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I let myself in through the side door the family always used. It opened into a mud room where two of my crew were always stationed and then into the kitchen. I walked into the house and immediately breathed easier. This wasn’t the home I’d grown up in, but it had all the familiar comforts I needed - the smell of fresh brewed coffee and the sight of a cloche of my mother’s homemademaritozziwaiting on the table.
Normally, I would expect to walk in and find my family sitting around the island or eating at the table in the kitchen corner. The room was empty. It was possible Lilly wasn’t even up yet and my mother had already had her breakfast. I pulled my favorite “Boss” mug out of the cabinet - a gift from the guys a few years back, filled it with coffee, and inhaled deeply of the scent of the freshly made pastries as I lifted the lid.
Ma must have made them recently or there wouldn’t have been any left. Dante wasn’t home to devour them, and Lilly rarely ate more than one at a sitting, but my mother was notorious for passing out food to anyone who was on the property at the time and the cloche was full. She usually only made a dozen at a time because she liked them fresh.
“And if I make too many, people won’t want them,” she’d say when I chided her for not making more.
Usually, I was lucky to get at least one. That morning, I feasted on them. I barely tasted the first one, I ate it so quickly. I savored the next one, dipping my finger into the sweet, whipped cream that ran through the split in the center of the bun and licking it off my finger. The cream melted in my mouth and for some fucked up, erotic reason, Suzanne’s smile flashed through my mind.
I was still distracted by her.
“Are you going to eat it or stare at it?” Lilly asked as she walked through the swinging doors.
Like a kid caught with a dirty magazine, I coughed to clear my head. “I’m surprised you left me any or that the guys didn’t gobble them up.”
Yeah. I was a grown man who said “gobble.” I was home, where I belonged. It was the most human I’d felt all week.
“Yeah, well,” Lilly sat in the stool next to me at the island, “I kicked them all out. Told them they had to stay in the garage or the mudroom.”
They rarely hung out in the house unless they were invited in, so Lilly’s declaration wasn’t just out of character, because she rarely bossed the guys around, it was also alarming.
“What happened?” Not an emergency. No one had called or texted. Despite staying at the club, I’d been surrounded by my crew. If something had happened, I would have found out about it.
“Nothing like that.” Lilly tried to calm me. “I just... Ma needed some privacy. I didn’t need them here... She didn’t need them watching her.”
My stomach sank. I could keep my emotions at bay even if it turned me into a monster while I fought them, but nothing brings a man to his knees faster than hearing something had happened to his mother.
I kept my mouth shut, dropped my mafia-don hat, and focused on being a brother and a son. Lilly would tell me what I needed to know.
“She made the buns last night before bed. She said she wanted you to have some when you got home. And then, she got up at five o’clock this morning and... it was just like last time, Gabriel.” Lilly’s voice broke. “She didn’t know where she was. She walked around the house for, I don’t know how long, before someone came and got me when they noticed her on the cameras. They had checked on her to make sure she was safe, but when I got downstairs, she was screaming at Martin, telling him to get away from her. She wanted to know why he’d taken her. He tried to tell her she was home, that this was her house, but she didn’t believe him. She said it wasn’t her house and that she’d never been here before in her life. We followed her from room to room.”
Tears filled her eyes and her voice broke. “Gabriel, she was looking for Dad.”
I swallowed hard. It was the second incident like this in the last two months. We put the first one off to old age - Dante had walked into the room after a long absence and Ma...she didn’t recognize him. She thought he was my father. She knew enough to know that my father was deceased, and she turned white as she whispered “Alessandro?” when Dante came through the kitchen door.
“No, Ma, that’s Dante,” I had explained softly. She stared at him for a moment before she nodded.
“Yes, that’s Dante. Of course, it is.” But she didn’t hug him or acknowledge that he’d just returned home from a long trip.
Dante stood in the doorway, looking as pale as she did, before he turned and left the room without a word.
We brushed it aside. We were cowards. It was just the one time. There were always little things, like forgetting where she put her purse, or what Uncle Gino’s phone number was.
But this? Lilly’s story turned my blood cold.
“I finally got her to calm down. I got her some coffee, sat her at the table. Showed her the buns she’d made and kicked everyone out of the house so she could calm down. We talked quietly for a while. She ate and didn’t say much more. When she was done, she patted me on the hand and said she was going back to bed. As if nothing had happened.”
“Did she recognize you?”
Lilly shook her head. “Not at first. I think I was able to reach her because I stayed calm and kept my voice down. I think she didn’t feel as threatened once everyone left.”
I cleared my throat. “What did the two of you talk about?”
“Nothing important, really. She asked if I lived here, and I said yes. She asked who made the buns, and I told her she did. We drank our coffee, and she said she remembered her mother used to makemaritozziwhen she was a child.”
Our eyes met.
“I...I wrote everything down. So we’d know...”
