AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Because I didn’t want it to touch you.” Her sharp tone belied her kind words. “By the time you were born, your father was in charge of three different bordellos, and he had used the money to buy this house. He wasn’t a big enough threat to anyone to bring violence to our door like last night, but it was a steady income. It made it easy to turn a blind eye, to forget.”
The sudden slam of coffee mugs on the countertop made Sabina start and tremble. Her eyes flew open to see that fury etched her mother’s face. “And now he is competing with Torrio and the like. The government is bearing in on one side, other gangsters on the other. And you wonder why I have always pushed you toward Enzo.”
Sabina’s mind was too muddled to make sense of Mama’s words. “What does he have to do with it?”
“Nothing.” Mama spread her hands wide, her eyes wider. “Don’t you see, Bina? That’s the point. From the time he was a child, it was clear he’d be different. He thrived in school, he listened at church. He was never going to be a part of this world. The day he announced he wanted to go to college instead of join the priesthood was the happiest day of my life, because I knew it meant that one of us was getting out, and that he would take you with him. He will do anything to keep you safe—he proved that last night. He’ll take you away from all this, he’ll love you as no mafioso ever would. There will be no other women, cheap or otherwise. There will be no enemies to hunt you down. He will give you a life, Sabina, one untainted by fear.”
In direct defiance of her mother’s promises, terror skittered through her belly. Her voice came out as a scratchy whisper. “I don’t know how to live any life but this one, Mama. Maybe that’s why Enzo and I drifted apart. I don’t know how to be anything but a mafioso’s daughter.”
Mama shocked her further by letting a few tears fall unchecked. Mama never cried—when something upset her, she just changed it. But right now, she didn’t bother wiping the foreign droplets away. “Learn, cara. Please learn—otherwise you’re going to make me regret every decision I ever made to stay here.”
Feeling the weight of a far-reaching family on her shoulders, Sabina nodded. She would have to learn, if she intended to prove to Lorenzo that they could start over. She would have to figure out, somehow, how to let go of every connection he hated without losing the family she loved. But how? She couldn’t see any paths through those brambles. Lorenzo didn’t want to be beholden to Papa—but what was she supposed to do, refuse the gifts he gave out of love? Spurn him? He was her father, the one man in the world whose love she’d never questioned.
A man who ran bordellos and came home smelling of cheap perfume. A man who had spilled blood—who, just yesterday, had walked out of jail after paying off people in high positions.
Her head was such a muddle she couldn’t even see straight.
For a few minutes, the only sound was the happy, oblivious bubbling of the water in the percolator, then the sloshing of coffee into cups. Mama pushed one into her hands. “Tell me you’ll try, Sabina Maria.”
Her fingers curled around the hot cup. “I’ll try.”
Lorenzo’s key stuck in the lock. He jiggled it, tried to twist it, and succeeded only in making his head pound.
“Let me get it.” Tony tried to elbow him aside—so gently that it was an insult—but Lorenzo slapped him away.
“I can open my own door.” He had a headache—he wasn’t an invalid. Though it had taken an embarrassing amount of time and two visits from the doctor to convince everyone to let him come home.
Mama’s exaggerated groan sounded from behind them as she and Val finally reached his landing. “Those stairs! When we find you a house, Enzo, it will be one with a nice ground-floor parlor for receiving your poor mother.”
In general, he loved “receiving his poor mother.” Just now, he found himself wishing she hadn’t insisted on seeing him home. “Mama, no one needs to find me a house. My apartment is fine.” It would be years before he drew enough of a salary to warrant anything more.
Mama looked at him as though he’d suggested giving up pasta for the rest of his life. “Don’t be absurd, Lorenzo. Parents always buy a house for their children when they wed—it is the way it’s done.”
In Palermo, maybe, when they could afford it. But it wasn’t the way it was done here. “I don’t want a house.” He finally convinced the stupid key to turn and pushed open the door, standing aside to let Mama enter first.
“Of course you do.” She turned the knob for the lights and bustled toward the small kitchen space. “And we have been keeping an eye out, Rosa and I. It is the bride’s family’s responsibility, of course, but as generous as Manny has always been with us, your father and I have set aside what we can too. You and Sabina will not have to knock around in this tiny place for long. It certainly won’t do once the bambinos start coming.”
Lorenzo blinked at his mother’s back—she was already poking through his ice box and pulling out every single ingredient he had—and then turned to exchange glances with his brothers.
Val, of course, tried to cover a snigger. Tony, though, looked surprisingly serious. He closed the door behind him with a soft click and eased closer to Lorenzo. “Are you going to tell her you ended things?”
Lorenzo rubbed at his eyes. His head would never stop hurting. “I…”
“Did you end things?”
Leave it to Tony to see right through everything. He sighed. “I did. Before. Then…I may have agreed to give her a second chance.”
Tony wasn’t exactly frowning, but he certainly wasn’t smiling. “May have? Do you want to or not? She played you wrong, bro. You don’t deserve that.”
“Don’t I? I thought I was a babbo.”
“Well, yeah. But you’re the best babbo in town.”
He breathed a laugh and gave in to the urge to sink onto his secondhand sofa. He darted another look toward the kitchen. Mama was singing in Sicilian, which meant she was cooking, though he had no idea what she had found to make. He didn’t exactly have a fully stocked kitchen. Val dropped to the cushion beside him and propped his feet up. Lorenzo didn’t even have the energy to chide him. He looked back to Tony. “I don’t know what I want. But I guess—well, there’s no reason to upset Mama with anything right now.”
Tony just gave him a look. It required no words to interpret it—they all knew that if one didn’t insist on something earnestly and repeatedly, their mother would simply steam ahead toward her own goals, chugging right over any minor objections. If he didn’t announce now that the wedding was off, he didn’t want to marry Sabina, he didn’t want a house, there would be no bambinos to fill one, then the wedding plans would simply proceed. He’d find himself kneeling with Sabina at Holy Guardian Angel on August thirteenth with a new deed tucked in his lockbox and a list of approved names for their grandchildren mutually agreed upon by Capecce and Mancari parents.
He didn’t have the energy for this. “I don’t suppose you can pry her out of here so I can get some sleep?”
