AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Some party they ended up at together,” Biondi says. “She’s still only sixteen, but she decides he’s her Prince Charming.”
Jimmy and Paul Biondi haven’t moved from the living room. Somehow Biondi, taking up as much of the couch as he does, makes the room look even smaller than it really is.
He is clenching his fists again. Old boxer’s hands, looking as if they got run over by a car.
“So she tells me before she leaves for the prom, in the limo he shows up in, that she’s going to spend the night with one of her friends whose parents booked her a hotel room,” Biondi says. “But in the morning, she’s in her bed.”
He stares down at the big hands now, then up at Jimmy.
“There’s bruises on her face and neck. One eye starting to color. When I ask her about it, she tells me she had too much to drink and fell in the ladies’ room.”
“But you didn’t believe her?”
“You’re a cop. Who bruises their neck slipping and falling in the ladies’ room?”
Jimmy just nods.
“I felt like I’d done a pretty damn good job raising this girl on my own,” Biondi says. “But at that point I knew as much about teenage girls as I did about brain surgery.”
It is very quiet in the house. His eyes are suddenly very red.
“I promised myself I’d be a better grandfather to her daughter than I had been a father to her. But now they’re both gone.”
“How’d she get home?” Jimmy says.
“That’s the best part. The asshole sent her home in the limo. Just alone this time.”
He’s telling it at his own speed and Jimmy knows enough to let him.
“She breaks down finally and tells me what happened, pleading with me not to do anything about it,” he says. “He took her back to his place. His old man was dead by then. The mother, as far as I could tell, was long gone. Just the two of them. She says she begged him to stop. But the more she told him that, the rougher it got. And no one there to hear them until it was done.”
He shakes his head.
“I never should’ve let her go,” Biondi says. “It didn’t feel right. But she was so goddamn desperate to be breathing that air. To be something more than the daughter of a guy who owned a goddamn gas station.”
“Did you go looking for him?”
“Yeah. When I get to the apartment or town house or whatever the hell you call it, it’s like he’s waiting for me. Him and this big guy he introduces as his uncle Joe.”
Champi.
Of course.
“The kid starts crying, not even denying it, begging me to forgive him,” Biondi says. “Says he doesn’t even remember all of it, he was blackout drunk. When he woke up he called for the car and sent her home. Swears on his dead father he’ll never go near her again.”
Biondi isn’t crying. But Jimmy thinks he’s close.
“That turns out to be BS, of course,” he says. “Before long he’s calling her, but at least my Lily is smart enough at that point not to have anything to do with him.”
“Is that all of it?” Jimmy says.
“No,” he says. Voice not more than a whisper.
Now he does start to cry. Talking and crying at the same time.
“The uncle tells me he knows my business isn’t too far from going under,” Biondi says. “Then he reaches into his jacket and comes out with a check for more money than I’ve ever seen in my life, enough to keep the shop going, and enough to send Lily to whatever college she wants, which turns out to be Princeton, by the way, something I never could have afforded. And along with the check is one of those nondisclosure things.”
Biondi is fighting to get some air into him.
