I noticed you do not get along with too many people. I had one—one—incident when I worked for him where I knocked a guy upside his head with my bucket because he told me I was working too slow. And I couldn’t get along with people? I was a people-ing motherfucker, as long as you didn’t fuck me over.
“I will have to convince Anna to come home,” he said.
“She will,” I said. “I’m working onAngela, because Giuseppe is giving me hell, too.”
You sing, and suddenly everyone thinks they can fucking push you around. That’s why I always said my cousin Dom was a pussy. He had “handlers” who all thought they could turn him into a singing puppet. He let them.
Fabrizio brought me back to real time when he started making funny faces at my Eleonora. She laughed at him, but she cried for me. That hit a fucking nerve. If he weren’t a man I considered family, I’d probably kill him out of envy. He had something I wanted—a smile from my daughter.
Alcina’s smile grew wider when she noticed the girl from Modica, the same one from The Club, Mariposa, coming up with the boy I had seen with her in Italy. Her son. Her husband hadn’t liked me from the moment he set eyes on me, but who the fuck was he? If I was good enough for his cousin to marry, I was good enough for him to accept.
The little boy in Mariposa’s arms reached out and touched the top of Eleonora’s head. She smiled for him, too. Everyone but me.
It was all so idealistic looking. The mothers. The aunt. The grandmother. The cousin (Brooklyn). The friends. The kids playing in the park.
For the first time in a long time, I realized how far on the outskirts I was of this life, and how deep I was in my other. It was times like these that something hit me worse than jealousy, or even envy, both emotions that Alcina had introduced me to. In that second, I was experiencing something else. I couldn’t put a fucking name to it because I wasn’t sure what it was.
It was what Alcina had explained to me one night.“Like you miss me, too, even though I’m next to you.”
The word “miss” was wrong. That seemed like such a simple, uncomplicated word to describe the mayhem I felt in the center of my chest.
To sum it up. I felt like I had spent an entire lifetime with these people, and every bad thing I ever did they held me accountable for, but loved me despite of them. Then suddenly, I found myself in a separate world, but I could still see them. I was on the inside looking out. It sent a rush of something I had never felt before through me. Panic—maybe. That I might never get to them.
I had never had my heart race. Not even when death was at my door. So maybe panic was the wrong word. Maybe it wasn’t strong enough. Or maybe it was. I didn’t fucking know because this was an entirely new world for me.
One thing was certain, though. The times when I reached them were fleeting. Over too fucking fast. Then my mind went in a different direction, my body following the orders, and the feeling would recede and nothing else registered but the life.
“Hey.”
I leaned forward some, narrowing my eyes at the girl walking out of the sunlight toward me with her son. She took a seat next to me on the bench, like she had known me forever.
I was a people person to a certain extent—I wasn’t fucking lying about that—but not too many people chose to sit next to me. It was usually done for a reason in my world.
The boy sat between us, playing with a toy. For a kid, he had a serious face.
I sat back so I could see her face better. She wasn’t a plain woman, but she wasn’t extraordinary either. It was hard to describe what was attractive about her, and not in a sexual way. She was somewhat regal looking. It was her nose. The way it curved. It gave her something special. Character that I didn’t see every day.
“Mariposa.” I nodded.
“It’s actually Mari,” she said. “My husband is the only one who calls me Mariposa.”
Maybe I was reading too much into it, but it was like she was telling me that for a reason. Like she wanted me to know that about her. Maybe she just wanted anyone to know.
“Your husband. The man in Modica. My wife’s cousin.”
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s him.”
“So that makes Eleonora and—” I looked at the kid.
“Saverio,” she said.
I nodded. “Saverio—”
“Cousins,” she finished for me. “It does.”
“It’ll be nice for Alcina to have family so close. Once hermammaand sister go back home.”
She nodded, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “It will be. They can grow up together.” She fussed over her kid’s hair. He had a ton of it. “I didn’t have any family growing up. I was alone most of my life.”
