find out she so much as gets a hangnail, I’m coming after you and I’m bringing something better than a tire iron.”
I pulled the steel bar from his neck, stood up, cast a gray shadow over him.
“Not another word about the girl.”
Ettore sputtered for some time after that, sprawled back in the mud like an abandoned scarecrow. Then, finally, “Okay… okay, Shonny.”
To say there was a celebration upon our return would be incorrect. After all the stress and lost sleep the McCartneys caused my father, you might imagine ticker tape would have fallen from the sky, that our wounds might have been concealed by an avalanche of confetti, but that was never the way it went, even when it came to taking out the McCartneys. When Ettore and I walked into the kitchen of my parents’ recently purchased English Tudor across the Hudson in Tenafly, New Jersey, my father was leaning on the counter, wiping dry the remnants of a small bowl of red sauce with a slice of bread. The first he’d seen or heard of us since we departed, he looked up, stared at the clots and bruises on our faces, Ettore’s odd stance.
“Hell happened?” he said.
Ettore cleared his throat, tried not to look at me. “C’ran overush in loh ash wuhwuh leafin’.” A car ran over us in the lot as we were leaving.
Pop approached us, looked at me first. “You okay?”
“We’ll survive. Right, Ettore?”
My father touched my cheek gently, looked at the scrapes and swollen flesh. His face sagged into a pout, was the closest I’d ever seen him come to expressing regret. But the years had depleted him, and the distance between regret and revenge had shortened. His expression soon turned into Bovaro anger, a burst of required retribution.
“Not the guy’s fault. We took care of it,” I said, then, changing the subject, “Ettore’s a hard worker. Mom and Dad are out of the picture.”
Pop took a step back and nodded, passed a subtle grin of approval. “The girl?”
Ettore looked down.
I answered, “I learned everything I could ever need to know from my cousin. The girl is mine. Don’t worry, Pop. I’ll take care of her. That right, Ettore?”
My dad moved to my cousin, put his hand behind his neck. “This was clean?” Ettore nodded. Pop smiled, reached around and hugged my cousin, whispered something in Italian, likely a verbal commendation. And as my father tightened his embrace, I could see Ettore’s hands shake in agony, hear his staccato breathing.
Ettore ended up being celebrated for his kills, marginally elevated in our family and crew, famed for doing what no one else could achieve. He had eliminated the more important of the witnesses—what juror would truly rely on what someone witnessed as a six-year-old from over a decade earlier?—and provided proof of how impervious the Bovaros were to prosecution. And from that honored moment, he became Shimmy Vido, aptly nicknamed for the way his lame leg would wiggle from side to side with every step, remembered for his acts of heroism with a life of disrespect and indifference:
“Go send Jimmy and Shimmy down there to talk to him.”
“Hey, Sh-Sh-Shimmy! What’s sh-sh-shaking?”
“Throw me a beer, you friggin’ gimp.”
As for me, I made it clear across my father’s organization that Melody was in my sights, that I would make good on taking her out, that her eventual elimination would be my absolution. That no one else was to touch her. But it must be understood that my absolution did not rest in her elimination, but in her insulation. If there existed any hope for my redemption, it had to be in becoming her shield.
She was all mine to take care of. All mine.
FIVE
By the time I reached my twenty-fourth birthday, it was undisputed: I became the family member no Bovaro really understood. Most families have one member who bucks the norm.
I became the rebel.
As my brothers contributed more and more to my family’s burgeoning organization, I managed to keep myself involved at an arm’s length. Though I might not have always been part of the decision making, I certainly remained a participant in the conversations. In our crew, we didn’t exactly find a conference room and follow an agenda; conclusions are drawn and plans derived over a plate of veal or eggplant. And I certainly continued to do my share of the household chores; as the months came and went, so did the extortive measures, the cleansing of ill-gotten gains.