Page 61 of Mafia King
“Oh, no, look at your face,” Gia says when she finally gets a look at me. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“But I’m still mad.” Her face scrunches up to stop the next onslaught of tears. “Papa is too. So mad he says he’s sending me back.”
Celia slides the cookies and two cappuccinos onto the table. I thank her with a glance, and she leaves.
“Here.” I lift the plate. “Biscotti makes everything better.”
“I don’t think I can eat.” Gia looks pained to even say it. “I-I’m so sorry, I just… why did you break the flowers? I don’t understand it.”
If I tell her, it’ll all be over. I won’t be putting the lube back in the tube.
“Why is your father so mad?” I ask.
“An insult. He said it’s an insult and he can’t show his face.”
“Is it though?” I say. Gia looks confused. “They’re just flowers. You were ready for the date. Damiano showed up. All anyone had to do was lie about them falling or, you know, make a joke about how you wanted to see how far you could throw them, then you could drive over to Aldo’s.”
Her puzzlement turns inward, as though she’s playing over last night’s scene in her head and can’t figure it out. “Dami said, ‘You backing out?’ and I thought he was talking to me, but my father answered him and said, ‘no, no, no,’ likehewas the one who had to reassure him. It was weird.”
“Yeah.”
“Then Damiano left really mad, and I ran out to the street to get him, but Tavie caught me at the gate. He said I was acting like a whore.” Retelling her brother’s insult makes her chin quiver. “But I just wanted to tell him it wasn’t me who broke it.” A fresh teardrop falls, then another. “Then they said it was you, but they won’t say why. Were you just mad at Santi?”
“Well, yes… but—”
“Can you tell everyone?”
“Listen, Gia, those flowers…” Am I doing this? I should talk to Santino before I do. “They weren’t just flowers.”
She’s hungry for answers, and there are plenty I could give her, but there’s only one truth.
“They were a message from Damiano.” I’m doing this. The train has left the station. “To your father.”
“What?”
“That he closed his end of the deal.”
“What deal?”
She’s a product of this culture. I won’t have to explain that much. I want to look away, but that wouldn’t be fair.
“You. You are the deal.”
The vulnerability of her face melts on contact with the truth. “I don’t understand.” False. She’s lying to herself. Stalling acceptance. “Papa said his debts were paid. That’s how they had the money to come here.”
“Damiano Orolio is paying them.”
If I’d been told this before it happened, and if I’d believed it the way she has to, I would have turned the house upside down. Thrown any object that wouldn’t break against every object that would. But Gia’s not me. She’s no stranger to the idea of having her body being used to pay for a man’s foolishness.
“I threw the flowers,” I say. “I was upset.”
“Because it happened to you.”
“Yes.”
She nods, looking at her hands in her lap.
