“I did. But you didn’t say why.”
“Okay so, lesson two…an open-ended question can be answered with a story.” I’m not trying to be a cutting snot-ass, so I check on his expression. He doesn’t look offended, so I continue. “My older sister died five and a half years ago from pneumonia while she was in the old country. And yes they have fine, fine care in Italy, but for some reason, not in that town, and not for her. So this is what motivates me. Even more than my parents, losing my sister was a big deal and if I can keep someone else from going through that, I’ll live happy. Now, you get to tell me what motivates you.”
“I’m sorry about Rosetta.” He lays his hand on my arm. All the blood in my veins races to the very spot, spreading heat across my entire body and I’m not sure if it’s from the touch itself or the unexpectedness of my sister’s name in his mouth.
“Thanks.” I step away, and his hand falls off me. “Now, you tell a story.”
“I knew your father.”
The statement itself stops my heart. I’m caught off guard by the revelation, but I’m not surprised he knew Emilio Moretti. We’re from a small corner of a big city, where everyone knows everyone.
But then he says nothing. Just those four words.
“That’s your story?”
Santino shrugs.
“It’s a lot to say to someone you just met, no?”
“Not really. I mean, yes but maybe a little context?”
We have half a block to go, and he spends a chunk of that deep in thought.
“I think he’d be proud of you,” Santino says, finally. “Smart girl. Going to school. Good cook. Very beautiful.”
He ticks off compliments like pretty beads, and each one of them makes me blush just a little, except the last one, which makes my cheeks burn like hot lava. Rosetta was the beautiful one. In the looks department, I’m extra average, with a side of ordinary. My brown eyes are a little too far apart and the brows are black and arched. My nose is too big and my neck is weirdly long. I’ve never learned to manage my hair, which bursts into cowlicks when it’s short, and when it’s long, it can’t decide between curly and straight so it’s both.
“Well…” I start to deflect the flattery, but Santino’s got a shovel so why not dig himself a big old hole?
“You’d make a good wife,” he says.
“Excuse me?”
“What? You disagree?”
“Well, I’m not a generic good wife for any generic guy. I’m not a cupcake, or a…you know…a reliable car that’ll go 200 thousand miles for whoever happens to be driving it.”
“No, I don’t mean…” He tsks. “Violetta. Do you misunderstand me on purpose?”
“Do I? Based on your earlier statements, you want a smart wife, right?”
“Of course.”
“Very beautiful. One who can cook?”
“What can I say? I like to eat.”
This toxic male pig doesn’t deserve to make me smile that easily, but he has his own touching, backward charm.
“But why? Why is she a good cook? Because she enjoys feeding you? Or eating? Or does she hate cooking even though she’s good at it? Ask yourself those questions.”
“Or I can ask you? Why are you a good cook?”
Santino DiLustro always has a way to turn the conversation away from himself and back onto me. I’m not going to get him out of that habit in half a block.
“Cooking,” I say, surrendering the conversation to him. “Has two main considerations. Space and time. How many burners, and how long. Like a dance. This is the space, this is the rhythm. And you go! If you’re organized, it’s beautiful. The bread and the escarole come out hot at the same time, if you think on your toes and you’re organized. It reminds me a little of triage, actually. You have to arrange things in order of importance to give everything equal significance.”
We round the last corner.
“I was right,” he says. All of Santino’s crew are outside the house, waiting with the men of my extended family. Maybe he’d predicted they’d be outside, and he was right about that?
I steal a glance at him, and it almost hurts to look at him. I look back to my Zias. They don’t wave back but turn away. I should feel safe and at home, but it’s unsettling.
“Guglielmo,” Santino says.
“Please. Capo. My respects…” From the spirality of the intro, I can tell Zio’s about to work in some long explanation for I don’t even know.
“Basta,” Santino says like a teacher hushing a recalcitrant child. “She will make a good wife.”
“She’s too plain.” Zio bobs his hand down the length of my body like I’m a car with rust under the chassis.
“Uh, hang on—” I say to exert my own will on whatever’s happening here.
“I need your permission, Guglielmo,” Santino says, and I’m so stunned he’d ask anyone permission for anything you could knock me over with a feather.
Zio and Zia look at each other with a few decades of shared fears and hopes.
“We’d better start cleaning up,” I say. “It was nice meeting you, Santino.”
I hold my hand up in a wave, but no one moves. The king does not cast his gaze upon me, because it’s fixed on my sweaty-templed uncle.
“Do not withhold your blessing,” Santino commands without a threat, just a routine authority.
“Of course,” Zio says. He looks at me with tears ready to fall from glassy eyes. “I know Violetta will be treated like a queen.”
“As she is,” Santino says. “So will she be known.”
Zia hugs me, crying with apologies, as I watch my uncle blink away tears.
“It is done.” Santino claps. He’s no longer just a shitty conversationalist who wants to take a walk, but a king laying down the law of the land. “The debt is paid.”
What. The. Fuck?
“Wait…what?”
“Violetta Moretti, daughter of Emilio Moretti, is now mine.”
“Stop!” I shout, shaking my aunt off me. “Hold the epic fuck up, and do not…” I point my finger at Santino. “…do not interrupt me again when I ask you. What. The. Holy. Fuck?”
He has the smirk of a devil who knows the exact position of my soul, how to extract it, and how tender it will be when he eats it.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll go to St. Paul’s, and we will be married.”
Now I know I’m in a terrible nightmare. Who says this? Who does this? Who talks so coldly about marrying someone they literally spent ten minutes talking to?
Am I still sleeping? Surely, surely, I’m passed out in the bread bowl in the kitchen, and dreaming/nightmaring this horrible mess…because of stress. That’s what Scarlett would tell me. She would tell me, per her dream book, this means I’m overstressed and need a vacation and if I can only wake up, then I can leave for Malta in a few days and let this whole thing become a figment of my imagination.
Except I can’t force myself awake.
Santino grasps my arm and leans down to me, hissing like a snake who doesn’t want anyone else to know when he’ll strike me. “You will be a queen, or your aunt and uncle will be removed as obstacles, and you’ll be replaced with your cousin, Elettra.”