Page 101 of Mafia Queen
For my five-year-old self, this revelation is not about a marriage. It’s about a family.
“What about Rosetta and me? Do you care about us?”
Had we let her be who she was? Had we stopped her? She seemed frustrated with us sometimes, and she yelled or cried. Was that who she wanted to be?
“I’ll always love you both. More than life itself.”
Papà comes in then. His call is done, and his footfall is heavy with whatever disappointments he’s lugging around.
“You ready?” he asks.
Mamma stands and nods, barely looking at him.
“Don’t cause trouble,” he says to me, following her out.
I promise myself I won’t cause any trouble. I’ll be good. Mamma might stop caring about me, and if she does, she’ll be her most unalive.
* * *
In the newspaper pictures,the purple hat was a few feet from her body, leaning against the half-open door of the restaurant. The pool of blood under her head crept toward it, but in the pictures Rosetta showed me, the blood didn’t quite reach.
I wanted to ask for the hat because I was sure I’d look good in it too. Just like Mamma. But I didn’t have a chance. We were sent running to a new normal.
“What do you look like that about?” Santino asks.
I don’t know how long he’s been awake. Could be half a second. Could be the entire time.
“Your hand.” I pretend to mean the left hand with the missing finger, but I’m really thinking about the way the crown was cool to his touch, and how it would feel if I stopped loving him the way my mother stopped loving my father.
“Don’t waste your time feeling sorry,” he demands. “I’ll still fuck you the same. And I punish you with the right hand anyway.”
“Keep promising me a good time.” I reach around him and take his left arm, pulling it forward. He lets me see his hand in all its bandaged glory. We won’t see it again for a while. The wound was a mess. An abomination. A hole in the universe. “Does it hurt?”
He scoffs. “It hurts.Fa molto male. But when I thought of losing you, the pain was nothing. It was better than morphine.”
This bravado thing isn’t going anywhere. He is who he is, and he’ll never admit to weakness or pain, but I can admit to it for him. From the finger, I knew they didn’t even get in the joint space where there’s no bone. They just cut the proximal phalange above the socket, leaving bone splinters and raw tendon gristle. But seeing this mess attached to him and not in a disembodied part buried another seed of rage in the fertile soil of my love.
“I’ll get the codeine.” I start to get up, but he pulls me back onto the bed.
“I’m fine.”
“That’s up to Dr. Aselli.” I straddle him while he holds my wrists.
“It was a good thing there’s a doctor left you don’t want to murder.”
“You want Farina’s dick shoved down his throat as much as I do.”
“We’re going to kill them.” He lets go, and I drop to put my nose next to his. “You and me. For everything they did to keep us apart.”
“Come, come? Cosa hai detto?” I ask him what the hell he’s talking about, then kiss him and pull back an inch to find his eyes meeting mine. “You left without me.”
“I am not sorry.” He runs his hand over my ass and pinches it. “Not even this much.”
“You know what I think?”
“No.” He smirks. “I do not.”
“I think I should put that crown on and see if you fall like a Tabona.”
