The Spia Family Presses On - By Mary Leo Page 0,87
about him when my own family didn’t.
He held a finger over his mouth. “Shhh,” he whispered, turning away from Maryann, and the rest of the pickers. I pulled off my gloves and followed right beside him, anxious to hear what he had to say.
“Your papa, how you say? He no can come out. Too many enemies in America, but he got a lot of friends in Italia.”
It just seemed impossible for this Italian import to know where my dad was living when we had been looking for him since I was twelve. How could this be true? I needed more information.
“So,” I said. “You never actually saw him?” I figured this Turk didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Ma-sure. Your papa, how shall we say, an important man in Calabria. He send me here, you know, to ask for the . . . ring and if he no give, then to do some work.”
I decided to play along with this elaborate hoax. It had to be, right? “Do some work on Dickey?”
He shrugged and bobbed his head in complete gangster fashion letting me know I was exactly right, but not really saying it out loud. “I call him. We meet. We talk and he say no. Then before I can, you know . . . another person do my work.”
“But why did my father want Dickey’s ring?”
He shrugged again, grinned and looked at me as if I was the silliest person alive. “I no ask this kind of question. I am a picciotti d’onore, a soldier. I follow the orders from the capobastone.”
It hit me like a ton of olives! I was convinced he was telling me the truth. My own father, the man who had disappeared like Jimmy Hoffa, was not only alive and well, but he was some kind of boss in the worst mob Italy had to offer, ‘Ndrangheta, and he had put out a hit on his own cousin, Dickey.
I so needed a drink.
Fifteen minutes later, after having picked only slightly more than a bucketful of olives, I called it a day. Giuseppe packed my now broken ladder back in my truck and I left him on the side of the road with Federico giving him picking orders.
I was on a quest for a big, overflowing glass of wine. I was absolutely going to drink it this time. And not just one glass, the entire bottle seemed like the way to go. I even decided on red rather than white. It reminded me more of blood, and blood was the word of the hour. My blood, my dad’s blood, and Dickey’s . . . we were all related, but that didn’t seem to matter in this family. Vendettas mattered more than blood, and heaven help the person who stepped in front of a personal vendetta.
I drove my truck, loaded with my viciously tampered with ladder, back to the barn and parked behind my mom’s house, completely distracted by my quest for wine.
Heading straight for the case I’d shelved in the barn the night Dickey was murdered, I figured I’d grab a bottle of Leo’s Pinot, and show up on his doorstep wearing my best rueful smile. We’d have great make-up sex and I’d be over this ridiculous sobriety I’d enforced on myself forever.
Whose idea was this sobriety gig anyway? Certainly not mine.
After my tryst with Leo, I’d return refreshed and renewed to help my mom and aunts prepare tonight’s feast. There was always a big feast the last day of our first harvest. We had one more harvest that would take place sometime in early November when the remainder of the fruit was at its peak of ripeness. That would constitute a major party, but for now, we celebrated all the hard work and the fact that it didn’t rain during the harvest. Rain during harvest is the single most destructive natural force for olives. Even a mist can hamper a successful harvest. Fortunately, neither of those scourges had taken place, so we were in for a fantastic harvest, and what looked like a profitable year.
I had phoned Lisa on my short drive back to the barn, wanting to share the news that my dad was alive and well and playing Godfather in Italy, plus I wanted to tell her the sinister details of my attempted demise, but she still wasn’t answering.
Opening the barn door, I was eager to get on with my new found sobriety freedom when I ran smack into Nick Zeleski. There were