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Michael.
"What do you want?" I asked, careful to keep the odd pit of fear out of my voice.
Time had blurred the edges of those memories, replaced them with better ones, happier ones, ones that I was happy to have in my head.
I never forgot what had happened all those years ago, but I could go weeks now without having them flooding back, making me full stop in the middle of my day, remembering where we had come from.
And Michael in particular was the least of my worries. After radio silence for close to two decades, there was no reason to think about him. He was serving time for all the evil he had done, even if the crime he was imprisoned for wasn't one he was guilty of.
"So you haven't heard the news. Those contacts you have in the force don't have your back anymore, huh?"
The news.
I hadn't heard it.
I had heard nothing.
But that wasn't surprising.
As Charlie grew the business, Connor had kept his distance. I saw him in passing at times. Once with a little girl with pretty blonde hair, dressed in a football jersey with her hat turned back, the perfect little tomboy. But we never spoke. Not since that day he suggested we open a legit business.
I had no one to tell me anything even if there was something to tell.
"Get on with it, Michael," I suggested, putting a boredom I most certainly didn't feel in my voice.
Because I knew.
I knew exactly what he was about to tell me.
"I'm out, Pudge. And I'm on my way back to claim my place. You and that fuck you no doubt shacked up with, your life is about to be a whole lot different."
The line went dead before the words even fully sank in.
"Boys, give us a minute," Charlie said, voice barely more than a whisper, but they all jumped and walked out, seeming to sense something going on.
"What'd he say?"
"That he's out. And he's coming back. And our lives are about to be a whole lot different."
Charlie took a breath, nodding. "We'll close ranks," he said immediately, meaning him and the men who worked with him. The enforcers he had needed to employ. "We'll be more careful around here. I'll get some ears on the street. Grassi will know what is going on. Lyons will want to know about a cocaine dealer trying to break back into the area."
Lyons.
It was a somewhat sad day when your best ally in a fight was a cocaine dealer who employed a small army.
But we would have to take what we could get.
"Everything is going to be fine, Helen."
"You don't know that."
He couldn't.
He didn't.
And it wasn't.
A week later, two of Charlie's enforcers were dead, shot execution-style while on jobs.
The following week, the final one was taken out.
Grassi had informed us that Michael had set up shop back in Alberry Park, actually buying out the current owner of our old house with money from our father he must have had stashed away somewhere.
Lyons told us we were on our own because Michael didn't come after the cocaine trade, or even the heroin trade that Third Street was known for. No. He dealt in the specialty stuff, the harder to find stuff, the stuff young kids would pay out the ass for. Acid. Mushrooms. Even fucking opium. Party drugs. Psychedelic drugs. The market wasn't saturated. And since people who were into drugs like heroin and cocaine were not into things like shrooms and acid, there was no competition.
He wouldn't help us.
We were completely on our own against someone who had assembled his own army in weeks, had already decimated our numbers, who had a cross to bear against us.
The scariest part was that he hadn't made a move. The threat of his was a heavy fog over our lives, making me jumpy and paranoid, making Charlie tense, spending every spare moment trying to gather information about Michael's rapidly building empire.
Would he come after me?
Charlie?
The business?
Or, heaven forbid, the boys?
The boys who didn't even know he existed, who we had kept in the dark about the whole ugly ordeal. We meant to tell them. Someday. When they were older. When they understood our lifestyle more, had more life experience, would understand how terrible things like that were necessary.
They would never look at me the same again.
I think that was what it all boiled down to.
They understood what Charlie did, why he did it, the honor code he had about it.
But me?
I was just mom.
The cooker.
Housekeeper.
On-their-ass dictator.
And, sure, the lifestyle touched me in the way that it touched them. By association.
They had no idea how deeply entrenched in it I was. How I had been baptized into the drug world, raised by monsters, forced to learn to fight back when they rattled my cage.
Their mother was a killer.
