“Who are all these people?” Tara asked as we stepped into the Don’s large living room with its high ceilings and exposed wooden beams. Massive windows overlooked an expansive back yard with a pool and some relatively absurdly sculpted bushes and hedges.
“Now you’re talking to me?” I asked, grinning a little as she leaned closer to me.
“Don’t be a dick.” She sipped her drink. “Come on. Tell me.”
I nodded at a group of men sitting near the fireplace. “Guy at the end is a state senator. Guy next to him owns seven restaurants. The woman across from them is some high-powered lawyer, I forget her name. We passed some Capos, a couple important soldiers, the underboss, Roy, and some other random guys that work around the Valentino family orbit.”
She chewed on her lip. “So it’s basically a who’s who of organized crime,” she said.
“Exactly. And politicians, which I guess isn’t so different.”
She smiled a bit at my admittedly dumb joke. “How open is it?” she asked. “The crime part, I mean. Does everyone know?”
“They know,” I said, and steered her toward the back door. “Maybe not in detail. Maybe some of them don’t want to know it all. There are doctors back there, doctors we pay to help take bullets from our guys, and they don’t ask questions. We’ve got union guys that employ some of our soldiers, and guys that work in the police department—”
“Cops?” she asked, frowning.
“Sure, and sergeants, and captains.” I opened the sliding door and helped her step out onto the porch, then closed it behind me. “You don’t really realize how embedded the whole underworld is into the levels of power, do you?”
“I never thought about it,” she said. “I’m a waitress. Or I guess I was a waitress.”
“Money runs this place,” I said as we drifted over toward the pool. It was quiet and there weren’t many people outside. The water rippled in the wind and lights from the bottom made it glow a strange, eerie blue. She finished her drink and left it on a high table as we wandered deeper into the garden. “Where there’s money, power follows.”
“So politicians, doctors, unions, they all want money, and the Valentino family has it,” she said.
“Exactly.” I put my hand on her lower back, and she didn’t pull away, but she did stop and face me.
“Is this really your world?” she asked, staring into my eyes, and I felt like she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen before. In that garden, surrounded by manicured bushes and blooms of flowers, she was gorgeous and luscious, and all I wanted to do was stay close her.
“Not exactly,” I said softly. “I do the dirty work. I’m only a part of all this because the Don wants me to be. I grew up with him, more or less.”
“I don’t understand that,” she said, shaking her head. “He adopted you?”
“Basically,” I said, and hesitated. “My mother died. Then my father took off. And I had nowhere else to go. That’s when I met Dean, and the Don, and they put me up for a while. The Don mentored me, gave me a room to stay in. Worked me like a fucking dog around here, but it was a better life than I had before.”
“What happened to her?” she asked. “Your mom, I mean.”
I looked away, back toward the pool. I could see people inside, gathering in groups, wearing their black fancy clothing and laughing, all that power concentrated in one single room, and I thought of breaking through that barrier, of joining that world, but knew it would never happen.
They all knew what I was, and knew I’d never be more.
“Cancer,” I said. “Took her fast. Doctors found it too late. One day she was here, and the next she was gone.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s okay. It was a long time ago. Things weren’t easy for her before that, and sometimes I wonder if it was better, the way it happened.” I stopped and felt the old anger bubble beneath the surface.
“She was better off dead?” Tara asked.
“I don’t talk about this,” I said, and closed my eyes for a second. I pictured my mother, the last time I saw her, wasted away in a hospital bed, her red hair gone stringy and white, her cheeks sunken, her light blue eyes sparkling in the overhead light of the hospital as she squeezed my hands and told me that she loved me more than anything in the world, that she’d miss me and wanted me to get away from my father, get away from that old life. She wanted more for me, and maybe I found some of that, but not quite.
“It’s okay,” Tara said. “You don’t have to.”
“No.” I faced her and took her hands in mine. “You need to know. You deserve to understand.”
“Understand what?” She shook her head, staring into my eyes, and I touched her cheek gently.
“My mother was a whore,” I said softly.
She recoiled back. “What?”
“She was a sex worker,” I said. “She was a prostitute.”
Tara put her hands to her mouth, and I saw her make all the necessary connections.
I rarely talked about my mother, because I was ashamed of the man I’d become, not because I was ashamed of what she did for a living. I didn’t blame her for that—I blamed my father, that piece of shit. He was her pimp and owned her from the day I was born until the day she died.
“That’s why you hate them,” Tara said.
