leaves without another word, and a second later, Santino shows up in the kitchen doorway, standing there as if nothing’s changed between us.
Maybe nothing has.
Everything’s changed between me and my dead father, but itfeelslike something’s different with my husband.
Santino picks up the two bowls, and without a word, sets them on the other side of the kitchen bar, where we never eat. He always eats with me in the dining room, and I figure he’s setting them down for me to bring to the formal room. Instead, he gets spoons from the drawer and places one on the right side of each bowl, gets a third teaspoon, and lays it on the parmesan I’ve taken out of the fridge.
“Come,” he says softly. “I’m hungry.”
He slides onto his chair, takes two napkins from the basket, and lays one on his lap. The other, he holds out as I sit, and drapes it over my leg. He picks up his spoon when I’m settled, because no one eats until the king starts, then drops it in favor of the parmesan.
“So,” he says, hovering a spoonful of cheese over my bowl. “Parmigiano?”
“Sure.” I can’t look at him, so I watch the dust settle on the surface of my soup, covering the lumps of sausage like snow on the mountains.
He dredges cheese, then uses his spoon to cut the diameter of his soup. He eats like a man waiting for someone to speak before he does, but I’m not someone. I already sent him that picture. That’s enough communicating for me until he says something I don’t already expect.
“You know, then?” he asks, finally.
“I don’t know anything.”
“About your father.”
“What about my father?”
“Games make me impatient, Violetta.”
I shrug and eat my wedding-fucking-soup. I don’t look at him, but I feel the impatience he promised along with something new. Curiosity, maybe. He wants to know what I know, and though I assume it’s for business reasons, I tell myself there’s more to it than that.
When my bowl is empty, I wipe my mouth and look at him in the flat light of the kitchen.
He’s tired.
