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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
DOMINIC
Gio was planning on coming with me to meet with the funeral home director about Donna’s service and burial. It would be a small, intimate affair on Tuesday afternoon, and we intended to close both restaurants until 6 p.m. Employees who were scheduled to work would receive full pay but were not expected to attend the service unless they wanted to. Sonoran Acres had offered us their conference room as an informal postfuneral gathering place, and I was happy to take them up on it. Most of Donna’s living friends were there anyway.
When I saw Gio this morning, I also had to tell him that I planned to contact Steven and let him know that our grandmother had passed away. It shouldn’t be that hard in this hyperactive social media age to locate a family member, but after an hour of drinking coffee at my bare kitchen table while scouring search results on my laptop, I wasn’t having any luck. Meanwhile, my phone was overflowing with messages that I didn’t feel like dealing with yet. I did take a quick look to see if any calls or texts had come through from Melanie. They hadn’t. The meeting this morning with the funeral director was at ten, and after that I planned to drop by Melanie’s apartment. I hoped to take her out somewhere and try to have a few hours of a normal relationship. I badly wanted that with her. I just hoped she wanted it too.
The knock on the door came early, just after eight. I was still unshowered and wearing only my boxers. Part of me immediately hoped that Melanie was here, but the knock was too loud and insistent to be the work of her delicate hand. That knock was all Gio.
“You’re early,” I said when I opened the door.
He wasn’t dressed either. In fact he looked like he’d just rolled out of bed in his flannel pajama bottoms. He didn’t have a shirt on, and I noticed the faded scar on his right shoulder. I’d forgotten about that scar and where it came from, but now I had a sudden flashback.
Gio was maybe five at the time—we were at a Fourth of July block party in Uncle Frank’s neighborhood in Brooklyn. It was dark outside, and my grandparents were twenty yards away at Frank’s house when some drunk dickhead ran through the crowd with a pair of Roman candles. A shower of sparks landed on Gio’s shirt and caught fire. I didn’t have time to react, and I didn’t know what to do anyway. But Steven did. Our big teenage cousin grabbed Gio and threw him down on the ground, rolling and smacking him until the fire was out. Gio was screaming, and people were crowding and gasping. I saw Papa Leo sprint our way at a speed that was remarkable for a potbellied gray-haired grandfather. Steven had gathered his little cousin into his arms as he assured him, “It’s okay. Fire’s out. You’re okay.”
More than twenty years later, Gio wordlessly stepped into my apartment and pressed a folded newspaper to my chest.
“What’s this?” I asked.
My brother sat on the couch and glared at me. “Read it.”
“You’re the only guy I know who still gets the damn newspaper delivered to his door every day,” I muttered as I leaned against the wall and unfolded the paper. According to the headlines the congressman who’d been on trial for running a prostitution ring out of a sporting goods store was going to prison.
“So what?” I looked up to find Gio was still grimly watching me.
“Section D,” he said.
I was drawing a blank until I sorted through the pieces of newspaper and saw that section D was the Food and Entertainment section. I’d forgotten all about the fact that the article was coming out today, the one written by the annoying reporter who came to the friends and family event and cornered Gio with a bunch of weird questions that didn’t have anything to do with food. I still didn’t know why Gio was slumped on the couch looking like I’d just run over his puppy. Maybe that reporter, Becky Baller, had given us a bad review. Maybe she hated pizza.
I was expecting a few paragraphs on one of the inner pages, but “Brothers Haunted by Family Failures” took up four columns on the first page, then continued for another half page on page four.
Gio rose from the couch while I scanned the article. He walked into the kitchen and stood at the window, staring at the gray morning. “Read the whole thing, Dom. Read every fucking word.”
I did what he said. I read every fucking word. Gio didn’t make a sound the entire time. He just stood there beside the window, a silent moral custodian. During the fifteen minutes or so that it took me to read and absorb the article in its entirety, I half forgot he was even there.
I was startled to read that Frank had done prison time years ago. He served nine months for tax evasion and racketeering. There was no mention of whether Steven had gone to prison as well.
“Can’t believe Uncle Frank was in prison,” I said to Gio.
“Keep reading,” was his curt answer.
As I continued to read, at first I was furious with the writer, then sadness filled me for the broken family described in these paragraphs. My broken family. All that history, came to this. I’d pictured my grandfather’s lonely death a million times, yet seeing it described in a couple of stark print sentences brought fresh waves of pain.
But the worst of the heartbreak was news to me; “death certificate ... thirty-five years old.”
My throat tightened. I read those sentences again to make sure I understood them. Something heavy squeezed my chest and wouldn’t let go.
Beth, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.
I never hated her. I hoped she didn’t hate me. She was lonely and sad, and I knew exactly what I was doing the first time I got her on her back and eased my way inside. She and Steven had been separated for six months when I started coming by to fix things around the house. She was grateful and pleased. She fed me plates of spaghetti. She asked me questions about school and life and really listened to the answers.
Beth was sweet with a delicate Snow White kind of beauty, but that wasn’t why I wanted her. Honestly, I wasn’t lacking for options. There were even prettier girls my own age that followed me everywhere in the hopes I’d give them a few minutes of my time. I liked being in her house, my cousin’s house. I liked knowing that she was eagerly waiting for me to come over after she tucked her daughter in for the night. Most of all, in my fucked up teenage head, I liked the idea that I was taking something important from the man who’d taken something important from me. Later on I was ashamed of that. But it didn’t change anything.
With care, I folded the newspaper along its original creases. The final paragraph had said positive things about the food and awarded a five-star rating, but that hardly seemed to matter.
Gio turned around, and I didn’t like what I saw in his face. He’d never asked me about it, never. I knew he watched me every time Beth’s name came up, but as the years passed that happened less and less. I could almost pretend history was different.
Donna knew. Maybe she’d suspected all along, but she guessed the truth for sure when Steven and I sported matching black eyes after brawling in the middle of his living room. He’d stopped by to talk to his estranged wife and found her with her head bobbing between my knees. Donna talked to me about it only once. She’d grabbed my hand and begged, “Dominic, let her go. Please.” It was the only thing she had ever asked of me, but it didn’t matter. Beth had already informed me she was reconciling with Steven. I didn’t even realize I’d fallen for her until I heard that crushing news. But it wasn’t the last blow to be dealt. The restaurant was officially lost, thanks to Frank and Steven, and so were Gio’s and my future hopes. All of a sudden there didn’t seem to be anything left for us in New York. Impulsively our grandmother called a moving van, packed us up, and shuttled us across the country. At that point I was glad to go.
