As I’m coming in the door after school the next day, the home phone rings. It’s usually for me or Anthony. Or it’s Aunt Mary calling to go to the mall with my mom. But we always check caller ID before we answer. Now it’s ringing and no one is home and I’m checking and it’s New York 1, the all-day news channel calling, which scares me because we’re not exactly listed in the phone book, so how the hell did they get our number?
“Romano funeral home,” I say.
There’s a pause. “Excuse me, I was trying to reach…” The voice drops off.
“Sorry, wrong number.” I hang up and it rings again. I go through the same charade, but they’re on to me.
Silence.
Are they putting a tracer on the call? A few minutes later there’s another call. CNN now. I freak and call my dad.
“We’ve had two calls from the news.”
“On the home number?”
“Yes. Daddy, are you okay?”
Ten-second pause.
“Don’t worry, Gia,” he says, his calm, blanket answer to everything, which makes me worry more
“It’s nothing, nothing. You know how they chase me.”
“But I don’t want them to.”
“Gia, I’ll see you later, don’t worry so much.”
There’s a knock on the door a few minutes later. My mom isn’t home because she’s at the church helping them get ready for the women’s bingo lasagna luncheon. Do I answer it? If I don’t, maybe they’ll break in. I go upstairs and look out my bedroom window. A cop car. Now a finger is glued to the door bell.
I open the door. Two cops, one with his hand resting lightly on the top of his gun.
“What do you want?”
“We’re looking for your dad.”
“He’s not home.”
“Where is he?”
“You know more about where he is than I do.”
Cop one turns and looks at cop two.
“Let’s go,” he says.
They give me one more lingering look and then get into their car and drive away.
I was ten when I found out about my dad. It was something my parents always worked hard to hide from me, to keep my innocent world intact and at arm’s length from reality, at least their reality.
I remember everything about that day. It was snowing lightly in the late afternoon. I had been up in my room watching the snowflakes hit the windows and then slide down in slow moving, slushy drips. The room was cold and I remember putting a sweater on Beppo, my teddy bear, to keep him warm even though I was old enough to know that was silly. My mom was making minestrone and the whole house smelled good from the onions and garlic that she browned in olive oil in the giant soup kettle.
When important things happen in your life, your brain has a way of archiving them so later on when you want to go over them again the memories are preserved, like a prom corsage pressed between the pages of a diary.
When I was little, I thought my dad was in construction or in the restaurant business. We would be in the car and my mom or dad would point out office towers or apartment buildings.
“See, Gia,” they’d say, “that’s daddy’s building.”
I thought he built the buildings. I thought he made them himself, putting one brick on top of another, the way Anthony and I built our mansion houses with red, blue, and yellow Legos.
Later on I thought my dad was in the carting business even though I didn’t even know what carting was. Then I found out and knew they used the word carting because it sounded fancier than garbage. Well, he was in the garbage business, but not the way I thought. He was in other businesses too, like restaurants, bars, dry cleaners, used car business, casinos, and places outside the city too that I didn’t even know about.
It was something that Anthony said to a friend of his one day about my dad being a boss. I always thought well, yes, he was the boss, the boss of his company, because I didn’t know what a boss was. But the day someone got shot down on the street in midtown and the papers reported it with my dad’s picture on their front pages, it all fell into place.
That, plus the way I began to get treated.
For the first time I felt this divide: people were either keeping their distance or just the opposite, trying hard to be my friend, inviting me places where I didn’t fit in. I wasn’t just me anymore after that. I was a part of something bigger and I felt split down the middle. There was the Gia I was to myself, my family, and my friends, and the one that everyone else saw and either wanted to be close to or steer clear of, like I had a contagious disease.
When I finally understood about my dad, it hurt just to think of it.
“Does dad kill people?” I once asked Anthony. He looked at me, annoyed.
“No,” he said, leaving it at that.
“Does he tell other people to kill people?”
“Do your damn homework, Gia,” he said, turning back to the TV.
I had a hard time believing all that. I knew what my dad was really like so how could that be true? No one cared about us more than him. He was always there for me and Anthony, bringing us presents and taking us out for fancy dinners, the circus, and Broadway musicals. Actors came out to meet him when they knew he was in the audience.
Whenever we needed advice, he always had the answers. And if we got sick and stayed home from school, he’d sit by our beds and tell us stories.
His kind side went beyond just our family. He helped everybody in the neighborhood who needed help too. He even paid the vet bills for a neighbor when his three-month old golden lab puppy nearly died after eating something in the street. The neighbor renamed the puppy after my dad, and every time the man walked the dog past our house, he would stop and cross himself.
My dad gave to everybody, except when I was really small and we didn’t have money. That was when he told us that the love we had in our family was more important than anything money could buy and that it didn’t matter if we couldn’t put presents under the Christmas tree as long as we woke up together on Christmas morning.
I remember coming home from school that snowy afternoon and turning on the TV. They were doing a report about a crime and the next thing I saw was the screen filled with my dad’s face. I shut the TV off because I knew he would get mad if he saw me watching.
He was working at home in his office that day so I decided to go ask him because I had to know. I opened the door and walked in without knocking first. The office walls are paneled in dark wood, and both windows are covered with heavy wine colored velvet drapes, always drawn. I loved the way it looked from the moment he had it decorated. It reminded me of a cave. I felt safe there. Even now, my dad’s office is my favorite part of our house, although I don’t go there much since it’s mostly off-limits. I remember staring at the vase of fresh roses on the table near the window.
He has a mahogany desk with a gold letter holder where he keeps bills. Next to it is a tall lamp with a wine colored base and gold handles that look like ears that stick out too far. On top of it is a shade with tiny pleats. I remember how the room smelled, like lemony furniture polish. I sat in the red velvet armchair with the lace doily over the footstool and stared at him, waiting. He was reading the newspaper and finally looked up.
“Gia, what’s the matter?”
I didn’t know how to answer. I wasn’t sure what the matter was.
“Those things,” I said, “that they say about you…on the TV…Are they right?”
“What things?” he asked, lifting his chin slightly.
“That you’re the one behind it when people get killed,” I said, so low I didn’t think he could hear me. Our eyes met across the room. I don’t think either of us blinked.
His eyes darkened. “Don’t listen to the TV. They’re trying to make headlines to be popular. Just remember the only important thing is that I love you. That’s all that matters here.”
“But is it true?” I said, refusing to look away.
“Sometimes things happen, Gia,” he said, looking down at the gold rings on his fingers and at his nails, always perfectly covered with clear polish. “People don’t always act the way they’re supposed to. They cross you.” He looked back up at me. “If you’re running a business you have to trust the people around you, like we trust each other, right?”
I nodded.
“So we have to do the right thing when other people don’t do the right thing. If you’re the boss, you have to act like the boss.”
I must have looked confused because he shook his head and smiled. “It’s complicated,” he said, “and I don’t want you to worry about it. You’re safe here, that’s all you have to know.”
I swallowed hard and got up to leave.
“Come, come here,” he said, motioning to me. I walked over to him and he hugged me, kissing me on the top of the head again and again, as if he was trying to fill my head with his love instead of the thoughts I came in with.
“Who loves you more than anyone else in the whole world?”
That was our game, the game we had played since I was a two-year-old. He asked me that question again and again, each time as if he had never asked it before. Every time he did I was back to being two again, looking up at my dad as if he were this giant, the most perfect man in the whole world.
“You do,” I said, and he broke into a smile the way he always did.
“That’s right. Now go and see if you can help your mother with dinner. She’s making chicken cacciatore,” he said. “You love that, no?”
I nodded. He patted me on the back and I walked toward the door. I turned to look at him one last time, expecting to see him already looking down, reading his paper again, but he wasn’t. His face was darker, his eyes hooded, and he was still watching me.
I never asked him again.