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Told them that I could settle his debt.
His daughter.
He told one of the biggest crime families in New Jersey to go to hisdaughterto secure payment for his gambling debt.
That was the wake-up call.
Because there are a lot of things you can forgive when it comes to family. And you can forgive a lot more when illness shows you just how precious and fragile life is, how precious your family is.
But selling out your own child to dig you out of your mistakes?
No. I couldn’t forgive him for that.
“Lola, it’s just this once. I promise,” he’d said. But that’s also something I’d heard so many times before. It had started slow, asking for small amounts here and there. He even asked Sam once or twice, and we’d talked about it, trying to come up with a plan. Sam never knew the whole story, but he was aware of how my father coped after Mom. While I was handling the financial end, keeping things settled, Sam had been keeping an ear out on the political side to help keep me abreast of anything that my father might not share that the press might not know of.
When my mother passed slowly and painfully from breast cancer at a relatively young age, my dad dove deep into his work, just like my mom anticipated. I know we both made promises to her in those last few days. Promises I did everything in my power to keep.
But something in me snapped that day. Keeping a promise you made to a dying parent is one thing, but it’s different when it’s leading you to empty your trust. To drive down to Raceway Park at 11:00 on a Friday to settle a debt that was made behind closed doors.
Things change when you’re getting calls from mobsters and they’re telling you that your own father told them you’d settle his debt.
I realized then I had become a sure thing for my father. At some point, I had changed from his daughter, whom he was ashamed to ask for help, to a security net he relied on.
The night I got that call, I called my father.
I think a part of me wanted him to be surprised. Or confused. Or embarrassed.
“I got a call, Dad,” I’d said.
He didn’t sound surprised.
Or confused. Or embarrassed.
He’d sighed. I remember that sigh, a bone-deep, exhausted sigh.
“It was someone from the Carluccios,” I continued on. He didn’t see that coming, though. “They called me directly, Dad.”
When silence hit the line, I realized then he knew. Even if Johnny had said my father told him to contact me for reimbursement, I held on hope that he’d have that shock. That confusion.
There was just acceptance.
A detached sort of acceptance.
With his acceptance came my own pure form of frustration.
Rage came next.
Frustration and rage.
But those feelings were both tinged in the same type of disappointment I’d been fighting off for years, telling myself it wasn’t greed or addiction but grief.
The next night we sat in my father’s dining room, the same house my sister and I were brought home from the hospital and raised in, the same dining room our mother served us dinners in, the same house she took her last breaths in, having been released on hospice to spend her final days in the comfort of her home.
It was like her ghost was watching over the proceedings, some unseen judge we knew we’d all have to answer to eventually.
And truth be told, I don’t think either of us thought we were doing the right thing in her eyes—not Dad with his thirst for power and undeniable addiction, and not me, with my inability to keep the promise I made her, with my enabling of his problems.
Keep your dad clear, Lola. I need you to promise that you’ll help him. He’ll be lost without me. I hate putting this on you, but promise me you’ll help him.
