“You can’t be serious.”
“I am. I’d do anything for him, and even that wouldn’t be enough.”
I didn’t even know how to respond, other than a desire to smack some sense into him with my sauce-slobbered hot dog.
He scoffed. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like you’re crazy?”
“Like you’re judging what you don’t get. He’s a good man in a complicated position.”
Now it was my turn to sneer. “You sound brainwashed.”
“No, I sound like someone whose life finally makes sense because the guy whose car you tried to burn down saved it and gave me a chance. I’d be dead right now, my mother too, if he hadn’t been there. He helped us start back up and move forward. I graduated high school because of him. My mom got to go back to nursing school because of him. I owe him everything.”
I picked the relish off my hot dog. “He saved your family but killed mine. Why is yours worth more?”
“You don’t think he’s trying to make amends?”
I slammed my food down on the table between us. Ketchup and mustard sank between my fingers.
“I don’t want his fucking apology.” I flicked off the sauces. “I want my brother back. I want my life back.”
“Well, boo-hoo, you’re not the only one with a sad story.” I flinched back from the venom transforming Ricco’s face into something dark and riddled with pain. “You need to get over yourself and realize that you’ve got someone rooting for you. You’ve got food. You’ve got clothes. You and those kids are looking healthier. You’ve got more than a lot of other people. But you’re so stuck on what you used to have. What you lost isn’t going to come back, and after three weeks, I’m sick of hearing about it. I’m sick of you being ungrateful. I’m sick of you trying to bring down a person who fights for those he cares about.”
“He’s—”
“I’m going to stop you right there. I already know what happened to your brother. All of it.”
“He told you?”
“Yeah, he thought I should know since I’m out here all the time.”
“Then you know why I can’t accept this.”
“He’s not responsible for your brother’s choices, and your brother…he chose the wrong side. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but hechoseto be there. Do you even know what kind of manhewas?”
It was all because Noah wanted a better life for me. But I couldn’t voice that out loud, not when all these people were staring, and it felt like my heart was being carved into.
“It wasn’t just drugs and guns with Elio Iannelli. He dealt in organs. In people. In sex.”
“Noah would never have done any of that.”
“Doesn’t matter though, does it? Because in some way or another, whatever he did for Elio helped the man do all the sick things he was doing.”
His eyes brimmed with the kind of hate that boiled your insides until all that was left was a mess of bubbled goo, turning up into down and down into up. I understood it. I’d been feeding off that magma for months.
“You hated him,” I whispered.
“No less than he deserved, but much less than the boss did.”
The same boss who’d murdered my brother and thrown me to the wolves. The boss who’d refused to hurt me when he could have. The boss who’d been taking better care of me and two other kids than people appointed by the government. How disgustingly ironic.
“He doesn’t stand for that kind of crap,” Ricco continued.
On the top floor of the play structure, Lou called my name, waving with her whole little body. I did the same.
“The boss—he can be brutal and harsh, but he’d never lay a hand against a woman or child in anger. Not ever.”
