Page 37 of Mafia Queen
“You should have seen it when they brought her,” Celia interjects.
“You put ice?”
“Yes,” I say coldly. “It’s fine.”
“I heard what happened,” she says with a glance at my belly. “I’m so sorry.”
She can go fling herself off the side of this goddamn mountain. She’s lying. She’s glad. I can see her face clearly…and I’m wrong.
She’s not a liar. I’m lying to myself.
She doesn’t look disingenuous at all. She’s a woman giving sincere condolences, and I’m a child looking for trouble.
“Thank you,” I say.
“You’ll try again. You go to the doctor. Get cleaned up. All done.”
“You have experience.” I hear myself getting sour again, suspecting she lost Santino’s child. It’s too intimate with him. Too much like stealing something from me. My insides are tearing themselves into pieces.
“I was engaged to Elio Sala,” she says, relieving me of images and ideas I cannot bear to hold. “Santino’s cousin. And since I was older, no one expected there to be blood on the wedding sheets.” She shrugs. “Anyway. Our baby didn’t make it, and neither did he.”
“Is that the Elio who…?” Celia stops herself and redirects. “From the baseball field?”
My memory is triggered but still vague. A little boy and his father were early for Little League pitching tryouts and were warming up his arm. When he kicked away the dirt behind the rubber, he came in contact with Elio’s buried head.
Loretta sighs, and that’s the answer. Same guy.
“Elio was a mechanic. Santino said he was the best he ever had. Elio could marry a Toyota to a Honda and make it look like a Cadillac. I thought, what will the babies look like when he marries me?” Loretta pauses while Celia chuckles. “I found out I was pregnant, and he said, ‘Let’s get married tomorrow.’ So I bought a white dress on Flora, went home, and waited. He was working late, and I didn’t find out until the next day. Saturday. When the boy… You know what happened.” She takes a deep breath, knitting her brow and shaking her head. “Carlo Tabona wanted him to work in their chop shop. Offered everything. He refused, but he thought even being asked was disloyal. So he didn’t tell Santino or anyone. He left himself with no protection.”
Her voice cracks. She doesn’t have to say she loved him. It’s obvious his death left a hole in her life my husband never filled.
Celia puts her hand on Loretta’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too,” I say, hand on her opposite arm.
“Well,” she says. “The Tabona family was smaller after that. The king ran through them like a disease.”
It will be hard to trust anyone after Gia’s betrayal, but Loretta may deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Zia used to say,Dagli amici mi guardi Iddio, che dai nemici mi guardo io.
God protects me from my friends, I protect myself from my enemies.
There’s no instruction on how to discern between the two. That’s up to me. If I’m going to stand beside a king, I have to keep his entire domain in view.
With that thought, I feel him near and turn toward the back lawn. He’s standing in the morning breeze, talking to a man who is slightly taller, with the same regal bearing. He’s not Santino, the ruler of my heart, but—just in bearing alone—he’s closer to an equal than anyone I’ve seen in my husband’s presence.
Santino sees me watching him through the glass, finishes his conversation, and walks toward me. I drift away from Loretta and Celia to open the door.
“My violet,” he says, leaning in for a kiss.
The way his lips touch my ear, then the side of my neck right now is something I won’t let another woman have as long as I live.
My feelings are intensely private, but there are people everywhere. I feel as if we’re in the middle of a piazza. The source of my irritation is back in the house. So I pull him away from the main house to a quiet spot between two buildings on the opposite side of the lawn.
“We have no time to fuck,” he says. “And we probably shouldn’t, so soon after…” Mr. Tough Guy’s unable to say the word miscarriage. God, I fucking love this caveman.
“I don’t…” I pause, because when I lay my hands on his chest and feel the muscles there, every neuron in my brain reroutes the current to feeling how hard and substantial he is. “I just… I want you to know that I’m not some jealous little girl. You’re mine. Always. If you ever even thought about another woman…”
