“What do you say we get started?”
~ 4 ~
Giada nodded as her housekeeper finished refilling her guests’ glasses and stepped back. “Thank you, Jonathan.”
With a smile, Jonathan left the room, headed back to the kitchen, no doubt to prepare the next round of ‘light’ snacks.
Deandra Giocali, wife of Tommy’s consigliere, Bruno, watched Jonathan walk away. “Such a shame to waste that beautiful ass on men. Are you sure he’s gay?”
Giada sipped her Passito. “He’s married to a man, so yeah. Pretty sure.”
“C’mon, Deedee—who’s gonna ‘preciate a fine ass better than a gay guy?” Fallon, Tommy’s wife, asked, her tone typically loud and nasal.
When everybody laughed with her, she flung her arms wide, sending white wine flying from her glass, and gave her hips a vulgar jerk. All Giada’s guests laughed dutifully for the don’s wife—they were drunk, too, so they might have legitimately thought the display amusing.
“Oh, sorry, Giada! Sorry!” Fallon made a drunken and totally ineffectual swipe at the spilled wine on Giada’s blush-pink leather sofa and then abandoned the effort to resume drinking.
“It’s okay—it’ll clean. That’s why I serve you lushes white.” She said it with a wry smile, and her guests laughed like it was the best joke they’d heard in ages.
“It’s so good!” Mia Busto enthused. “You always have the best food and wine. I swear I gain five pounds every month on this night alone. I gotta start fasting for pre-game—Fabi’ll kill me if he sees me gaining.”
Several heads nodded, oblivious to the subtext of that remark. Julie Uberti said, “I see what you’re doin’, though—you get us boozy and fat so we never talk about the book, since you never read it!”
Again, her guests laughed, this time, peppering in good-natured jeers about Giada’s habitual neglect of the stated purpose of these evenings.
No, she never read the book club book. She’d been a reader as a child, an avid fan of all kinds of stories, but she hadn’t read a work of fiction in decades. When she had time at all to read anything more than the news online or real estate contracts, she chose histories or treatises on contemporary politics and culture. She had no room in her life for fantasies and fictions.
On the other hand, the women she was hosting lived lives teetering on fragile pillars of lies and delusion.
Giada laughed. “You figured out my nefarious scheme. Here, Jules”—she leaned over and lifted a frangipane tart—“have another before you start thinking again.”
Now that was the funniest thing these women had heard. Giada sat back and smiled while they slapped their knees and held their guts.
When Fallon and the other wives had a chance to be free of their cages for a while, they always let completely loose. That was the whole point of this ridiculous book club—to give the Sacco women a truly safe place to relax, if only once a month. That she sometimes also got useful insights into her brother and the men he trusted had emerged as a happy side effect.
Tommy was as bad a husband as he was anything else, and as vicious. Giada had tried to warn Fallon off Tommy when they were engaged, though Fallon had, by then, enough evidence of her own to know she was jumping into a deep well of boiling water.
Men like her brother chose women like Fallon, who perceived lavish gifts as expressions of love or sincere apologies for terrible behavior, who blamed themselves for ‘setting him off,’ and shaped their selves desperately into the mold demanded of them. Women like Fallon—like almost all these women in her living room tonight—took all the ills of their life and family into themselves and existed in a near constant state of siege.
With one possible exception, none of these women, the wives of the top-tier men of the Sacco Family, had an easy road. The men Tommy held close were much like him. Frankly, Giada’s father hadn’t been dramatically better. He’d been savvier and more circumspect, but they’d all known the back of his hand, and the cut of his tongue. Her mother had known betrayals as well. To be constrained, betrayed, and taken for granted, if not outright abused, was the lot of a Sacco wife.
It was Sacco tradition, as in so many families of their world, that wives did not work. Whether they were Saccos in blood or in law, once they were married, they could not work anywhere but the home—they were to be wholeheartedly devoted to their husband and children, even after those children grew and moved on to their own lives.
It applied to Giada as well. If she had ever married, within the family or outside it, her father would have pushed her out of Sacco Development. So she had remained single all her life, never giving even a hint that she had serious romantic inclinations in any direction.
That was not to say she was celibate. Far from it. But all her life, even in college, she’d satisfied her needs with one-night stands or, more often, professionals. She preferred escorts, because they took direction well.
Her father had known, and her brother knew. They both hated it, Tommy had called her a dirty slut more times than she could count, but neither had moved to stop her beyond registering their disapprobation. She ignored them.
A life lived alone was not her natural inclination. She would have liked the chance to know that kind of love. But she would never give up her power to have it. So she’d made a choice.
Watching her guests, she was reminded again that she’d made the right one.
~oOo~
That night, her ringing phone woke Giada into deep darkness. She pushed an arm from under the snug warmth of her comforters and flailed at the nightstand until she got hold of the noisy thing and pulled it from the charger. Blinking at the screen, she saw the name of the single member of the Sacco Family she trusted: her Uncle Vincenzo.
It was five minutes before three in the morning. Except when there was a baby coming, no call at this hour brought good news.
“Zio,” she answered. “What’s wrong?”
“Mi dispiace, piccolina.” She was forty-five years old, and her uncle still called her ‘little one,’ as he had all her life. “There’s trouble with your brother.”
Giada sat up and switched on a lamp. “What can you tell me?” On this phone, it wouldn’t be much. Boston was well known for the cozy relationships among its law and its outlaws, but the Feds were a different story, and no organization lasted long recklessly. It was always better to assume someone was paying attention and behave accordingly.
Which was the whole problem with her brother, who had, over the few years of his reign, begun to be called, in whispers through their world, Il Pagliaccio Arrabbiato. The Angry Clown.
“We need you at Emily’s.”
Emily was Tommy’s comare.
“What kind of mess did he make?”
“A whole mess.”
Holy mother, he’d killed her.
“Zio, Fallon’s here. Last night was book night.” Since her nieces had gone off to college, Giada had made a habit of letting her sister-in-law spend the night after their ‘book club.’ Tommy had endorsed that arrangement, because it gave him the sense that Giada was being a good sister—and it freed him to be with Emily and not bother with pretense.