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And keep Lilah safe.
That day I wondered if I misunderstood her words—maybe she wasn’t telling me to help him keep things under wraps but to help him learn to fight his demons without her. Maybe all this time, she was sitting in heaven, shaking her head with disappointment that I wasn’t doing right by her.
Regardless, that night we sat there in silence, the help having left long before, cold dinners untouched.
“I’m done,” I’d said, shattering the silence. And I meant it. “I don’t have the money, Dad. I don’t.”
“What about what Mom left you?” he’d asked, asking about the trust my mother left Lilah and me. My stomach churned, the knowledge that he used my trust as his backup plan burning deep.
Not Lilah’s.
Mine.
The sweet, appeasing oldest daughter.
Lilah was there to be pretty and smile and be mysterious, never to make much of a splash.
Hide your sister from them,my mom had said.
I was there to make everything right. To fill in the gaps.
I was the disposable one.
“There’s nothing left, Dad,” I had said, sick with the knowledge that the financial security my mom thought she was leaving me was just security for him.
He sighed.
I remember that part the most. The sigh was disappointment. He was disappointed in that turn of events. It’s a sound that keeps me up at night, echoing in the dark as I try and decode it, try to assign different meanings to it. Meanings that make the situation look better than what it is.
Most parents sigh when their kids spend their money frivolously.
Mine sighed because he spentminefrivolously and there wasn’t any left.
I remember thinking that was kind of funny, in an ironic kind of way.
“Dad. TheCarlucciosreached out tome. Asked me to pay. They told me you told them I’d cover it.”
“It’s just a small—”
“It’s the fuckingCarluccios,Dad.”
“Lola, I’m your father. Don’t you—”
“Then fuckingact like it!” I had roared. It took my father aback, the normally reserved and conceding Lola snapping. “You want to be treated like a father, step up and be one! I’m done with this shit. I knew that after Mom died, you’d need some leniency. I gave it to you. I gave itallto you! You got in deep, and I helped you stay above water. We did that becauseyou’re all we have left, Dad.And because it’s what Mom would have wanted.” I paused a beat before I laid that last dig, the final blow to my dad’s soul. “This isn’t what mom would have wanted. Not you, not what I’m dealing with, and sure as fuck not what Lilah could be facing. The Carluccios, Dad? Seriously?” That one hit, I saw it. The strike.
“Your mother—”
“Grandpa had the ties to the Carluccios. She cut them. She loved Gramps to hell and back but cut those ties when he got in too deep.” That’s true. The reason Dad would even deign to go to the Carluccios is that there was a time when Andre Santino, my mother’s father and a politician in his own right, was looking to build ties with Carmello Sr., the head of the Carluccio family, before his son, Carmello Jr., took over.
He tried to align the family through marriage, offering up his only daughter to Carmello Jr.
It’s funny how history repeats itself that way, isn’t it? A woman growing up in twisted politics, marrying to get away from it, then winding up right there again, leaving her daughter to that legacy.
When Mom refused to marry into the Carluccios, instead marrying the unknown political science major she met, her family disowned her, cutting ties.
But family ties like that? They don’t just break because you will it to happen.
The Carluccios were always a line in the sand for Mom—she’d tolerate a lot, but not that. Not them. It’s the true reason Dad getting involved with them was a stab in the back to our mother’s memory.
