Page 31 of Broken Trust

18

DANTE

The apartment I'm renting now is one room at the top of a building behind the train station, with a mattress on the floor, a secondhand crib I bought off a woman at church, a two-burner stove, and a window that looks straight into the kitchen of the family across the alley. Every night at seven their nonna yells at the television, and Rosa thinks it's the funniest thing she's ever heard.

Right now she's in her high chair, smearing mashed banana over the tray with both hands and singing a long string of “ba-ba-ba” that she seems very proud of. I've got my laptop balanced on the only seat in the kitchen and my phone pressed to my ear, listening to Franco Galli, the man who produced my last two shows, find a polite way to tell me to go to hell.

“It's not personal, Dante,” Franco says. “You know how much I respect your work.”

“Then give me a job. Assistant, stage manager, anything. I'll sweep the floors if I have to.”

“I can't. The investors read the papers.” He sighs down the line. “Your name's poison right now. The twin thing, the baby, the family pulling strings to make sure you never work again. Nobody wants to be the guy who hires you and has Aldo Rizzo calling him the next morning. Give it a year, maybe two, and we'll see.”

He says he's sorry before he hangs up, and I think he means it, which makes it worse. I put the phone face down and listen to Rosa sing while I tally it up. I've called every producer, director, and theatre manager I've ever shared a drink with, and some of them said no straight away and others promised to call back and never did. One guy I helped out of a hole three years ago had his assistant tell me he'd moved to Argentina.

The story broke in the tabloids two months ago, and I have a pretty good idea who leaked it. RIZZO SON-IN-LAW FATHERS CHILD WITH WIFE'S TWIN. They ran a photo of me leaving the hospital with Rosa in her car seat, right next to an old one of Gia smiling at some charity dinner in a blue dress, and underneath it, in smaller letters, Heartbroken wife flees to mountain retreat. I read it in the checkout line at the supermarket, then left my groceries on the belt and walked out.

Rosa shrieks and flings a fistful of banana at the wall, so I grab a cloth.

“Nice aim,” I tell her.

She beams at me with mush in her eyebrows, and I laugh in spite of myself.

While I'm scrubbing the tiles, my eyes land on the pile of envelopes by the door that I've been avoiding for a week. Electricity, gas, the phone bill, and something from the bank with FINAL NOTICE stamped across the front in red. My stomach sinks lower with each one I flip through, because in all the years we were married, I never had to open an envelope like this.

Gia handled all of it. She kept a little notebook with a green cover where she wrote everything down, and on the first of the month she'd sit at the kitchen table with a cup of chamomile and pay the lot before I'd even noticed anything was due. She booked my dentist appointments and remembered my mother's birthday. She read my contracts before I signed them and caught the clauses that would have screwed me, and whenever a show fell apart, she was the one who sat up with me until three a.m. working out which investors we could still call.

All that time I thought I was the one keeping us afloat, the big shot with the plays and the reviews and the opening nights. What a joke. She was the foundation of everything, and I was just the paint on top, and now that she's gone I can't even keep the lights on.

I toss the envelopes aside and lean against the door with my eyes closed. I'm so tired my bones ache. Rosa still wakes twice a night, so I haven't slept more than four hours straight since she was born, and my jeans are held up with a belt I had to punch two new holes in. I can't remember the last meal I ate that didn't come out of one of her jars.

It's Sunday, and it's eight in the morning in New York, which means my brother will be home. I scroll to his name and hit call before I can talk myself out of it. Carlo picks up on the third ring, his voice thick with sleep.

“Dante? Jesus. Is Ma okay?”

“She's good. Pa too. Nobody's sick.”

Not that I would know. I’m not allowed back into our family home, but Ma does come and help with Rosa sometimes. I’m sure Pa knows she does, but turns a blind eye to it, more for Ma’s sake than mine. He probably says nothing, because he knows it makes Ma happy to see Rosa.

“Then why are you calling me at the crack of dawn?”

“Because I'm in trouble, Carlo.”

There's a long pause, and then I hear a door slide open and the rush of traffic far below. I can picture him out on the balcony of his apartment in Manhattan in his bathrobe, barefoot, an espresso in his hand, the way he always is when he calls Ma.

“Okay,” he says, and his voice goes soft. “Talk to me.”

So I tell him everything. The rejections, the tabloids, the money. How I gave Mia every cent I had and sold the house and the car, and how I'm living in one room with a baby and a stack of final notices. It all comes pouring out, and by the time I'm finished my voice is shaking.

Carlo's quiet for a while.

“Ma told me some of it,” he says finally. “Not all. She said you'd shut everyone out.”

Ma obviously never told him about what happened with Pa.

“Yeah, I’ve been a fool.”

“At least you know it.” He sighs. “How much do you need?”