The entire back of the house is now a complicated ballet of dishes and elbows performed to the rhythm of two languages shouted between two kitchens.
The kitchen dance always makes me think of home—Napoli—and my mother. If she were here, she’d be gossiping with family and neighbors, flour up to her elbows. Rosetta would refill the wine and sneak treats for me. Everyone so happy and so alive.
Envisioning them with me still, as if they were part of the chaos brewing alongside the handmade cabinets and stocked pantry, is my favorite part of cooking. And days like today, with the whole family participating, it’s easy to forget two women are missing.
In this moment—covered in flour and shining with sweat—maybe I am my mother and Tina is my sister, and we can all pretend their spirits aren’t just with us, but a part of us. It’s not so hollow in my chest anymore. That phantom ache that loves to assault me when I least expect it has disappeared into the ether. I am one with these old wooden floors and the voices that chide and tease with nothing but love.
The beach is nice, and the boys are pretty, but this is my happy place.
I’ve all but forgotten the look on Zio’s face when I came downstairs. In the heat of the afternoon, the pity has slid from everyone’s faces. The long looks have ceased. All anyone can remember is the words to Umberto Tozzi’s “Ti Amo” and that funny thing you said ten years ago when you were mad. Get the olives. Check the bread.
At exactly five o’clock, the doorbell rings.
The entire house goes silent.
I don’t notice it at first. I’m too busy slicing thin shards of basil to notice everything around me has gone quiet, but it creeps, heavy, and I’m soon as stoic as the others. Everything I’ve managed to forget bangs down the door between what’s on my mind and what I choose not to think about. It enters, operatic and full, with a voice that’s impossible to ignore.
“He’s here,” Zia Donna whispers.
Everyone flocks to get a glimpse of the man who has brought our lively kitchen to a grinding halt, but—as if there’s an invisible barrier—none of us step into the hall. My aunts whisper like chatty chickens, speaking Italian too fast for me to understand. Tina squeezes between several pairs of legs. Elettra grips my arm to pull herself higher onto her tiptoes.
Zia pulls me back, hard. When I look at her, she’s looking at Elettra.
“I’m sorry, Violetta.” Her voice is barely above a whisper. “I’m so sorry, my sweet Violetta.”
“It’s okay, Zia.” I squeeze her hand with a tight smile. “You didn’t hurt me.”
She’s not the crazy aunt who leaves scratches and calls her daughter—well, niece—a street whore as we all witnessed with Zia Donna. The event must have shaken Zia more than usual for her to apologize for just grabbing my arm.
The things this man, this supposed king, is doing to our house are starting to piss me off.
I drop Zia’s hand and peer over Elettra’s head. Santino and four other men are in our hallway, greeting Zio and three men. They are each dressed in various shades of darkness, all somber and serious.
Santino, though, towers above them. Hulking, tall, somehow dazzling in the light of the late afternoon despite all the funeral colors. He’s just as stunning as the day he pinned my ghost to the hallway floor. Just as serpentine. His jaw is tight, locked, a man coiled to strike at any moment. Venomous. Gorgeous.
His handshake is even something to behold. His hand engulfs Zio’s like ravioli dough folded over a lump of cheese.
Elettra sighs beneath me, a young girl with an intense and palpable crush. I can practically feel Zia Donna coil up herself, ready to put another series of bandages on her oldest and most yearning daughter, but then Santino looks our way, and she goes rigid.
His eyes pinpoint everyone in the doorway, hammer them in place. Surveying, inspecting maybe? Memorizing those who dare to spy on him? Even little Tina goes still.
Finally, his gaze reaches mine, just for a moment, but in that very moment, my soul shakes free from my body. I can’t breathe, think, move. This, I decide, is why they call him the king. He exudes power from across entire rooms, entire houses. A mere shift of his gaze has rendered me marble. I am again a young girl, pinned against my will and very much in accordance with my fledgling desires. Everything fades away in that brief moment, and it’s just him and me, trapped in a long hallway.
Zio leads them into the dining room, Italian flowing like river rapids between them, breaking the curse binding my body. Breathing becomes taxing, like my lungs are relearning how to function once again. Like everything was fine marble, chiseled and perfected, and then God blew life my way, leaving me to fumble through the very actions everyone else seems so capable of doing.
Breathe, stupid girl. Breathe.
For the first time, I do the math in my own head. Santino brought five men, Zio brought three. In the kitchen, there are six of us. The dining room seats twelve. The women will be relegated to the kitchen while the men usher themselves into the dining room.
It is a meeting, not of the families, but of the families.
A small tremble creeps down my spine. Earlier, Elettra mentioned the capos. About her brother keeping her safe. Protecting her. Then in walks Re Santino with his crew and Zio standing by with his.
We just made a week’s worth of pasta and bread, with Zia Donna popping the corks on several bottles of basement-fermented red.
There’s no room for the women. This evening is about the men. Dangerous men. What was it Zia told me only yesterday about the different sides of life? “If you’re lucky, you’ll have a man to deal with the cruel one.” If I’ve learned anything from my perch on the landing above the stairs over the years, it’s that talks with men never end in good news.
“Violetta.” Zia’s all business now. Any signs of being shaken are long gone. Zio may be the one to deal with the cruel side of the world, but I’d put money on Zia taking down just as many terrible people as my uncle. “Take the bread baskets to the dining room while Nana Angelina and I get the antipasti.”
She hands me our best bread baskets. Zia Donna finishes polishing the silver trays. We don’t bring out the silver much anymore.
My aunt and uncle are probably more than a little old-fashioned, and very traditional. Moving away from the old country only encouraged their behavior, rather than ease it up, as if they were terrified to forget Napoli. My American friends would never understand our home life or their behavior, and I never bothered introducing the two worlds because explaining it would be fruitless.
But this? This was positively backward. I couldn’t even count on one hand the number of dinners served in this house where the women were relegated to the kitchen as servants to the men. Zia isn’t the kind of woman who sits back and serves the opposite sex. Not even when she’s worried about the cruel parts of the world.
What in the ever-loving fuck is going on?
If I’m to be a mere bread carrier, then I’m going to do some spying. Between the piteous looks and this baffling display, I don’t trust what’s happening in my home, and that’s a terrifying place to be.
In the dining room, thick with the scent of man, cigar, and too much cologne, Santino is at the head of the table, not Zio. How fitting for a king.
The thrill is mostly gone, leaving instead a lump of fear stuck in my throat. What man thinks he can sit at the head of another man’s table in this other man’s own home? What does a man do, exactly, to be revered as such? I don’t think I want to know.
Their conversation is strictly in Italian. I linger, placing the baskets just so, and carefully moving around their large feet, so I can eavesdrop. Figure out what exactly is going on with these soberly dressed men. In all these years, I’ve forgotten how to speak our mother language, much to Zia’s dismay, but I can understand enough to get what’s going on.
One of them is flying back to Italy for a christening. Someone else’s idiot brother-in-law nearly chopped off his thumb while using hedge clippers. There are jokes about the kids left at home. The burden of taxes.
The idiots in the FBI. A younger man with a huge nose and thick eyebrows brings up his mantenuta—a woman who isn’t your wife, but who’s expensive nonetheless—joking about her putting him into such a debt he’s going to have to give Lucinda to American Express. They all laugh, except my uncle and the king, who puts his wineglass down so I can fill it.
“Enough,” Santino says. He’s not even loud or sharp, but the laughter dies as if it’s been shot.
As I lean over Santino, pouring his wine, I can feel his eyes on me.
I try to keep my body as far away from his as possible, but our skin is practically magnetized. I can’t breathe.
“Grazie.” The word rolls from his lips like thunder from a cloud.
My nipples harden and press against my blouse, tingles explode across my skin. It’s the volcano choosing another day to erupt yet promising to explode for him and only him—when and only when he chooses.
I hurry back to the kitchen—my skin burning in shame and lust.
“Well?” Elettra grabs my arm after clearing another round of dishes. “What are they saying?”
“Boring things.” I shrug, secretly thrilled to be playing informant, but also disappointed there was nothing more exciting to relay. “Family chatter that doesn’t matter. Someone almost lost their daughter’s wedding savings playing cards. That sort of thing.”
Elettra pouts. “I like it when they talk about exciting things. We never get to be involved. But one day I want to be like my brother, in the thick of it all…”
“You do not,” Zia Donna snaps. She’s more tempered than earlier, but there is still venom in that stare. “Get the espresso cups. Go.”
“Can’t I just go out there once?” Elettra pleads. “I’ve been doing all the work, too. Let me see them, just once, Ma?”
“Here.” Zia thrusts a second bottle of sambuca into her hands and passes me the coffee pot. “Go get those brazen men their coffee.”
The way she says “men” forces her entire face to curl up, like a soured lemon.
Conversations in the dining room prove to Elettra that there’s no excitement here. No danger. Just boring people talking about boring things. An Italian circus, just for them to joke about minutiae. I try to catch Elettra’s gaze to tell her, “I told you so,” but then a single word from the man at the head of the table stops me dead.
“Violetta.”
Everything stops. Zia and Elettra stop pouring as if his voice turned them into statues. I’m at the opposite end of the table from Santino, pot of coffee frozen mid-air, but the way he stares at me, across so many other men, makes me feel naked, exposed. Vulnerable as a gazelle too young to run with the herd when the lion begins his chase.
The way they all look tells me my name wasn’t simply mentioned in passing. It was a command to pay attention. A command to answer. A command that came straight from the king.
“Yes?” The word barely unsticks from my throat.
“You will take a walk with me.”
“Capo,” Zio interjects, tilting his head as if he’s starting an argument he can’t afford to lose. “I was thinking—”
“Hush, Guglielmo.” Santino stands, silencing the entire room with a single movement. How tall is this king? Six-two? Three? A thousand feet, scraping the night sky as he comes to me?
“I could sell the business.” Zio presses on. “Maybe some property I’ve kept. This house.”
If I wasn’t confused before, I am now.
As far as I know, Zio’s business runs in the black. He’s not rich, but I never thought he’d be in so much debt he’d have to trade his property.
My Z’s don’t have children of their own, so all the earlier talk of daughters paying debts was irrelevant, but now Zio’s trying to throw real estate at Re Santino and this all makes no sense.
Santino opens his gilded fist and holds his hand out to me.
My muscles collapse, and this man my body cannot ignore pins me upright with nothing more than his gaze. My body is torn between fight and flight, pleasure and pain, fear and thrill. A heavy veil of danger floats above, covering some greater truth, and I’m not sure if I want to see behind it.
One thing is for sure.
There’s a debt owed him, and I have no idea how it’s going to be repaid.
“Come, Violetta,” he says. “Walk with me.”
As if in a trance, I let the lion lure me from my aunt and uncle’s house.