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“No.” She hid the paper behind her back. “You didn’t say that a C- needed to be an A for me to make wishes.”
“She’s right,” Ethan replied, placing a white strip around the boy’s neck.
Marco sighed. “Just go.”
“We’ll talk later,” Gabby mouthed to me, and I nodded to her.
“Go!”
“I’m going!” She groaned, making a show of having to go back.
“So you all are family,” I replied when she was gone. That made more sense. I doubted Ethan would be so comfortable with people if they weren’t family.
“Very distant relatives of my mother,” Ethan said, not looking up at me as he concentrated.
“Very distant or not,” Marco said to me, “we’re still the only relatives Bloody Melody ever acknowledged.”
“Bloody Melody?” It sounded like a bad horror movie.
Ethan snickered. “My mother’s nickname. Apparently the Irish gave it to her after she married my father. And it stuck on the count of the fact that my mother was, well…not slow to use her fists.”
“Ha!” Giovanni scoffed. “Or gun. How many times did she shoot your father? Twice, correct?”
“Your mother shot your dad?” My jaw opened as I looked at him.
Ethan made a face. “I was hoping no one would ever tell her that. She is already temperamental as it is, and my mother left her the gun.”
“Hey!” I frowned, turning back to the guys. “She sounds like a hell raiser.”
“She was. May she rest in peace,” Giovanni said seriously as did almost everyone else in the shop, everyone but the kids, far too young to know her. And I remembered the letter she’d left me, where she said, You are now the head woman of this family. Act like it and make them talk about you as they talked about me.
I realized why Ethan had asked me if I could do it. The more I found out about his mother the bigger her heels became.
“So your mom was Bloody Melody. Did your dad have a nickname too?” I didn’t ask that. Instead, Gabby stuck her head back out.
We all just looked at her for a moment before looking back at Marco, who took a deep breath.
“His name was the Mad-Hatter,” Marco spoke through his teeth. “And I used to think it was because the man thought of the most insane ways to harm people, but now I’m thinking it must have been the stress of parenting.”
“Can’t be,” Gabby said back smugly. “If it were, you’d have a nickname too, right, Dad?”
Ethan paused from cutting the boy’s hair to laugh, actually out loud, in public.
“Get back in there and do your science homework!” Marco pointed his clippers at her.
“Science is boring!”
“GASP!” I put my hand over my heart, and she turned to me. “Science is amazing. What are you talking about? You can create almost anything through science. When I was nine, I won the science fair by creating an incalescent voltaic receptacle to hasten the growth cycles of potatoes.”
“A what?” her father asked before she could. And not just him. Everyone else was confused too. Even Ethan looked at me for a quick second.
“It was like an umm…” I tried to think. “It was a greenhouse that made potatoes or any other vegetable grow faster.”
“Oh…” They all said like a light bulb clicked in their minds.
“See? Look at that. At your age people were already creating incalescent voltaic receptacles,” Marco said to her, making her pout.
“I can’t gift to people who hate science,” I told her, crossing my arms.
