with a stiff drink, even if Frankie’s tastes are a little cheap for my liking,” he muttered, filling the glasses to the top despite the fact that it wasn’t even nine am yet.
“I’m pretty sure this stuff is over a hundred dollars a bottle,” I commented, but the look he gave me said that that was cheap to him. Fair enough.
I only hesitated briefly before lifting the glass to my lips and drinking the whole lot. It burned on the way down and filled my belly with fire, but I didn’t really give a shit. I just wanted to take the edge off.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come and meet with you the moment you returned to the city,” Martello began, looking at me over the rim of his glass as he took a sip. “I only have one excuse, but I hope you can understand it.”
“Go on,” I encouraged, waiting, wondering how much I cared or if I even wanted to admit to myself that it had stung that he’d left it so long.
Martello offered me a sad kind of smile and for a moment I could see a bit of myself in him. In the colour of his eyes and the set of his brow. It was so odd to be looking at a stranger and recognising them so instinctually.
“All those years ago, when Giuseppe Calabresi broke into my home and killed my wife and child...when I thought he’d killed my child, something broke in me. It’s not something that can be explained by anyone who hasn’t lived it. But I loved your mother fiercely, she remains to this day the only woman I ever loved or ever will love. I’m a shell of the man I was when I had her by my side. And my boy, my beautiful boy with the biggest brown eyes and the easiest laughter you’ve ever known...”
I held my breath as real tears shimmered in his eyes for a moment and he shifted to the edge of his seat, looking at me intently, studying my eyes as if he was searching for that child.
“I failed you, Angelo,” he breathed and some of the hard walls I’d been building around my heart against this man began to break apart. “I failed you and I can never make that right. I can’t imagine the life you’ve led and if that Calabresi scum were still alive today, I assure you I’d take great pleasure in ripping him apart piece by piece for what he’s done, but I...” He looked up at me like he didn’t have words and I found my resolve to keep this man out of my life breaking down too. I could see what losing his wife and child had done to him. More than that, I could see how much time he’d spent thinking about me and the life I should have lived. Probably at least as much as I’d spent wondering what I might have had with my real parents when I’d believed I was an orphan. It was why I’d hungered for Giuseppe’s approval and affection so much. I’d just been looking for it in the wrong place.
“We can’t do anything about the past,” I said, the regrets I felt for that plain in my voice. “But the future belongs to us. We can do whatever we want with it.”
Martello looked at me for the longest time before lifting his glass to his lips and draining the contents in one hit like I had. He pushed to his feet in the next move, closing the distance between us so that I stood too.
The moment his arms closed around me, I may as well have been that young boy he’d lost all those years ago. The scent of spice and cigars clung to him and I could have sworn that it was familiar to me, comforting and soothing. I felt at home there with him in a way I couldn’t explain as anything less than love. He loved me, his child who he thought he’d lost and there was a deep kind of beauty in that, the likes of which I’d never known.
My throat thickened as we held each other tightly and I tried not to lose myself in regrets for the life I should have had. I could carve my own path from here on out. And that meant shedding the lie of my old name for good. I was a Romero born and bred. And I was finally home.