“You know she’s struggling.” I set dinner on the counter pivot to face my brother. “You still worried?”
Gian is good at hiding his feelings around everyone but me. We have a sort of understanding of each other that no one else can match. He’s older by exactly eighteen months and those are the only months we’ve been apart. There are no secrets between the two of us. I can tell when he’s pissed, sick, moody. We’ve opened all of our businesses together. He’s my closest friend.
I can sense the anxiety radiating from him. Anyone else would look at him and only see the calm and collected made man he presents himself to be. But me? I know that underneath that facade was a brother and a son worried for his family.
“Yeah,” he scrubbed a hand over his face. Unlike mine, that has too much stubble, Gian’s face is clean-shaven. “It’s been six months.” his face is pained. “And she’s still not herself.”
“I know.”
“I don’t know how to help her.” Gian flings his arms out in desperation.
“I know.” I sink back against the counter. “She has to get through it on her own. The grief counselor-”
Gian shoots me a look. “Fuck the grief counselor.”
The grief counselor was a last ditch effort we made to help Gemma. We hired a woman who specialized in dealing with death and paid her handsomely to keep quiet. Three sessions with Gemma and no success other than driving us crazy with her five stages of grief and motivational sayings. We didn’t even need a conversation to know that the woman needed to go. We fired her and left Gemma to her quiet crying over Ben and Jerry’s instead.
I stifle a laugh. “Yeah she sucked, but I don’t think forcing her to be happy is going to work either.”
“I’m not forcing her to be happy. I just want her to take a damn shower!”
“I know, but she has to do it on her own.”
Gemma is 23 years old, a grown woman with a college degree. She doesn’t need her two big brothers hovering over her every move. Though nothing could stop us from protecting her.
“Yeah, yeah.” He groans.
“I’ll go talk to her while you set up for dinner, yeah?” I clap him on the shoulder as I pass.
“It’s me.” I announce knocking on Gemma’s door before opening it. There’s little privacy in this house.
Her room is still painted a girly shade of pink she picked out when she was twelve. She has posters on the wall of boy bands and she sleeps in a white four-post bed. It’s still every bit of the teenage haven she left when she went to college. The plan had been for her to look for her own apartment after she graduated, but after Ma’s death she was too depressed to even google apartments.
I had tried to drag her out to look at some, but she had no interest, and part of me didn’t want to leave dad alone either. So I stopped pushing her and let her stay in this teenage dream room instead.
Gemma is curled under a fleece blanket in the middle of the queen bed. “What are you doing?” I ask, plopping down on the edge of the white comforter.
She unwraps herself just enough to look at me. “Nothing.”
“I see that.” I smile easily. “I brought dinner.”
“I’m tired, Gio.”
“I know.” I sigh. “Just come eat with us and then you can come right back up here.”
“Fine,” she groans, giving into me. “And then you leave me alone?”
I extend my pinky, “Pinky swear.”
She throws off the fleece blanket and pulls herself out of bed. She’s wearing leggings and a T-shirt so large it reaches her knees, though that isn’t hard to do with her small stature.
“What’d you get?” she asks, padding on bare feet out of her room.
Gian already has plates laid out filled with pasta and chicken when we reach the table. “Finally, she appears!” dad taunts when he sees Gemma up and out of bed.
Gemma gives him a half-hearted smile. The joke since we were kids is that Gemma is his favorite, though I’m not sure it’s a joke. She’s the baby and the only girl, of course, she was a daddy’s girl. Dad was easy on her and non-judgemental, which encouraged her to share with him. They had coffee every Sunday morning, even when she was in college. He’d drive to Brown and take her out to their regular cafe. Neither Gian or I had a standing coffee date with dad.
“How’s work, dad?” Gian asked as we settle at the table. Giuseppe owns his own law firm, though he mostly handles famiglia related cases. Occasionally something else would stumble across his desk.
He makes an annoyed sound under his breath. “Petty cases, drug dealers, that sort. Nothing big, unfortunately.” He pushes a fork full of pasta into his mouth. “I need a big case, I’m bored.”
The remark makes me laugh. Giuseppe lives for the drama of a court case. That’s where he’s in his element. He has a long history of making problems disappear. It was good for la Famiglia and it was really good for his wallet. The former boss paid Giuseppe handsomely to make their problems go away, and Gian wasn’t about to be the exception if he got the position.
It wasn’t even that he needed the money, at this point he had more than he could ever spend, it was all about the thrill for him.
“Gem’s gonna start in the office on Monday,” he adds.
‘What?” Gian nearly spat his food.
“Begrudgingly,” Gemma added.
“I need some help and she’s not doing anything.” Giuseppe winked. It was true, the only thing Gemma had been doing since graduating college six months earlier was sleeping or clubbing. She had no
