agree.”
She is right about that, for sure. Dita has more need of a third tit than a heart-to-heart with Mrs. Gianis.
“So you broke into my bedroom instead? I think you better go.”
“I need to talk to you about Cassian.” In her silly floor-length muumuu, Mrs. Gianis has crept close to Dita’s bed. Her long fingers are webbed in front of her heart, in an aspect of prayer.
“Sorry, Lidia. That’s none of your business.” The Gianises are old-world and Dita knows calling Mrs. Gianis by her first name will seem impudent.
“I need to ask you, Dita, to stop seeing him.”
“Ditto. MYOB.”
“Dita-”
“Look, Lidia, right now I’m just fucking your son, so don’t worry about it.”
Mrs. Gianis slaps her. Hard. Dita’s cheek erupts in pain, almost as if it’s been skinned. The old woman has advanced on Dita so quickly she barely has had time to react, and in the process of drawing back, or maybe in recoil from the blow, she’s whacked the back of her skull against the mahogany headboard. In the meantime, Lidia has retreated at least twenty feet, obviously shocked at herself, and is suddenly crying, an act that seems as unlikely as if a stone statue were standing here shedding tears.
“Oh my God,” she keeps saying. Lidia had been doing her in-charge thing, her favorite routine, but now the old lady has lost it and grown frantic. She presses a hand to her forehead, like it will hold in her brain.
“I am pleading with you to act like an adult, Dita. To listen to me.”
Dita tenderly touches her cheek and tells Mrs. Gianis to fuck herself.
“You cannot marry Cass. Or, God forbid, have his child.”
“‘God forbid’? Is that this old crap? The Gianises against the Kronons? You and your feuds. My father always says your family are like hillbillies.”
“He never said that.”
“I’ll call him down here.”
“He would not speak about me or my family that way.”
“‘Just a bunch of sheep-fucking hillbillies.’ That’s a quote.”
“Dita, Cassian is your father’ s child.”
“Bullshit.”
Lidia reacts as intensely and unpredictably as before, throwing her hands wide in rage and striking a pane of the French door. The resonant thump of bone against the glass sets off a cascade of remarkable sounds, a shriek from Lidia, and a pop like a muffled gunshot as the window breaks, followed by the wind-chime tinkling of the shards showering onto the concrete balcony outside. Lidia is looking down in amazement as blood bubbles from the back of her wrist. That sight, which Dita hates, as well as what Lidia has said-that her father, Captain Wanderdick, fucked her, too-is dizzying to Dita. It seems to unravel the loose knot that holds the different parts of her together. She needs to scream and she does.
“Get out!” Her head is starting to hurt as much as her cheek. “Get the fuck out of here! Or I’m calling the police.”
Crazed and overwrought, Lidia moves one way, then the other, dashes to the bathroom and reappears with her arm wrapped in a towel. She starts to speak, but Dita grabs the phone beside her to dial the cops.
Crying fiercely, Mrs. Gianis struggles with the door. A little star of blood has already reached the outer layer of the towel swaddling Lidia’s forearm. Finally Dita tells her to turn the key.
Once Dita hears the front door slam, she dials the phone in her hand. It keeps ringing until she gets Cass’s answering machine, on which she leaves a message.
“You better get your ass over here. Your fucking mother just beat the crap out of me, and I’m totally going to call the police.” Dita is astonished to find herself crying, perhaps only over the indignity. One thing is for sure- she is done with Cass and his lunatic family. She touches the back of her head. The fucking bump is starting to swell.
28
Just When He Thought It Couldn’t Get Any Worse: Gianises Split
The office of state senate majority leader Paul Gianis (D-Grayson), 50, who last month failed to qualify for yesterday’s runoff election to become Kindle County’s chief executive, announced late Tuesday that the senator and his wife of nearly 25 years, Dr. Sofia Michalis, had agreed to divorce. Dr. Michalis, 49, who heads the Reconstructive Surgery Department at University Hospital, plans to marry the senator’s identical twin brother, Cass. Cass Gianis was released from the penitentiary on January 30, after completing a 25-year sentence for the 1982 murder of his girlfriend, Dita Kronon.
It has already been a turbulent period for Senator Gianis. He was the initial favorite in the mayoral race and led by as much as 20 points in some early polls. His slide followed an intense negative advertising campaign funded by the real estate mogul Hal Kronon, CEO of ZP Properties, headquartered in Center City. Kronon alleged that Senator Gianis also had a hand in the murder of Dita Kronon, Hal Kronon’s sister, charges Gianis furiously denied. Days before the April election Kronon pulled his advertising off the air without explanation, but the change came too late for Gianis, who missed the runoff by about 3,000 votes. Following his loss, Gianis endorsed yesterday’s winner, North End councilman Willie Dixon.
Disclosure of the Gianises’ impending divorce seems to have been timed in the hopes it would be lost amid election coverage, but the news became the subject of comment, much of it humorous, across the country, where the effect of Hal Kronon’s ads on Gianis’s campaign has already attracted substantial attention. The
“At least Paul has a chance to retire his campaign debt now,” Weisman wrote. “Who wouldn’t buy a ticket to that Thanksgiving dinner?”
On the sofa in his sun-room, Tim read the
“I was just going to pick up the phone,” she said. “Hal’s already airborne, asking if this could have anything to do with Dita’s murder.”
“I can’t see how. Can you?” Tim had never told Evon he suspected Sofia had sewed Lidia’s wounds the night of the murder. There was no way to prove it. And his loyalty to Sofia made him reluctant to see her put through Hal’s wringer.
“Do you have the time to nose around a little? Just to be sure. It’ll keep Hal off my back.”
“Hell yeah. I admit the whole thing eats at me.”
With all the unfinished business in life, all the crimes where ancillary questions went unresolved, it surprised him that he remained preoccupied by the killing of Dita Kronon and the many pieces that didn’t quite fit. He had thought for a quarter of a century that Cass Gianis committed the murder, and perhaps he had. But for Tim the case had been safely filed under “Jobs Done Right.” At eighty-one, it was unsettling to see your supposed accomplishments unravel, since it left you to wonder how many more would come apart over time.
“Hal’s still pissed that Paul wouldn’t tell him the story,” Evon said.
“Guy spends two years running for mayor,” Tim answered, “and then won’t recite a little piece of ancient history to get himself a better shot at the job? Whatever tale he has to tell has gotta be worse than what people were already thinking. Or at least as bad.”
