Mafia Girl (18 page)

“Where did you find those?” I ask.

“In the garbage,” he says.

I feel a lump in my throat. “Thank you, Domingo. Thank you very much.

“But why did you take them? How did you know?”

“Someone was trying to hurt you, right, Miss Gia?”

I nod.

“We appreciate it, Mr. Caruso. Thank you,” Mr. Wright says. “You can go home now.”

But Domingo doesn’t move. He looks at me dead on. “You’re different, Miss Gia. You always throw away the garbage, even if it’s not your garbage.”

And then I realize that he may be one of the smartest people in the school.

After school the next day, Clive and Ro and Candy and I head to Central Park. It’s one of those extraordinary days when you’re convinced it’s due to global warming because on January 5, how can it be sixty? We all take off our down jackets and walk around in sweaters, and like a six-year-old, I’m excited about going to the park and fooling around and then getting hot chocolate and hanging out at Clive’s to do homework. We walk toward Fifth Avenue, but when I look up, I see someone I don’t expect to see. He’s standing in front of his red Jag. I stop for just a minute and stare.

“Gia,” he calls, even though he knows I see him.

Anthony.

In all the years I’ve been in school, my brother has never waited outside for me. Not only that, he’s wearing a suit and a white shirt and tie, which he doesn’t do unless there’s a wedding or a funeral, so I freak and think, uh-oh, has Frankie died? Did my mom send my brother to drive me straight to the funeral home? Then I think no, I’m in jeans today and my mom saw me and there’s no way I could go in this so I’d have to go home first, and no, that’s not why Anthony is here, which brings me to think about other things.

“Anthony.”

“Wanna get some lunch?”

“I had lunch three hours ago.”

“So dinner, whatever,” he says. “Get in, c’mon.”

I say good-bye to Clive and Ro and Candy and kinda shrug when they look at me like,
what’s going on?
because I have no idea. So I get in the car and he pulls out.

Anthony’s car has white leather upholstery and even though his room is always a pigsty, his car is immaculate, which I can’t exactly figure. He keeps it parked outside the house and every few days he washes and waxes it himself. Even the white wall tires never have a speck of dirt on them. Once I actually saw him scrubbing a little dirt spot off the white leather seat with saddle soap and a toothbrush. I kind of stopped in my tracks because where did that come from?

The only annoying thing in the car is the cheapo cardboard deodorant tree hanging from the rearview mirror that reeks of artificial pine.

“Why do you have that shitty thing hanging there?”

“For the good smell.”

“Like a good cheap taxi smell?” It must be the word cheap because he rips it off the mirror, opens the window and throws it out.

“Okay?”

I look at him weird. “Yeah, but I didn’t mean you had to throw it out immediately.”

He shrugs and keeps driving. We approach a red light and Anthony starts honking at the guy in front of us who slows down because he thinks the guy could have easily made it through the yellow.

“A-hole,” he says.

“A woman started crossing with a stroller. What do you want him to do, mow her down?”

He looks at me and doesn’t say anything. “What are you in the mood for?”

Actually nothing since I’m not hungry and it was his idea to eat, not mine. “Whatever.”

“Want to go to Rao’s?”

“Are they serving now?”

“For me they are.”

“Okay, whatever.”

He heads uptown and I just sit there because I really don’t have a huge number of topics I feel like discussing with my brother. I notice that he’s wearing the cuff links I bought him in Rome. I point to his cuff.

“You like them?”

“Fuckin’ A,” he says. “They’re gorgeous.”

“Does Dad like his?”

He glances over at me. “He’s wearing them today. He loves ’em.”

The cuff links are gold, almost like the beans Elsa Peretti makes for Tiffany, only these have a few tiny rubies on the side, which upgrades the whole look, I thought. The pair for my dad has a few more rubies and some tiny diamonds too. And for my mom I bought an eighteen-karat gold cross with tiny emeralds because she loves crosses and owns more of them than the Vatican. And every day, no matter where she’s going, she wears every single one, a total of about twenty, in different sizes and shapes, in case someone may not realize she’s a serious Catholic.

When we get to Rao’s, Anthony manages to find a spot close to the restaurant windows so he can keep an eye on the car. We go in and it’s pretty empty at that hour and they give him a huge greeting like he’s made their day. I’ve totally lost my appetite, but I’m not going to sit at Rao’s and not eat, so I order a seafood salad and so does Anthony, but he also wants meatballs and ziti. We eat and Anthony looks like he’s in heaven, which always happens when he eats, which is why he’s about twenty-five pounds overweight. But I don’t go there because when you’re chowing down at Rao’s, you don’t exactly want to hear a lecture about how fat you are.

“Where’s Mom?”

He looks at me. “Home.”

“Oh.” I pick up another forkful.

As usual, Anthony manages to drop some seafood salad on his shirt and he goes “shit,” and the waiter runs over with a cloth napkin and a bottle of club soda, and Anthony says thanks and does a lousy job of trying to get it out, and what he’s left with is an oil stain with an enormous wet spot around it like a bull’s-eye. But based on his skills with his car, I’m sure he’ll rise to the challenge when he gets home.

“How’s school?”

“Okay.” I kind of look at him strangely because Anthony always hated school and never ever talked about it. After high school that was it for him and he never mentioned it again.

“You’re like the president?”

“Not ‘like,’ I am the president.”

“Cool. So what do you do, make the rules?”

“Yeah, I decide totally everything.” I shake my head because my brother is obviously a bigger moron than I thought. “It’s not exactly a job that comes with total power,” I say to disabuse him because he must be thinking that I’m like Castro was over Cuba or something. “It basically means I get to do the stupid volunteer stuff that no one else really wants to do anyway.”

He nods and that kind of ends the conversation about the school and being president and I look up and—whoa—see one of the girls who was at the photo shoot with me at
Vogue
. It’s Bridget, the daughter of Jade Just, the designer. This time she’s wearing this over-the-top black cashmere sweater dress that looks like someone took a knife and arbitrarily made some significant slits in it so that it’s clear she’s got on a royal blue satin bra and a matching thong, plus these extraordinary over-the-knee suede boots in a dark eggplant color. We make small talk for a minute or two as she stands at the table.

“Are you alone?” I say finally. “Do you want to sit with us?”

“No thanks, it’s fine,” she says. A second later John Plesaurus walks in.

I guess Bridget Just has an extraordinary body too and maybe she’s fine with having a
Vogue
photographer take porno pictures of her just for his personal viewing pleasure or whatever, because John Plesaurus is obviously not only a great fashion photographer but also a deviant child molester. So I smile at him and then turn back to Anthony, who, a second later, asks too loud, “who the fuck is that?”

I roll my eyes. “The guy who shoots for
Vogue
.”

Anthony looks at me confused.

“He’s their favorite photographer.”

“Oh, from those pictures?”

“Yes, from those pictures.”

After that I make a point of not looking up and watching them and I’m getting antsy about sitting there because all I’m wondering is whether this meal is before or after for them. And my mind is going places it has no business going because what do I care what she does? I’m wishing that Anthony would just hurry up and finish the stupid meatballs or take them home or whatever. Finally he cleans his plate and signals for the waiter to come over because I know he wants dessert.

“I have a ton of homework, can we just go?”

“Never mind,” he says to the waiter, “just the check.” He pays and we go outside and get into the car and I’m watching him and waiting and he starts the car and finally I can’t stand it anymore.

“Anthony, what the fuck is going on?”

He looks at me and bites his lip, staring off into the distance. An eternity later, he turns back to me. “The jury came in,” he says, so low I can barely hear him.

Neither of us says anything and I stop breathing.

“Dad’s not coming home anymore, Gia,” he blurts out finally. “This is it.”

Then I see something I rarely see. My brother is crying.

I sit there looking at him, getting more worked up than I would have if I just went home and found out or read it in the papers, because someone put him up to this lunch and I know it wasn’t my mom or my dad.

“What does Super Mario say?” The words come out in a rush. “He’s on it, right?”

Anthony doesn’t answer.

“Anthony…what does he say?”

“He says we’re fucked.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Gia…you don’t know how much they have against him this time.”

“Like what?”

“Like wire taps and all the Frankie shit.”

“But Dad’s gotten off before. He always does, no matter what.”

“That was before,” he says, staring off like he’s lost.

I wait for him to go on but he looks back at me, his eyes scared and empty and he shakes his head as he starts to sob.

Clive must have been watching
the TV. “Come over, Gia,” he says. “Stay here with me.”

“I can’t leave my mom. She’s a wreck.”

There’s silence on the phone. What can he say? “I’ll be here if you need anything. Anything, Gia.”

“I love you, Clive.”

“I love you more, Gia.”

Ro and her parents come over, and then Anthony’s friends, sending my mom into desperate, total despair cook mode, working too fast and preparing everything in her entire Italian repertory and it’s like a wake where you try to act like you’re there to pay your respects, only my dad is alive, even though, despite appeals and appeals and appeals, I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again without a partition between us.

And that morbid scenario makes me feel needy and crazy and abandoned and weepy and loveless, and I start to obsess about being alone and lost and think of Michael, who I haven’t seen since I got back, and all my crazy, screwed-up feelings make me cry because—oh God—my dad just got put away, so why the hell am I thinking about being with someone in law enforcement, you know?

I’m not sure if it’s the headlines on the five and six and ten and eleven o’clock news that night or the fact that I disappeared in Europe for three weeks and have not spoken to him in, what, a month? Something telepathic must be going on between us because at two in the morning my phone rings.

“Hey,” I say.

“Gia.”

“How are you, Michael?”

“How are you?” he says, like with everything going on.

“Crappy.”

“I know.”

Silence, the painful silence that’s always there and feels like he’s on one side of the continent and I’m on the other.

“You were away,” he says, more like a statement than a question.

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

“Rome, Milan, Paris, London.”

“Right.”

“I’m not kidding.”

“How come?”

I tell him about Clive and his parents and the magazine and he listens and listens.

“You have some life.”

“Yeah.”

“I want to see you,” I blurt out.
Yeah, I want to see you too
, I wait to hear. But no, not Michael.

“Tomorrow,” he says. “I’ll wait for you after school.”

“And then go to work after five minutes.”

Exhale. “Not five minutes, I need to see you too.”

I’m on my way into the kitchen when I hear my brother talking to my mom in a tone that puts me on alert. I stop outside the door and listen.

“All our assets,” he says, “they’re seizing all our assets.”

“Everything?”

“We’ll have to sell the house and maybe move into Grandma’s apartment, and we’ll keep some money to live on…but they get everything else…everything.”

It feels suddenly like the whole world is crashing down around us. Not only have they taken my dad away, they are punishing all of us for being in the same family.

“Everything,” she says over and over. “Everything we have after a lifetime.”

Suddenly I’m filled with anger and I burst in. “Mom, my God, didn’t you know? Didn’t you know that one day this would happen?”

She holds out her hands. “You don’t think about that. You can’t,” she says, “or you can’t go on.”

“But why didn’t you ever try to stop him? Why did you accept everything? All the shit he was into.” I’m feeling a rage at my mom that I never knew I had inside me.

“You have to accept everything with a man like your father,” she says. “There’s no other way. I talked to him, I did what I could, but he lived the way he lived.” She shakes her head. “So I committed a crime. I loved him,” she says. “I loved him no matter what. And now this is what I get, this is how they punish us.”

“But you didn’t—”

“Stop, Gia!” Anthony yells. “Don’t blame her. Leave her alone. It’s not her fault.”

“I can’t stop. Look at what’s going to happen to us now.”

“Fuck the feds,” Anthony says. “They’re not going to stop us.”

“Dad said that too, Anthony, and look what happened to him. Do you want to end up in the next cell?”

“Don’t talk like that, stop it,” my mom yells. “Stop the fighting. I don’t want this. We’re a family.”

“We
were
a family,” I say. Then I run up the stairs to my room.

I don’t know when it dawns on me that everything they’ll be taking from us will include the money for my school. Instead of Morgan, I’ll end up at some low-end neighborhood school with forty kids in a class instead of twelve and teachers who are too burned out to care whether we learn anything. It’s almost a laugh to think of the fight I went through to become president of the Morgan School. Now Wentworth, Brandy, and Georgina will have the last laugh. Their prayers will be answered and the don’s daughter will get what she deserves. In September, I’ll be gone. The job at the bakery will stop being a joke. We’ll need the money now.