“I’m sure you did wonderfully.” Nana Angelina squeezes my hand. “Such big brains, those Moretti girls have.”
“Why don’t you help with the bread?” Zia gives my shoulder a tight squeeze. “You are so good at the bread.”
Bread’s easy. The vibe in the kitchen, however, is anything but. Everyone is too eager to help me, too complimentary on the way I knead and roll the dough. The way they look at me is...weird.
“Such technique!” Zia Donna coos, giving my waist a squeeze. “You’d never know it the way she’s so slender, Madeline. She’s a prize, indeed.”
My gut sours. This was the way they looked at me when they told me Rosetta wasn’t coming back from her trip home to Napoli. This was the way they treated me when they told me she’d died there. Pneumonia. No chance to recover. One moment I had a sister and the next I didn’t.
They didn’t look me in the eyes then, either.
I know what that look means. The weight of it. The feel of it across my skin.
Pity.
If they’re giving me the Pity Face, it must be something truly awful. Like the time Zio’s cousin Gino was here from the old country and took a deeply icky interest in me. I couldn’t escape his rough grasp as he praised my childbearing hips and slim waist. His anchovy breath put me off the little fishes forever.
“Who is coming to dinner?” I swallow fear and channel all the anxiety into cutting a loaf into manageable slices.
“Some of Zio Guglielmo’s business associates.” Zia tries to pull off a casual response, but I can feel the stress under it. Zia Donna and Nana Angelina share a look over a massive pile of finger cakes.
“How many? A hundred?” I look at the bread I’m cutting. The beige slashes in the top, spreading open like wounds, the layers of knife marks in the butcher block table Zio made for Zia decades ago. Rosetta and I did our homework at this table and ate together and colored pictures of unicorns and rainbows.
Our table hasn’t ever had this much bread on it.
No. One time. When I was a little younger than Elettra.
We’d only had that much bread on the day the devil came in the door and cut me open with his cruel eyes, exposing a darkness I spent all my discipline and rigor denying. I’d hated him for it.
“How much bread do we possibly need?” I babble nonsense to shut this shit out of my head.
“What if Re Santino wants more and we don’t have it?” Tiny Tina chirps.
The cruel, terrifying, beautiful, mysterious man in the doorway hadn’t shown up in years. Now he’s coming to dinner so soon after standing over Zio as he wept? And all Nana wants to do is muse about my waist size in comparison to my hips? Why is no one asking why?
Suddenly, the anchovy seems quaint.
I’m torn in two—terrified and curious. I can’t bear the thought of seeing Zio like that again. A man who never cries, a man who carves cement with his bare hands, weak and exposed. It hurts my heart just to think of it.
“I’ll get King Santino whatever he wants.” Elettra twirls her skirt with a saucy look on her face as hot as the strange feelings bubbling through my veins.
Zia Donna grabs Elettra violently by the arm and growls. “You shut your mouth.”
“Ow! Ma!” Elettra winces and tries to pull away. The whirling activity in the kitchen freezes, prosciutto and tomatoes practically floating mid-air.
“You want to be turned into a street whore?” She shakes Elettra viciously, danger etched into her features.
“Donna!” Nana grabs her by the shoulders and gently pries her hands away. But she’s hell-bent on proving whatever point she’s got and winds up scratching Elettra’s arm as she pulls away.
“I was kidding.” Elettra hiccups between sobs, cradling her scratched arm. “Ma, it was a joke!”
“That is nothing to laugh about!”
Zia catches my attention and tips her head towards the back half of the house, as she picks up a tray of antipasto. I know what she’s asking.
“Come, Elettra.” I wrap my arms around my cousin to hold her together as she cries. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
“I was just kidding,” she whimpers again as we go to the little downstairs bathroom.
“You know how moms get about their daughters.” I don’t actually know, because my parents died when I was very young. Still, I think back to the argument between my aunt and uncle early this morning, and it’s enough to elicit empathy. “Family cares, even if they do it rough.”
I close the door. Elettra sits on the blue toilet so I can tend to her arm. She’s still as shaken as I am, though more, given what happened. What about this man caused my aunt to go ballistic? He’s scary as hell, sure. But that didn’t justify calling Elettra a whore waiting to happen.
Is that why Zio lost his shit this morning?
And what does that say about Santino? Is he the kind of man who only likes fallen women? Does he ruin all the girls foolish enough to flirt with him? Does he use them and then abandon them?
I try not to dwell on it too much, instead keeping focus on carefully bandaging my cousin’s arm and pretending it’s part of my final, but I can’t stop twisting back to it. So many arguments in our home today, violence from my aunt, all over this mysterious, dark man.
The king, about to receive hospitality from a man he’d made kneel and weep.
What would such a man do to me?
Would he make me kneel and weep too?
“Violetta?” Elettra says. My hands have frozen a Band-Aid inches from her wound. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” I place the adhesive strip. “Just…thinking.”
“About?”
About a man so mighty he’s called a king.
About a man whose power I felt so strongly, twice, that the memory of it lives deep in my body.
About the fear of him taking away my defenses, opening me the way heat spreads the slashes at the top of a loaf of bread, crusting my insides against my outside.
About me liking it.
Wanting it.
Fearing it.
I like sweet blonde boys who demand nothing and don’t care if I stop calling them.
I don’t want a dark-eyed king.
Except the one.
Which I can’t, because he’s terrifying.
I can’t hold the contradictions in my head, and shake them away.
“What’s going on out there?” I ask.
“I have no idea,” Elettra whispers. She watches me smooth down the bandage. “My brother was weird this morning, too. He said Daddy would never deal a daughter to the capos.”
Ah, this was about the part of my community I never had to think about. My uncle was in construction, so he dealt with it, paying what he had to pay and staying in the good graces of the criminals in charge. We observed the law of omertà like a religion.
The law of omertà is simple. You don’t speak of who runs Secondo Vasto. You don’t say or even think the words. You don’t dream of them or what they do.
You certainly don’t judge it, because the mob makes the world go around, and in the same way you don’t think of gravity or the forces that keep the planet in orbit, you don’t spend time thinking about the corruption or crime. You just pretend you’re more American than anything else, because the lie of omertà is about so much more than the mafia.