Page 98 of Mafia King
“Happy birthday!” she says.
“That’s tomorrow.”
“Oh, these time zones always confuse me.” I hear the bustle of a café and the honking of car horns behind her.
“The party is today,” I add. “So itfeelslike my birthday.”
“I wish I was there.”
Personally, I don’t. I’m glad she’s thousands of miles away. While she’s away, I don’t have to worry that she’ll try to stop us, or scuttle the plan by trying to help, or blow the secret.
Somehow, planning ways to buy out her arranged marriage right in front of her seems more offensive than doing it behind her back, but it relieves me of having to treat her like a full human with agency over her decisions—because she isn’t, and I hate the practical, real world truth of that.
“When are you coming home?” I ask.
“Tomorrow night.” She pauses. “Dami told me it’s going to happen right off the plane.”
Itmeans the wedding. At least he told her himself. He’s braver than I expected.
“Why so quick?”
“I don’t know, Violetta,” she snaps. The mood swings I observed in the back of the Lincoln are still happening, and I don’t blame her.
“Are you okay?” I say.
“I guess.” She doesn’t sound convinced, but she’s definitely trying. “He seems all right when we talk on the phone, and I remember why I liked him in the first place.”
So they’ve been talking. That’s actually good. It shows an investment on Damiano’s part that’ll soften the blow if I fail to stop this atrocity.
“He understands me,” she adds.
“Does he?” This is not what I expected to hear at all. The women of Secondo Vasto do not strive to be understood. They bend to their husbands’ needs. “Like how?”
“Like…” She stops, pausing to think about it for so long, I fear the line dropped. “We make plans together.”
The wedding, of course. He dictates that it has to happen whiplash-fast—inserting himself into the family just as Santino and I get the crown—then probably agrees to all the other plans a bride makes.
“I’ll be there for you,” I say. “Whatever you need.”
“Do you promise?”
“I do.”
“That makes me feel so much better.”
She tells me her departure time, and together we do the math of time zones, and I realize she’ll be landing as Santino and I will be driving to the lawyer’s—where we will pick up the one thing that can keep her from being sold into marriage.
I don’t tell her I might be breaking my promise to her by about an hour so I can keep a promise I made to my unborn daughter. If everything goes perfectly, I can keep both.
26
SANTINO
“Coming through!” Violetta chirps like a bird and slithers like a cat around the kitchen’s obstacles.
She salts the water, tests the sauce, and pours another glass of prosecco in one near-fluid motion. Violetta is like the ocean’s shifting waves. She is the stars dancing around the moon.
Watching my wife work the kitchen for her birthday party, knowing we planned the most important piece of it together is a joy I never could have imagined.
