I hate Lolita. Never trusted her, and my stomach churns at the thought of Reese endeavoring to protect Lolita.
Lolita gives a seedy sigh, disinterested in her daughter’s feelings. “While on the beat, Milo started getting kickbacks from petty criminals. Then over the next six years, he stole kilos upon kilos of cocaine from the evidence locker. Sold some shit, snorted some shit. And he handed over intel to his thugs, and the Mexican Cartel. Oh, once he made friends with those Juarez motherfuckers, that was the end of him. Doped up every day, but let him tell it, he was a God. I didn’t persuade Milo to become a dirty cop, I told him to get back in his father’s good graces!”
Her eyes sparkled as if the thought of Milo becoming the next Don had been her solitary goal.
Instead of speaking, Reese turns toward me, she nudges her head into my neck and she cries.
Salvatore arises from his seat. “Take them all back to Los Angeles.”
I had handed the key to Vinny’s sports car to one of Matteo’s other brothers since he left during Lolita’s story to help his mother gather her things. The flight home was silent. Now we are all on the landing strip, stepping out of Salvatore’s private jet.
It’s now early morning. The sun is worming its way past skyscraper buildings as Reese and I descend first, since her mother sat toward the back of the tiny plane, and my girl couldn’t even look the bitch’s way.
“I’ve been instructed to take the two of you home,” says a man in a driver’s uniform, a cap on top of his head.
“And my m… Lolita, who will take her?” Reese asks.
The driver cocks his head toward another Cadillac.
For the first time, Reese peers over her shoulders. Lolita is a few paces behind us. She accepts her daughter’s gesture as an opening and steps toward us. “Reese, Reese’s Pieces…”
Reese gets into the car and I close the door.
Lolita stops before me. Arms folded beneath her breasts, she pushes them up somewhat. “She’s my daughter, ya know.”
“I’m highly aware.” My jaw sets rigidly.
“Good, and don’t you forget it. Reese wants a family, always has, always will. I’m blood. The babe growing in her belly is blood too. You are not. And just that alone makes you all the more replaceable, Tino.” She spits out my nickname.
I nod slowly. “Replaceable? Yes, that’s probably true when it comes to the image of love. But unfortunately for you, what Reese and I have is real, get what I’m saying? What you’ve had with her father, my father, and a slew of other men, that is not true love.”
“Oh shut the fuck up, kiddo.”
For Reese’s sake, I continue to advise, “I’m a cop, Lolita, I’ve seen some crazy shit. Lust takes a person down to their knees.”
“I don’t mind being taken down to my knees,” she says licking her lips and backing away.
My jaw sets. Fucking Tony, wise up old man.
47
Reese
Lolita didn’t have any regard for me, she just regurgitated the life she forced my father into. While she spoke, I clung to Evan, and I clung to each morsel of a father who’d been taken from me. It all concluded with Sal dismissing the three of us. The powerful man was dejected, his pain palpable.
Why is the bad in each other so easily conjured to memory? Every once in a while, I reminisce on the good in Milo, it bleeds through the nightmares and warms my soul. On the long plane ride to L.A., I ruminated on the past. Though as I aged, the golden boy Salvatore spoke of went extinct. I recall dad, my mom and I traveling up the coast of California in search for the best ice cream. Santa Barbara had the best vanilla ice cream. My father’s favorite was pistachio, and I recall San Mateo had become his favorite place for it. All along our trip, Lolita grumbled about the misty air and how it ruined her hair. My mother, the parasite, never attended my spelling bees without dad. When he was out-of-town, I had nobody in the crowd hooting and hollering and cheering for me. And as far as training goes? Milo sat with me, giving me techniques to remember how to spell the words.
Once again, my mother has whisked away another love from my life, another chance at contentment. The happiness I could have known about the Giuglianos, about my father before her, about my nonna, evaporated the moment Salvatore ordered for us to travel home.
I have this sinking feeling that him determining that I was more like his version of Milo became my mom’s saving grace. The part of him that made me cower and cling to Evan was knowing he had the capability of murdering in a most peculiar way. The long, painful death he’d mapped out for Lolita reflected in his eyes as she spoke.
I just keep going back to the moments before Lolita arrived, and how humbled the Boss was when asking to meet his grandchild? Has Lolita truly taken that away from me, being that Sal released us? He’d transformed from a man eagerly jumping into my life, to a man who opted to set us all aside after all was said and done.
So maybe Lolita has cut ties between him and I, but the man towering before me, he is all mine.
Evan and I stand in the bathroom of his apartment. My ear snuggles against the taut plane of Evan’s chest. The echo
