the feds found my parents—or how they even knew we were witnesses in the first place.” She points her finger at me like she’s picking me out of a lineup. “It was you.”
I blink instead of nod. “What can I say? I wasn’t the thirty-year-old guy sitting before you, Melody. I was just a kid, who wanted to be a grown-up and big and important like my father. I had no idea it was my dad that killed Jimmy. I didn’t even really understand what killing was yet.” I frown at my ultimate decision. “When the cops were asking everyone on the street if anyone saw anything, I told them I saw a family run out of the restaurant.”
“And you just magically knew our address?”
“No. But I did notice your car had Jersey tags, and I remembered two numbers and a letter.” Fig Newton. Florence Nightingale. “Apparently, it was enough.”
She puts a fist to her mouth, stares me down. “So,” she says, “you are the one who brought all of this pain and misery and destruction into my life. You are the one responsible for my parents’ deaths!” She rises up, like she’s standing to leave. I lift off my chair to match her, let her know leaving is not an option, running is not a possibility. Yet.
“The most I would have had to deal with,” she yells, “was some… some post-traumatic stress disorder, maybe some therapy. I still would have had parents and proms and friends and birthday parties and a heritage and something to look forward to!” She pops like a bubble, gushes this tirade as though she’d been waiting her entire life to unload.
“Melody, I was ten years old—just a few years older than you were. Do you have any idea what this did to my family?”
“I do not care.”
“I turned my own father in—not intentionally, of course—but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m the one who did it!”
“Your father is a sick bastard! Who wants a dad who eviscerates people?” She drops down into her chair.
As I slowly ease down as well, I say, “My dad wasn’t Jeffrey Dahmer. It wasn’t all weird.” I finally lower my voice a notch, hope she’ll do the same. “I mean, he was still my dad, the guy who took me to Yankee games and taught me how to throw a football, how to appreciate things like this wine.” Taught me how to clock my twelve-year-old nemesis and beat him to submission, how to hotwire almost any car. “He wasn’t your stereotypical mafioso, with his Friday-night wife and his Saturday-night girlfriend. He taught me to respect women.” Unfortunately, also the guy who coined the street term for a woman he deemed to be half-skank/half-bimbo: skimbo. “We attended a Catholic church and he cried when I made my first Communion.” And only took the Lord’s name in vain three times during that service. “He cheered me on when I hit a homer in Little League and consoled me when I blew a critical double play.” And had an interaction with the umpire that involved more than kicking dirt on the guy’s feet. “He was a real dad. To me, at least.”
“You don’t get it, Jonathan. I didn’t have a chance to play Little League or dance ballet or anything else. We were always trying to stay out of sight. My dad might have taught me how to toss a ball if he hadn’t been so worried about one of us getting plucked off in the process. I mean, getting mail from our mailbox was a stressful daily event.”
“Look, I’m not comparing my parents to yours. My point is that my family—and the business we’re in—makes people do bad things. But the bottom line is it’s business.”
“My family never did anything to the Bovaro clan.”
“Your parents testified.”
“And if they hadn’t?”
I consider the question, do not consider answering it. I want to illuminate this scene, and her potential future, but it would be easily recognized as artificial light. I simply cannot lie to Melody, the way I cannot be profane in front of her, the way I struggle to light a smoke in front of her. My mother once gave me a piece of knowledge that rang with such truth, even as a child, that I might never forget it: A man finally understands the greatest sense of devotion, knows he has fallen to love’s greatest depth, when he voluntarily surrenders all his vices and addictions for a woman. Based on the