by CD Reiss
Being married to the capo may come with privileges, but as Santino pulls the Alfa Romeo into the driveway, I’m hard-pressed to list them. The duties and obligations are more clear. I’ve already missed a mass I was apparently obligated to attend so I could meet up with Scarlett, but if church is to ask God for indulgence and forgiveness, the meal afterward is where the sins are gossiped about.
Which is why—even though I’d rather chew glass—I get out of the car to go upstairs to freshen up.
I’m curling my hair when Santino appears in the bathroom doorway as if I invited him.
Which I didn’t.
His jacket is unbuttoned and his elbow is high on the doorframe, exposing the shoulder holster.
“You’re carrying,” I say. “Why?”
“Five minutes.” He drops his arm and walks away.
I turn off the curler without confirming this countdown, and I unzip my makeup bag. My stomach may be in knots, the world may feel like a rollercoaster. Santino can keep his guns and his bulletproof windows. I will not leave this house without armoring myself with blush and lipstick.
My mother once said something about women’s defenses being vastly different than men’s. She never said it to me. I was five when she was killed.
Rosetta used to tell me about things our mother had said, when I was younger and asked questions. Her words didn’t always make sense and I forgot most of them, annoyed Rosetta was trying to assert herself as the one in charge of our parents’ adult quips and adages. Now, I’d give anything to hear a word from either of them.
“What would you tell me?” I ask the mirror, envisioning the two of them standing behind me, their hands resting on my shoulders.
“That it’s time to go,” Santino answers.
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
“You’re beautiful.” Santino sounds bored having to state the obvious. “That’s enough. Your face needs no more preparation.”
“I’d believe you if I knew why a woman we saw a week and a half ago didn’t mention she was taking a trans-Atlantic flight to our doorstep.”
“Business happens.”
I dust my cheeks and nose with pink, just enough to keep me from looking like a china doll, not enough to need to blend. “She bring Siena Orolio with her this time?”
Santino steps into the bathroom and puts his hand on my shoulder.
“Don’t,” I say.
What I expect is a reassertion of his power over me, and I’m ready for all the pleasure and surrender that comes with it.
What I get is confirmation that Santino DiLustro knows when to back off. Our eyes meet in the mirror.
“You were always…” He looks at his shoes and rolls his hand at the wrist as if he can form the right words from the air like cotton candy. “Dai, dai, dai, come si dice.”
He can’t jog the expression. His frustration is painful to watch.
“I was always a pain in the—”
“No! Sempre. Before Rosetta. Before I was a man. Before we were born. You were always. Always. I…” He looks at the ceiling then closes his eyes. “Right after I took control of Secondo Vasto, I came to your uncle’s.” He invokes that day when I saw him in the hallway as a reminder. He has no idea it’s a cornerstone of my life. “To tell him I would marry Rosetta when the time came. And I saw you there. This connection, it was so strong…” He holds up his hands as if he wants to stop my thoughts. I’ve never seen him so unsure. “You were a child, so I didn’t hold it in the same place. I had no idea of you as a woman.”
“So you married my sister because you couldn’t marry me?”
“Porca puttana.” He exclaims for fuck’s sake in irritation. “Violetta, no. But I met her, and we spoke, and… yes. She was beautiful and… how do you say… incantevole?”
“Lovely?”
“Si. I thought, I could not walk away. I had to protect this woman and her little sister, like I promised.”
“Wait. Protect?”
“My God, just listen.”
“The debt? What about—”
“There is no debt!” Santino clamps down, having said more than he wanted to. “Your father was the most powerful capo the camorra ever knew. How could he owe some lowlife like me a debt?”
“My father was a grocer,” I say, turning away from the mirror. “He had a store he named after my sister, and my mother worked behind the register. He loved us. That was all I ever knew until very fucking recently.”
“I know.” He puts his hands on my arms and leans down to look into my eyes with seriousness and warmth. “I know. And you’re right. He did love you both. But everything else is a very small piece of truth.”
I have only this slim, unguarded moment to extract more from him. I should ask why now, why me, why this, but another question muscles past those and into my mouth.
“Did you love her?”
His hands slide down my arms and rest under my hands, leaving the ring I shared with my sister nested in his palm. He thumbs the stone as if asking it for strength.
“You were a child.” He raises his gaze to meet mine. “A future sister. The thoughts I have for you now didn’t occur to me. Then…” He glances at the ring. “I saw you as a woman, and that changed.”
“When?”
He drops my hands. “We should go.”
“Santi! Was it when I saw you in Zio’s office?”
“Every day,” he says as he backs out of the bathroom, “I fail you.”
“He was kneeling and weeping.”
“Every day,” Santino continues as though I haven’t said a word, “I push you away.”
“Was it gratitude? Is that why he was crying at your feet?”
“When I finally lose you”—he goes on as if I haven’t built the scene for him—“I’ll be in hell, and I’ll deserve it.”
He leaves before I can ask him another question. The moment of revelation is over, and I’m to perform my social duties with scraps of information. I’ll have to see Paola for the first time since her guest dropped the world from under me.
The jewelry box on the vanity plays a tune when I open it to remove the red seashell brooch carved with three dancing Furies. I slide the pin through the navy fabric, clip it closed, and check the mirror to make sure it’s straight. The fashion statement is 1970s old Italian woman, and it’s accurate.
I am a shrewd Italian woman out for answers.
6
VIOLETTA
Angelo and Anette’s house sits in a neighborhood one step above the one I grew up in. The garages are in the back, and the houses are separated by narrow driveways. The front yards aren’t deep, and all have painted plaster shrines where the Virgin Mother presides over patches of grass and rosebushes. As the sun sets, the altars are bathed in yard lights.
I always thought the Virgin shrines were showy piousness. But as we pull up, I see them for the first time as a way the residents connect with each other by a common thread of faith.
Santino pulls into the last spot in the driveway, behind a row of luxury cars. The block is lined with them.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask. “About Rosetta?”
“You want to talk about this now?”
“No, I want to talk about it before she died, or when you married me, or any time in the last month.”
He sighs and clicks the car into park. “You think I keep secrets.”
“Uh, yeah. It’s a compulsion with you.”
“No.” He smiles and clicks his tongue. “My compulsion, as you say, is I make promises, and I keep them.”
“Oh. Too honorable. Sure.”
“Your sister was all you had.”
He’s stated such a core truth, I twist in my seat to face him. “So?”
“She wanted to wait until you were older. She said you two only had each other and I was taking her away. She didn’t want you to hate me. Obviously, that couldn’t be avoided.”
His comment isn’t glib. It’s stuffed with regret and sealed sh
ut with surrender to things being the way they are because that’s just the way they are.
I believe him for all these reasons, and because I knew Rosetta. This request to protect my feelings is exactly what she would have done.
“And now,” I say, following his gaze to the house, “it’s Sunday dinner as husband and wife.” Two young men with an arrogant bounce in their step and bulges under their jackets mount the front steps. “Look at these harmless church folk.”
“They’re only harmless inside a church.”
One of the men turns just enough for me to see the left side of his face. I recognize him from the photo I spit on.
“Is that Damiano?”
Santino leans forward and peers up the steps. “It is.” He relaxes back into his seat, tapping his fingers on the gear shifter.
“What are you thinking so hard about?” I ask, and he gives me a quizzical look. “I smell wood burning.”
“There’s a fire?” He looks around.
I laugh. His command of English is near perfect, but throw an idiom his way and he turns literal. It’s kind of charming.
“It’s an expression. Your head is wood, and when it thinks too hard… never mind. Just tell me.”
“No one knows you’re learning Italian. They don’t know how much you understand.”
“They know my zia and zio. I don’t think anyone would be surprised.”
“You’re mostly American.” He nods toward me in an assumption that his words are beyond nuanced disagreement. “Don’t persuade them otherwise.”
I exhale in a half-laugh. “After all the effort you put into turning me into a good Italian wife, you want me to keep pretending you failed?”
The insult doesn’t land. He knows what he wants and what he’s done to make it happen.
“Their ignorance is our advantage.” He unlocks the doors. “Keep your ears open.”
“Okay, I guess.”
Santino’s supposed to trust these people, but obviously he trusts me more. That’s also charming, and damn me for being charmed. I can’t help it.
“Bene.” In the moment after we come to an agreement, he’s still. I know by the tilt of his body that he’s thinking of kissing me, but he thinks better of it and gets out.
We walk into the house together, with his hand on my lower back, and greet everyone as if the Sunday meal is here every week and we’re just a regular married couple, visiting the family. I meet Angelo, the man of the house with a shirt-stretching belly. His brother in-law, Marco, has an epic comb-over and a nose that looks as if it’s been busted sideways a few times.
“You know my daughter,” Marco says, waving Gia over.
She shines in a yellow dress and strappy sandals, her hair in a stylish bun caressed by a dainty headband. She embodies a radiant summer and I can’t help but love her. My feelings about dinner immediately improve.
“Gia!” Santino greets his cousin. “Come stai?”
“Va bene assai!” Gia kisses his cheeks and hugs me. “I’ve been dying to see you ever since you got back!” Her English has already improved from when we met. “You have to tell me everything. Everything!”
Gia gives me a knowing wink and my stomach takes a nose dive. Up until our last thirty minutes in the beach house, I would have joyfully turned our trip to Italy into savory gossip. The house, the food, the wine, the sex. All crushed with a few words from Siena Orolio. Now I’d be gossip of a different sort.
“Come!” Gia grabs my hand and tucks it around her arm. “You’ll be so much more comfortable in the kitchen than out here with the horrible men.”
I let her lead me deeper into the house. It’s smaller than Santino’s, but most are, and decorated with the same level of stuffy tradition. Ornate furniture, knickknacks, still life oil paintings. Lots of gold paint. But the farther in Gia drags me, the more the whole scene shifts. A room off to the side, the door ajar, looking refreshingly modern. Sleek white couches square off with a massive bean bag chair. In one side room, a TV the size of the pickup truck sits on a wall with every recognizable gaming console below it. Instead of heavenly miracles in oil and canvas, there are movie posters with busty women.
“Oops!” Gia dances around me to snap the door shut. “Tavie’s room is such a mess.”
With me on her arm, Gia sashays toward the upstairs kitchen, which is populated with women’s voices.
“Violetta!” Paola catches us before we go in. “Gia, go.” She shoos her daughter into the kitchen, then when she’s out of earshot, Paola’s shoulders drop and she holds out her hands. “I am so sorry. What happened with Siena, it was… I didn’t expect it. I would never have brought her if I knew.”
“Knew that I didn’t know?”
She nods slowly, then gradually, the movement turns into the shake of a no. “I wouldn’t have brought her if I knew she would say things like that.”
So she was aware of my ignorance that day, and she’s admitting it now.
“Thank you for being honest,” I say.
“If this makes you feel any better, Santino looks happier than I’ve ever seen him.” She puts her hand on her chest and taps her gold cross. “I swear it’s the truth.”
“I believe you,” I say, but don’t mention the rest—that I wish he wasn’t happy.
“You’re wearing it.” She taps the brooch with the Furies. “It suits you.”
“Is this Santino’s new bride?” A woman’s voice comes from the other side of the archway leading to the kitchen. She’s in head-to-toe beige that matches her hair dye. “Guglielmo’s niece?”
“Anette,” Paola says. “This is my husband’s sister. The woman of the house.”
In a moment, I’m pulled in with the women. They smile and greet me. I recognize many of their faces from church and the pork store. From funerals and weddings. They’re the adults in my world, and only now have I graduated to live among them.
“You look so tan!” Francine says. I scour the dark corners of my brain and remember her waiting outside St. Barnabas to walk her son, Aldo, home from school. “I hear you just got back from Amalfi!”
“I did.”
“How was it?” a young woman with meticulously ironed hair asks dreamily. A quick glance at her finger tells me she’s engaged. Her face is bright, open, expecting. Friendly.
An old woman shelling peas breaks in with a thick accent. “It was her honeymoon. How do you think, Lucia?”
Lucia blushes and turns her attention back to cutting slices of bread.
“It was great.” I’d probably get more piqued interest if I said it was terrible, but a generic reaction is the correct prize for my generic words.
“She married Santino DiLustro,” a woman says, and by the M shape of her hairline, I can see she’s the engaged girl’s mother. “You’ll be lucky to go to a Motel Six on what Lorenzo brings home.”
Lucia sticks out her tongue and everyone laughs.
They think my marriage is perfect. They think I’m lucky.
What can I say? I was kidnapped and forced to marry? I didn’t get to choose my bouquet or dress?
They either know already or they don’t, and if they know and don’t mention it, I shouldn’t.
Across the kitchen, a little girl no more than six drops a heavy can of olive oil. Everything comes to a screeching halt. We all run to help mop it up, which saves me from having to defend my sham wedding.
“It’s all right, sweet.” A gentle nonna kneels beside the girl, limbs creaking, and wipes away her tears. “It’s too many acts in a comedy in here.”
I smile.
“Do you speak?” Lucia asks, suddenly at my elbow.
I jump from surprise. “Sorry, what?”
“Italian.”
“Forgot after years of disuse.” I shake my head with a guilty smile. “You know how it goes.”
She points toward the little girl. “You laughed at Fare troppi atti nella in commedia.”
Right. I’m not supposed to understand that. “I was think
ing of something else.”
“I bet you were.” Lucia’s mother winks at me.
Standing in that kitchen, the fullness in my heart pushes it into complicated shapes. This is not my family, yet this is my family. I don’t know these women, yet they’re my people.
Once the floor is cleaned, I pick up a job seeding peppers.
“I can’t believe Re Santino’s cock will stay tamed,” someone murmurs in Italian loudly enough for me to hear it.
I’m sure they don’t intend for me to understand, so I keep my eyes down. Everything runs very still. Slowly, I turn to see who spoke and find Lucia’s mother with her head lowered, talking to another woman with dyed black hair who’s trying not to laugh.
“Santino is a whoremaker,” Black Dye replies, looking at me as she fills a pot with water. I pretend to smile and go back to the peppers. “That poor girl. Does she know everyone else knows?”
I work to keep my face even and nonplussed, but inside, everything feels as if it’s dying.
They think I’m a whore? Of course they do. Elettra got shaken into butter and told in no uncertain terms that an attraction to a whoremaker turns a girl into a whore.
My face is hot, my heart races, and I need to get out of the kitchen before everything inside my rib cage explodes. I don’t know if I need to cry or scream, but whatever I do, I won’t do it in this kitchen.
“I-I’ll be right back,” I say to no one and walk numbly in search of a bathroom where I can get behind a closed door.
The house is tight with people. By the time I find a bathroom, my brain is churning mush and all I want to do is vomit.
Everyone knows. Everyone knows. Everyone knows.
Lucia didn’t want to know about my wedding; she wanted it confirmed I was stolen and forced. Everyone knows, and I’m definitely going to vomit.
The bathroom door flies open, and I almost fall into the guy leaving it. I jump back and find myself staring up at the scarred mouth of Damiano Orolio. He carries himself like a typical Secondo Vasto gangster. He doesn’t look like the kind of guy Santino would have around. Too brazen, too cocky, too built like a locomotive.
He looks me up and down in a way no man has dared since I stepped foot into the world as Santino DiLustro’s wife.
