by Mary Leo
“Well, somebody’s gotta do it,” Aunt Val countered.
Jimmy smirked. “Everybody take a deep breath. I’m sure the guy is fine in that department. He doesn’t need an inspection. Instead, let’s try to stay on the subject . . . the wedding.” He turned to me. “So, you didn’t know anything about this?”
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
“Then how the hell did it get all planned out?” he asked. “I think there’s even a date.”
“Planned? My wedding has already been planned?” I asked, as real anger began to take hold.
“Not all the details, darling,” my mother said. “Don’t be silly. That’s why I called this meeting today, to iron out some of the remaining elements. Now that you’re here, would you like a chocolate cake or a yellow one? I think a nice yellow cake would be a better choice, more people like yellow. That is of course, if they’re not gluten-free. We might have to have another cake for those folks. We don’t want anyone to feel left out. Aunt Hetty can bake whatever you’d like. Just let me know what you want. And we can’t seem to decide on ravioli or cannelloni for the main course. Although my preference is cannelloni . . . more filling than dough. Oh, and more importantly, we don’t know about serving wine. After all, it might really tempt you and none of us want to be responsible for your fall off the truck.”
“It’s a wagon, Mom. Not a truck.”
“Whatever, dear. We don’t want to do anything to tempt you.”
Everyone seemed to shake their heads in unison.
“I haven’t even agreed to this thing yet and you’re stressing over wine and cakes and cannelloni?”
“We know how busy you are,” Aunt Val added.
“We picked out a date and a location as well,” Maryann said. “It’s going to be lovely.”
My knees were beginning to buckle again. Jimmy must have spotted it and pulled out a chair for me. “You picked out an actual date?”
“Yes. It was going to be the first Saturday after you returned from Maui,” Cousin Audrey said. “Your mom thought you would want it as soon as possible.”
“We’d hoped to surprise you, but now that you’re here, we can have it sooner,” Mom said.
“We’ll have to renegotiate with Father Duke from Saint Peter and Paul’s church,” Aunt Val said, sitting across from me at the table. “He’s a very busy man, so it might be hard to change the date.”
“I can work on the date change with Father Duke,” Audrey said as she leaned on the far end of the kitchen counter, her iPad in hand. I assumed she was taking notes on my wedding. I hardly really knew the girl and she was helping to plan my surprise wedding? “He’s in one of my cooking classes,” she continued. “We’re learning how to pair red wines with red meats. He owes me a favor anyway for saving his butt when he couldn’t get the knack of cracking two eggs at once without breaking one first.”
“You can do that?” I asked, not really knowing what I was saying.
“I can break three if they’re a regular size. It’s the extra-large I can’t get my hand around.”
“Huh,” I said, wanting to scream.
“So what date do you want dear? We might be able to pull it together by this coming Saturday or Sunday, but the following weekend might truly work out better for everyone.”
They all agreed that it should be the following weekend.
My brain finally kicked in again once the date was being decided upon . . . for me.
“Wait! Stop!” I stood up. “I’m not marrying anyone. And besides, if I was going to marry someone, it would be Leo Russo. We’re back together.”
I figured that would challenge their old world ideas. I mean, didn’t arranged marriages, even in organized crime families, die off several decades ago?
My mother laughed. “Oh, darling, that’s a good one. You had me for a minute, but then I realized you were kidding.” She laughed again, then controlled herself. “You know that boy is no good for you. Your shrink already told you that. Besides, he’s a winemaker.”
Heads nodded, and a general agreement amongst the group ensued.
“What does that mean?” I asked, thinking none of this was making any sense. The family rarely got involved in matters of the heart, but for some reason, they were all on board with my marriage to an active mobster. I wondered just how long they’d been collectively thinking up this crazy scheme and to what end? Did they really think I would agree to this outrageous idea?
“Leo knows nothing about olive oil,” Uncle Benny injected. “A woman like you, with all your knowledge of olives and oil, could not possibly consider matrimony with someone out of your faith.”
“My faith? You’ve lost me.” No one in my family ever talked about faith, or religion. Our religion was olives…everything else was a private matter between you and the universe.
“You know what he means,” Cousin Maryann said, and she pulled open her accordion in order to indicate she might be starting a song. “Leo’s not of the olive. He’s of the grape. Two entirely different fruits. Giuseppe’s blood is rich with olive oil. He grew up on an olive grove, a substantial olive grove. One of the biggest in Southern Italy. He’s perfect . . . well maybe not at the moment with that bullet stuck in his body . . . but your mom is right. Giuseppe is your perfect blood mate. At least for the time being.”
“Explain time being, please?”
“You don’t have to stay married forever,” my mom said. “Just long enough.”
“Long enough for what?”
“I can’t answer that right now. It’s not important. What is important is that we settle on a date. Besides, you can’t argue with perfection, dear. And this marriage is perfection . . . well, as soon as your Uncle Ray can dig the bullet out and we’re sure Giuseppe will live. I’d hate for us to plan all of this only for the groom to die.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Nobody wants a dead groom. Hard to get him up the aisle.”
“Don’t joke, dear. This is serious.”
“Oh?”
“Where the hell is Ray, anyway?” Uncle Benny asked.
“He should be here any minute,” Maryann said, glancing at her phone as she now softly played “Call Me Irresponsible,” an old Frank Sinatra tune that had been re-recorded by Michael Bublé, one of my favorite standards crooners of all time.
At least I liked her song choice.
I never knew Maryann to be concerned over my love life. This was all way too weird. I wished Lisa could hear all of this, but she and Jade were in the other room tending to Giuseppe . . . my family-chosen betrothed.
“What are you saying, Mom? That you want me to marry a gangster because he grew up on an olive farm?”
“He’s not a gangster anymore, darling,” Mom corrected. “He’s defected. That’s why he didn’t fly off to Italy today. He’s come over to our side.”
That explained the bleached-out white hair and beard. I assumed he’d wanted to disguise himself, but I hadn’t known exactly why. He was trying to get out, but by the bullet in his shoulder, his exodus hadn’t been very successful. Especially since he hadn’t gotten very far. It might have been better if he’d left Sonoma and maybe returned to Italy, away from this orchard, and away from me.
“When did he make the decision?”
“A few days ago.”
“A few days ago? So that’s all it takes now? Giuseppe says he’s defecting and we’re supposed to believe him?”
“Of course darling, it’s the right thing to do. If this family is anything, we’re politically correct. We’re on Tweet-er.”
“Twitter.”
“That’s what I said.”
My mind was about to explode. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, desperately trying to calm down. When I opened them again, someone had put a sparkling water down in front of me. I drank some, discreetly belched and continued to try to make my losing case. “Well, apparently someone didn’t like his decision and tried to kill him.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” U
ncle Benny groused. “There could be a lot of reasons why someone shot him.”
“Name one.”
“Maybe it was something from his past,” Gianna said.
“That’s right,” Maryann agreed. She’d stopped playing. “It was a revenge hit.”
“Okay, and if I marry him, I could get caught in the crossfire,” I argued. “I mean, he’s not dead, so that revenge person will come after him again.”
“Never going to happen,” Jimmy assured me. “Whoever tried this is probably long gone.”
“Do you know that for sure?” I asked, looking right at him.
“No, but trust me. It won’t happen again.”
I didn’t want to take this line of questioning any further. These were the kind of details I didn’t want to know about in case an official police interrogation was called for. I had to trust that my family would find the means to protect me and to protect Giuseppe.
“So now everything’s okay and I’m supposed to marry someone I don’t love?”
Mom shrugged. “Yes, dear.”
“That’s the plan,” Aunt Val agreed.
“It’s the only way,” Gianna said, nodding her head.
I stared at this new cousin for a moment, wanting to ask her—since when did you get a say in this family? But instead I turned back to my mom, who was obviously the ringleader in this shotgun wedding idea. “The only way? The only way for what? What’s going on? Why the sudden interest in my hooking up with an imported gangster?”
“You really should stop referring to him as a gangster,” my mom said. “You’ll hurt his feelings. He’s found the error of his ways. Giuseppe just wants a normal life now . . . on our orchard. Besides, it’s the only way we can keep him in this country. You know that. Or else he’ll have to go back to Italy and something bad might happen to him if he returns.”
“You mean like he might get shot? Oops! Too late. We’ve already passed that hurdle. I think he can safely return now.”
“We will have to find the shooter and persuade him to leave,” Uncle Benny calmly announced.
I glared at my uncle who sat across from me at the table. He slowly peeled an apple, trying not to break the continuous circle of removing the peel. “Oh, no you don’t. We no longer persuade anyone to do anything, but maybe buy our oils, and even that has to be done legitimately,” I warned him. “There will be no other form of persuading in this family.”
“But we can’t allow someone to get away with shooting one of our own on our property,” Gianna said. “If we allow it to happen to Giuseppe, it could happen to any of us.”
Again, I wanted to lash out at her, and once again I stifled my concerns. She was new to our situation and I knew it took time to adjust. Even if you weren’t an actual mobster, family members had to also come to terms. It was like attending an Al-Anon meeting, only for us it would be called Mob-Anon. Family members were by default enablers. We were adult children of mobsters and that came with a heavy dysfunctional burden.
“Do you guys know that someone also tried to run us off the road and into the trees?” Jade said as she entered the kitchen. “It could very well have been the shooter.”
“I hope it wasn’t into our new Mission trees,” Maryann barked. She was our new groundskeeper now that Uncle Federico had been carted off to jail. “They haven’t even had a chance to bloom yet.”
“We could have been killed!” I shouted. “And you’re worried about our Mission olive trees?”
I would have expected cousin Maryann to at least be concerned with our potential demise, but clearly, once again, I was wrong. Like I said, olives were this family’s religion and nothing else mattered.
“Impossible. Lisa was driving,” my mother affirmed.
She was right, but still . . .
“That’s beside the point,” I protested, standing and sticking a fist to my hip. I think I even stomped my foot . . . kind of.
“Darling, you’re overreacting,” Aunt Val said as she joined Zia Yolanda at the table to help her clean broccoli.
“I haven’t even begun to overreact yet,” I told her and everyone else who was part of this harebrained scheme. “Give me another hour and you’ll see real overreaction. I could win an Oscar for my overreaction!”
Did they really think I would go along with this? Yes, I was attracted to Giuseppe, and yes the thought of slipping under the covers with him tickled my insides, but marriage? No matter how long I stayed married to him, we’d still be married. I was barely holding on to my commitment not to drink anymore. How could I possibly commit to Giuseppe while I was still lusting over Leo?
This was never going to work.
“I’m sure you’ll come around once we explain everything to you,” Uncle Benny added.
“I’m sure I won’t,” I assured him, wondering what this was really all about. My mother would never intentionally marry me off to an active mobster . . . at least I didn’t think she would. But what did I know? She never told me I had a half-sister. In light of that revelation, anything was possible.
“Don’t be so negative, dear,” Mom quipped.
“Don’t be so positive,” I countered. “This is my life, my future . . . if I even have a future . . . that you’re toying with.”
“Maybe you should check on Giuseppe and see how he’s doing,” she said, sounding as if she were dismissing me.
“Why?”
“Because he’s your fiancé,” she quipped. “You’ll see the light. It’ll happen.”
“The light? There is no light here. Only dark mafioso forces marrying off the oldest daughter to some Made Man in order to keep him here in the States. And that’s a pretty weak reason. He could marry anyone for that to happen. No, this is something else entirely, and no one is telling me the truth, which is common for this secretive family. And where’s the ring? If a girl’s going to get forced into a marriage, shouldn’t there be a ring?”
“Will this do?” Cousin Maryann said, handing me a simple rhinestone ring. “It’s not much, but we were in a hurry.”
I gazed down at the shiny object she’d placed in my hand. “What’s this? It’s not even a real ring. If you’re all going to force me into marrying a gangster, shouldn’t I at least have a real diamond . . . a big diamond, like maybe three or four carats? I have to get something out of this deal. This is . . . it’s adjustable!”
“Why are you so stuck on the details?” my mom wanted to know.
I wished with all my heart that I was sitting on that plane heading for Italy. If I closed my eyes, which I did, maybe they’d all disappear and when I opened my eyes again, I’d be sitting in row twenty-five, seat A, staring out of a window up at a milky blue sky.
I opened my eyes.
They were still all there.
SIX
A Face In The Crowd
Why did Giuseppe have to defect now? Couldn’t he have waited a few months? And what about his urgency to deliver Dickey’s pinky ring to my father? After all, Dickey was killed over that ring. Shouldn’t someone have delivered it to my dad or else what was all the fuss? And who was that man I saw in the crowd? Was it, in fact, my dad? Was he once again pulling the strings in this family? Was that why Giuseppe didn’t leave? Had he already given my dad the ring earlier that morning? Was that why Giuseppe wasn’t in a car? He’d just delivered the ring?
My head was about to explode.
I needed another tactic. “This whole thing is bad luck. I’m not doing it.” If anything scared my family, it was the bad luck card. This would turn the tide in my favor. I was sure of it. “A forced wedding will bring bad luck to the entire family.”
Zia Yolanda began to wail. My mother comforted her with more broccoli to trim. Zia sniffled, stopped wailing and trimmed the broccoli.
“It’s too late. You don’t have a choice,” Uncle Benny said.
“Yes I do. I live in America. We still have certain freedoms in this country, and last I heard, arranged marriages aren’t part of our indelible rights
: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. A forced wedding will not pursue my happiness, so therefore, I’ll have to decline the offer.”
“Nobody’s forcing you to do anything you don’t want to do,” Cousin Jimmy said as he came up beside me. “Let’s just say, to quote Mario Puzo, we’re giving you an offer you can’t refuse.”
I swung around to face him. “Oh, so I’m going to wake up tomorrow morning with a horse’s head in my bed?”
“Don’t be disagreeable, darling,” my mother quipped. “We don’t own a horse.”
It sounded an awful lot like a threat. Could that even be possible? My own mother was threatening me?
“Why can’t somebody else marry him? Like Maryann or Audrey or even Jade?”
“Me? Don’t get me into this. Besides, I’m too young to get married,” Jade protested.
“So am I,” Audrey added. “I’m still in school.”
“Culinary school doesn’t count,” I countered.
“Giuseppe specifically asked for you,” Uncle Benny said.
“So he’s in on this little scheme?”
Mom nodded. “Marrying you was an agreed upon idea. He wants to marry you.”
Something about the way she said it that didn’t feel like a compliment.
“Then why hasn’t he asked me himself? Shouldn’t the man ask the woman?”
“That’s so twentieth century,” Audrey said, rolling her eyes.
“Maybe because a bullet got in his way,” Jimmy chided.
“Okay. But why the arranged marriage? And don’t tell me it’s so he can stay in this country. I’m not buying it. Why do I have to marry Giuseppe?”
“Because your father wants to join the two families before it’s too late,” Uncle Ray said as he stood in the open doorway, a small black bag in his left hand. He’d just stepped into the kitchen with Aunt Babe right behind him. “Now where’s the patient?”
“In the dining room,” Jade said, and led the way. Both Uncle Ray and Aunt Babe followed her.
Uncle Ray suddenly looked all doctor-like, while Aunt Babe looked like an aging Marilyn Monroe from Some Like It Hot, dressed in a black dress with a black fur collar. My Aunt Babe loved to play dress-up and what better way than to mimic a siren from the classic movie era?
