“Do you like to read?”
“Lots, mhm. I do. You?”
“I do, but I read more when I was younger. Work and all that. My family always called me the little bookworm. Nonna approved, said a well-read man was a benefit to society. But my father…” It’s hard to keep the bitterness out of my tone when I talk about him.
“Let me guess,” she says. “Thought there were better uses of your time than in the pages of a book, right?”
“Yep.”
Her voice lowers. “Did he… get angry at you for it?”
I huff out a cold laugh. “My father got angry if you peed too loud in the toilet on the third floor of The Castle when he was in Tuscany.”
“Oh, ugh,” she says with a grimace. “Sounds familiar, though. My father once said I chewed too loud, and from then on I was banished to eat my meals in my bedroom with my nanny or tutor.”
“Jesus.”
She fiddles with a little silver ring on her finger, spinning it from side to side. It glints in the overhead light.
“For the record, you don’t chew loudly.”
“Well. Give me time,” she says with a wink.
“Your turn.”
“Oooh, I get a turn.” She wriggles in her chair when the flight attendant gives us a five minute warning. “What’s the best movie you ever watched?”
“Saving Private Ryan.”
“Yikes, Tavi, you don’t play around, do you?”
I shake my head. “Nope. Yours?”
“You have to promise me you won’t laugh.”
“I will make no such promises.”
She’s adorable when she frowns. “Alright, fine. My all-time, number one favorite movie was the live-action Beauty and the Beast.”
I don’t laugh at all. “That was an excellent movie.”
“Wait, what? You watched it?”
“I did. Marialena begged me to go on opening day. I mean, it wasn’t up there with my favorite top ten or even top fifty, but might be the top hundred.”
“No way!”
“Way.”
“Wow. You’re just full of surprises, Ottavio.” I like that she calls me Ottavio sometimes.
Jesus. She has no fucking idea. None. But I have a few weeks to ease her into this.
“Earliest happy childhood memory,” I ask.
“I remember waking up on Christmas morning. We were in America that year, and my father had bought me a pony. An actual, real, bona fide pony.”
“Seriously?”
“Yep.”
“You still have it?”
“No, God, no. We sold it. Poor thing was kept in a small paddock but I was never allowed to actually ride her. I barely petted her. She was happy as a clam when I went to go see her, but my father was afraid that I’d fall off.”
“What’s the purpose of a pony if you don’t get to actually do anything but pet her?” Why would someone do that to a kid?
“Good question,” she says, unable to hide the note of bitterness in her voice. “I found out the answer when we had our next party and he bragged about giving his daughter everything, including the pony she wanted.”
“Good thing your father’s dead,” I mutter.
She snorts. “Why do you say that?”
“Because I’d have to beat the shit out of him.”
“It shouldn’t make me happy to hear that, but I have to admit it does.” Another dip in the plane and she squeals and squeezes her eyes shut, but this one’s only a brief one. It isn’t until we’re steady again I realize my hand’s atop hers, steadying her.
I like the warm feel of her fingers beneath mine.
“Thanks,” she whispers. I nod. “Your turn. Favorite Christmas present.”
“First Ka-Bar.”
She whistles. “Wow, isn’t that like the most dangerous knife you can own?”
I nod. “Well, I wouldn’t say the most, but it’s up there. Damn good fighting knife but useful as a utility knife too. I whittled with it until…” Nah. I won’t tell her that.
“Until what?”
“You don’t need to know.”
“Nothing I haven’t heard or seen before, Tavi. Why start hiding things now?”
She’s right. The plane dips a bit. I’ll distract her until we land.
“Until I had to question a guy who betrayed us.” I’ll never forget the look of terror in his eyes or the way he begged me to leave his wife and kids alone.
“Ahh. So you had to torture him with the knife?” She winces a little but otherwise seems unaffected.
“Yeah.”
I cut his fingers, one by one, and watched him bleed. I woke for months after that, imagining my own fingers were scarred and bloody. I’d flex them in the darkened room, until Romeo caught me doing it one night when we were traveling. He made me tell him what tortured me in my sleep. Just telling him somehow made it better. I hadn’t thought about that first incident—hazing, I guess you could even call it—until now.
“So if you didn’t like what he made you do with it, why’d you like having it so much?”
“Why do I like having it? Never got rid of it,” I tell her. I run my thumb along the top of her hand. I shrug. “I guess every one of us has a rite of passage, don’t we? For a woman or a man. Something that brings us over the threshold of childhood to adulthood, don’t we?”
“Yeah,” she says with a nod, but doesn’t offer me hers.
“For me, that was crossing over. And I was ready to be rid of my childhood.”
She doesn’t ask me why. She likely doesn’t have to. We both know why.
Children like us don’t get an actual childhood with friends and family and carefree times. Yeah, we play like anyone, but the overhanging expectations, the loss of childhood innocence, the knowledge that we’re born into mafia life and we’ll never escape, impact all of us in one way or another. Some guys remember their first date, some remember when they got their first car, their first job, or lost their virginity. It isn’t like that for us.
“I want something better for our children, Tavi,” she says softly, almost meditatively. That she’s really thinking about having children with me means something. I wasn’t sure she really accepted that.
“Better?” I laugh bitterly. “What’s better than knowing you can walk in a room and have whatever you want? That people fear you? That you’ll have whatever house you want, whatever car you want?”
“Autonomy?” she says softly. “Freedom? Peace?”
We begin our descent.
“Yeah.”
I don’t offer much more than that. I don’t know what else to say.
Our kids will be born into mafia life, just like we were. If I have a son, he’ll inherit the keys to the kingdom one day. And if I have a daughter… I look at Elise and close the door on that train of thought.
“Did you go to college?” I ask, changing the subject.
“A little, but it was boring so I dropped out,” she says with a shrug. “You?”
“Got an offer from Harvard but didn’t accept.”
She tips her head to the side curiously. “Wait. Wait. You could’ve gone to Harvard? So you’re smarter than I thought.”