only one sweating. “Consider it done,” I said. “I’ll make sure I give her what she needs.” The source of my sweat: If I didn’t give her what she needed, someone else in our crew was going to. No longer a tying-up-loose-ends issue, Melody didn’t stand much of a chance. My father bit the inside of his cheek as he focused on me. “You need a chaperone?”
I could see those words coming like a fly ball aimed directly at my glove. “Nah, this party is gonna be so big I’m assuming we need people cooking and cleaning elsewhere, right?”
Pop squeezed his bottom lip between his thumb and forefinger, his head tipped down further as he stared at me.
“Okay, Johnny,” he said finally. “Treat her right, okay?”
I looked down at my shoes, wiped the sweat from my forehead under the guise of a scratch. “I know, Pop.”
The conversation lasted another hour, but the last words I tried to interpret were Peter’s: “You got to know how to treat a gal or she’s gonna leave you for someone else.” Not a single thought or idea ran through my head that wasn’t an attempt at solving this problem, at finding a way to set that little six-year-old girl free once and for all.
My sisters-in-law prepared a table—a feast—filling the enormous gap my mother left when she passed away. We congregated to fill our plates, then evenly dispersed over the dining room, kitchen, dinette, and sunroom, consumed veal and sausage and pasta and salads and breads. The conversation turned unusually light, in both quantity and quality. No one noticed my lack of discussion; it had become the common denominator. The only perceptible voices came from the women; the men had a lot on their minds.
And on mine: “You got to know how to treat a gal or she’s gonna leave you for someone else.”
I sat in the corner of my parents’ dinette, my seat pushed back against a window that overlooked a crumbling brick patio, its devastation delivered by the roots of maples and oaks that predated the house by decades. I shoved my plate away, took a long pull off a Moretti, and stared at Peter, who sat in the dining room at a far and distant angle from me. He twisted his neck to get a kink out, and when he did he noticed me watching him. We stared at each other for a few seconds, his words still echoing through my head.
And suddenly my mind opened wide, exposing a gush of beauty, like a daylily receiving its initial blast of morning sunlight.
The first and only time I utterly adored my older brother, Peter: that very day—the moment he supplied me with an unintentional epiphany despite himself. “You got to know how to treat a gal or she’s gonna leave you for someone else.” The someone else quite obviously referenced the feds, that her allegiance would be given to them. But the intended resonance of his words did not reach my ears as an explosion, but as the sweeping crash of an ocean wave. I perverted his words to something beautiful and filled with hope, a line better used as a mantra than a reminder.
I wasn’t going to kill Melody. I was going to win her.
NINE
The plan materialized later that night, after two full cycles of food consumption, after a few rounds of drinks to ease anxiety and inspire the imagination, after the team had been reduced to seven. The list was created; targets were matched to various members of the crew. I managed to convince everyone to leave Melody to me and me alone, the only person I’d been tapped to tap.
We were dispatched, and within twenty-four hours a few kills were completed, the easy ones, with the intent that it would catch the feds off guard. But the real essence of the plan was this: We knew the hits would subdue the raging tide of other witnesses, create a flurry of doubt that the feds could really protect them the way they had certainly been promised. We were richer in the currency of fear than the feds; we had to abide by far less rules. And as my father and brothers explained, the point could be no better exemplified than through the death of one of their already protected witnesses: Melody Grace McCartney. Do my job, I was told, and the rest of the pieces would fall in place.
And just like that: My hit became the most valuable.