“That’s kinda hot.”
Joey’s eyes crinkle, and he slides a glance my way. “What about you?”
I turn and stare out the window. I’m purposely dredging up everything bad about the mafia. I want to remember why this won’t work. Why I’m never getting involved again.
“I’d heard some of the girls at St. Mary’s Academy say something about it. They called me a mafia princess–which of course, I wasn’t–and I didn’t even know what that meant. I thought the Family was just family. I mean, Marie was my aunt. I figured I was related to everyone.
“But one night I got up to pee, and I heard someone downstairs. I went down to the cellar. My dad was at the big sink, soaked in blood. The water was running, and the basin was full of bloody water.
“I thought he was hurt, you know? I gasped and asked what happened, and he barked at me to go back to bed.
“Of course, that just freaked me out more. I started crying, and he realized I was scared. He took off his stained shirt and showed me it wasn’t his blood. That’s when I got scared in a different way.”
I glance over at Joey to see if he understands. He reaches for my hand across the center console and squeezes it. For some reason, now that I’ve started the story, I want to remember the whole thing. Tell the whole thing.
“It’s funny, but I wasn’t upset that he’d committed a crime. That he’d hurt someone. Probably killed them. He was my dad. And kids are selfish, you know? All I was worried about was that he might get caught and taken away from us. So I tried to help him wash the blood out of his shirt. I wanted to protect him. Keep him out of trouble. Of course, he wouldn’t let me. He told me everything was fine. That he knew how to take care of things, but I shouldn’t tell my mom. He sent me off to bed.”
I try to swallow. “I had nightmares for years about him going to prison.” My eyes burn. “Is that funny? That I was more worried about my dad going to prison than about whether he was a murderer?” My voice chokes over my words. “And then he did go to prison. And my mom and I didn’t really forgive him for abandoning us before he died. So that sucked.”
“Sophie.”
I search Joey’s face, hoping he can lend some insight to this secret I buried inside me for all these years.
“Your dad was a good man.”
My belly quakes with a swallowed sob. I guess I never reconciled what I’d seen that day with the loving man I called my father. “He was good to me,” I manage to say.
“Right. Made Men are soldiers, Sophie. They do what they have to do to protect the Family. Just like any soldier, there’s a code they live by. They follow a chain of command. They don’t harm the innocent. I’m not saying there’s not some blackness on all our souls. There is. But don’t let it blotch your memory of your dad.”
I study Joey’s profile as he drives. The curl of his lashes. The strong planes of his face. “How much blackness is on your soul, Joey?”
His head swivels, and he regards me with an unfathomable gaze. “More than I’d like.”
My heart thunders in my chest. I want to weep and run away at the same time I want to throw my arms around him and see if he can’t somehow help me find my home with all this.
“What if I can’t live with that?” I breathe.
He blinks. The street lights illuminate the shadows of his face in flashes as he drives under them. “You can’t deny who you are, Sophie. Where you came from. The people who loved, love, you. Loving a soldier doesn’t taint your soul. It strengthens it.”
I want to ask him how, but it’s all too much for me. I turn my face away, look out the window. Try to breathe.
After a long stretch of silence, I ask, “Why were you so nice to me at my dad’s funeral?”
“I don’t know. I suppose I felt a connection with you. I recognized something similar in you. The pain of our existence. The toll ofLa Cosa Nostraon a kid who never asked to be a part of it. I hadn’t lost my dad yet, but I always had that feeling I was born to the wrong family. That I didn’t belong in this life.”
I peer at him through the darkness. A band of light shines across his eyes, giving him the look of a reverse mask. A man who lives in the shadows but still carries light.
There’s something blindingly heroic about Joey despite what he is. Or perhaps because of it.
“Do you remember you gave me a pack of gum when my dad died?” he asks.
“Oh, God.” I flash a smile. “I’m kind of embarrassed about that. I had a crush on you after my dad’s funeral, and you’d given me a stick of gum. I don’t know why I thought–”
“It was the nicest thing anyone did for me that day.” The corners of his lips turn up. “Literally the only thing about my father’s funeral that didn’t make me feel like I was drowning in cement.”
The patch of light slides across his face like a caress as he turns onto my street. Something about it makes me ache with love for him. It’s probably the remembered ache of being a teen with a crush. Of wanting something I couldn’t have.
Now I can have him. He’s here, interested in me.