Father’s Day.
Every year, I say a prayer for my dad over breakfast. I’ve never missed one, even after all these years. Zio encouraged me. He never wanted to take the day away from my actual father. The one who never hurt anyone or did anything, and was murdered in the streets anyway.
The one who sold me into slavery for a truckload of oranges or the rent on his store. Maybe I was worth a few things in the deli, or ten billion lire. Whatever debts he incurred, he pinned to me for the rest of my life.
Today, I hate the holiday. Today, I want to burn it all down.
At dinner that night, I try to put on a happy face and act like this hasn’t bothered me immensely, that it hasn’t kicked up old worries and fears, that I’m not currently drowning in a life I didn’t ask for—no matter the perks. That I’m totally fine with being ripped away from my goals and dreams to be married to this cold, attractive devil who confuses me more as each day passes.
“Something is wrong,” Santino says in a way that it isn’t a question, it’s dinnertime commentary. Spinning my fork in the center of my spoon to spool fettuccine, I don’t like that he knows me well enough to make such statements, or that I have a compulsion to tell him the truth.
“It’s nothing.” I’d helped Celia roll out the pasta and season it with herbs, butter, and a dusting of Romano—just the way I liked it—but it tasted like lead.
“Lies do not become DiLustros.”
I’m a Moretti. Always.
“I don’t remember signing any paperwork to legally change my name.” I’m feeling like a grumpy asshole and I don’t care. “And Liar seems to be your middle name.”
“I have never lied to you,” he says seriously, taking no offense, which makes him even harder to deal with. “I have always told the truth.”
“Whatever.” I drink wine as if I’m an old, miserable wife, not an underage girl.
“Omitted, maybe.” He shoves a coil in his mouth and speaks around it. “But never lied.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway.” I idly spin my fettuccine in my spoon and feel so sorry for myself it’s pathetic.
“Sputa il rospo.”
Spit the toad. An Italian expression my friends wouldn’t understand.
“It’s silly.”
Santino rests his hand on mine and says, “Try me.”
My jaw stops working, but I manage to keep my mouth closed so dinner doesn’t drop out of it—because he’s being not just sincere, not just kind, but accommodating. He’s not demanding answers. He’s opening himself to suggestion and it’s like he’s a different guy.
I don’t trust it. I don’t trust him and I don’t trust myself, so I pull my hand away as I swallow the glue my dinner’s become.
“I don’t know who I am or what I want.” The words topple out, his behavior leaving me totally disarmed. I can’t stop them and I don’t really want to, either. “I was supposed to spend the summer traveling the world, hanging out with my friends, living up the college life.” My fork and spoon are stuck at an obtuse angle over my plate as if Medusa froze them in place. “Instead, I was sold into a marriage and I’m trapped in this house, fearing for my life and my family’s, then I find out my father…my own father was the one who gave me to you, and I hate him so much I can’t even think. I’m supposed to be having fun with my friends. They’ll forget I even exist at this point. I’m stuck here hating you and my parents and my own self. I want to have fun.” I shout the last word as if making it echo will draw it to me. “I don’t want to…do this.”
The silverware with half-rolled fettuccine clatters to the plate. My heart feels like it’s about to crack open and all I can do to not burst into tears in front of him is bite my lip until it hurts, and all I can expect from the guy at the head of the table is a big fat tough shit.
“I know,” I say, unable to look at him. “Che sfortuna.”
Bad luck, kid.
As if its idleness offends me, I pick up my fork and jab my dinner.
Santino snaps his napkin off his lap and places it next to his plate before pushing his chair away from the table.
“Go pack.”
“What?”
“Go pack, little violet. Find all your favorite things.” He stands. “Go.”
Little violet’s going somewhere.
Not Forzetta, which is fine. I can be the little violet as long as he sends me somewhere just a little farther than Staycation Villa.
“I need to know where I’m going.” I skip the duh that sits on the tip of my tongue. “Skiing or swimming…different clothes.”
“It will be hot,” he starts and in the second before the next half of the sentence I imagine beaches and tall Caribbean waves, “where we’re going.”
We.
Where we’re going.
He’s out the door, barking orders in Italian too fast for me to understand.
Well, this is going to be a late honeymoon more than a summer break carouse.
I throw all my new clothes into a suitcase that’s magically appeared left on my bed. His staff is remarkably fast, but they must have been too nervous or respectful to pack underwear, so I uncover the red lingerie Santino got for me the day I tried to escape. When I showed him the red dress, he said it fit me like a paintbrush.
Ti sta a pennello.
If he’s nice, it wouldn’t kill me to be nice back.
I close the lingerie drawer. After a quick race through the bathroom for toiletries, I’m ready to go.
But the top drawer tugs at me, saying open open open me and get the thing!
With a resigned sigh, I slap it open. The red underpants are spread into a smile. I pluck out the sexy underthings and stuff them in my bag. When I close the drawer, I finally feel finished.
By the time I clatter down the stairs with my suitcase smacking behind, Santino is coming down the opposite staircase.
“Where are we going?” I’m like a kid who’s finally getting a pony for her birthday.
“You’re going to ruin the surprise.” He puts his phone in his pocket. “Come.”
He seems so satisfied with my change in behavior, my delight, that I will play along to get to do something even slightly fun. So I don’t ruin the surprise. I let Armando take my suitcase and follow Santino to his limo, so excited I’ll come, sit, heel, and beg like he tells me to.
Traveling with a mafia boss, I quickly learn, is a different set of travel. Forget pushing through the crowds at an airport, being patted down by TSA, cramming into a seat away from the window. We pull up to a gate at a tiny, private terminal, show ID, and drive right onto the tarmac, next to a private jet with lights already blinking against the dark night.
Seriously.
I’m in such a state of awe when I see it, when I climb the stairs, and especially when I get inside, that I can barely speak. Soft leather seats. Warm lighting. Wood paneling. Crystal and brass. It’s less a plane and more a tube-shaped luxury hotel room.
A flight attendant with curly hair that’s half gray, half black shows us our seats. Her name’s Mellie and I love her already. Santino lets me have the window as if he knows that’s my preference.
Once we’re off the ground and steady, Santino asks Mellie for something to eat. She brings cheese on a silver tray and prosecco in sleek crystal flutes.
From across the table, Santino holds up his glass.
“To leaving worry behind us.”
I hold mine up, but snap it back before the clink.
“Where are we going?”
He leans back and tips his glass to his lips, telling me that’s the only thing he’s opening them for without even a word.
Mirroring, I lean back and pour the entire glass down my throat, then put it down.
He laughs, the charming fucker.
Mellie pours me more and I take the next glass more slowly, but I do take it all.
Between the prosecco and the emotional roller coaster of a day, I fall asleep as we break the clouds, curled up under an impossibly soft blanket in a chair that converts into an even more impossibly comfortable bed.
My last waking thought is, “Well, they do call him the king.”
One minute I’m awake, the next is darkness of hard sleep, then suddenly there’s a fog of orange light under my eyelids as my body jolts then rocks.
“Violetta,” Santino murmurs in my ear. “We have arrived. Welcome to Roma.”
Rome? I bolt upright and bump my head into his. He laughs and takes my hand.
“Come. We have much more to travel.”
In the private terminal, Santino greets the men waiting for us on the tarmac and collects a set of keys to a waiting convertible. I have no idea who the men are or how he managed to arrange all this, and I don’t care.
I haven’t been back to Italy in the years since I was taken away, and my life’s blood begins to thrum home home home home.
The men load our bags in the convertible while Santino talks to them. I stay a healthy distance away because, honestly, I don’t trust any of them. The last time I was surrounded by strange men in black suits things went very poorly.
“Come.” Santino only knows this command tonight, it seems, but he looks like an excited puppy as he says it. “We have to drive two more hours.”
I stare at him, feeling jet-lagged under the sun’s glare. Two more hours sitting? Two hours in a car with just Santino?
I hope he’s a good road trip buddy, but can’t picture him playing the license plate game, like I used to with Rosetta and Zia while Zio drove us to the lake.
But Vacation Santino is different than Workday Santino. Or maybe this guy making bad jokes and detouring to pass the Coliseum as if everyone doesn’t know what it looks like isn’t Vacation Santino. Maybe the guy in the aviators colorfully cursing in traffic as he laughs about being on the wrong side of the road is Italy Santino, and the other guy, who drives on the right, is America Santino.
I feel myself slipping further into the deep that is Santino DiLustro.
I feel it happening in real time. It’s terrifying. I miss him being an asshole.
Except I don’t. Because if I could keep this version of him, be it Italy Santino or Vacation Santino, I would for an eternity.
After leaving Rome, Santino puts the top up as we head onto a highway. The rush of the tires under me puts my mind into a pleasant fugue.
Am I happy? Is this me accepting who I am, who I always was?
Or is this what I feel like in the absence of terror?
We pull into a breathtaking house by the sea with sweeping eaves, a tiled roof, and windows surrounded by lush vegetation. I can’t see the ocean very well, but can hear it the second he opens my door, and I’m in utter paradise.
“You approve,” he says as if he’s asking, which as usual…he isn’t. He’s stating a fact with a twinkle in his stupid beautiful eyes.
“You want me to say yes,” I reply, spooning him a question as statement like a bit of his own, sweet medicine. I’m not as confident as he is, but it’s a start.
“You will.”
Before I can come up with an answer, he scoops me up under the knees and shoulders the way he did when he took me out of Loretta’s and—swinging the door open—carries me into this impressive villa, buzzing like a newlywed, and sets me down at the back of the house. It’s surrounded by towering indoor plants and a bank of windows that touch both the floor and ceiling. The ocean sprawls out before us, deep and vast and wine-dark.
“If you insist on your own room”—he gestures behind him—“there are plenty to choose from.”
A shot of heat burns through me and rests in my core. He said it casually, fully expecting me to claim the opposite side of the house from him, and yet I feel like he knew exactly what kind of thoughts entered my head.
Sharing a bed with the king.
Every moment of intimacy we’ve shared flashes through my mind like an old film reel. Pressed against the pool with a kiss. Held down and spanked raw. Bent over the table as he mouths a description of what, when, and how he’s going to take me.
He’d do those things to me.
All I have to do is let him.
He says nothing. I say nothing.
It’s time to put some more space between us so I can think. Time to forget everything that happened on the way here. Time to dig out the Santino-shaped barb buried in my skin. I take my bag and haul it to the opposite side of the house. He gets in front to lead me up the stairs, to a set of double doors and swings them open.
The room is like a spa—carefully luxurious, piled high with books and vibrant green houseplants, the sun pours in and the Mediterranean is just past a line of trees.
I turn to him. He puts the bag down and places his hands in his pockets. He looks pretty pleased with himself.
“Thank you,” I say.
“In Italiano, per favore.”
He’s not really saying please.
“Grat-zee,” I say with a red-blooded, stars-and-stripes American accent that only sounds rude because I know better. “Grazie,” I say properly before he reacts, then add, “ti apprezzo che tu…I think.”
I think I’m saying it right. His laugh tells me I’m not, but he lets it slide.
“I’ll see you downstairs,” he says slowly in Italian, and I nod my understanding.
When he leaves, he closes the double doors behind him, and I’m alone.
Stripping off my travel clothes, I put on a silky soft robe left hanging in the closet and recline on the patio outside my room—one of many patios that stretch across the back of the house. Between the house and the beach sits a yard dotted with white marble statues, a rose garden, and a pool that’s even bigger than the one at home.
Deciding not to think too hard about the word home and what house I associate with it, I stretch out on the rattan chaise lounge and nap in the salty air.
It’s the best nap I’ve ever had, because I awake at night, hungry and thirsty. I pad downstairs in my bare feet to find a tray of dinner, and a handwritten note in Italian.
Little Violet,
I’m out making plans for tomorrow.
Wait up for me.
Santino
Of all the times he’s left me eating alone, this is the only time he’s asked me to wait for him, and I try. I really do. After eating, I sit outside, turn on the news, find it in English, still get bored, turn off the news. I look in the cabinets and thumb through the books. It’s not too long before I go back upstairs, where the Mediterranean Sea lulls me to sleep yet again.