toss the phone at the wall.
When I have calmed somewhat, I use my key and go into the little back section with the desk and some filing cabinets. My father has been known to lock himself away in here for hours, poring over figures and making tiny adjustments to this column or that. It’s the sort of studious work that bores me to tears and, I reflect suddenly, perhaps one of the reasons he doesn’t think I’m ready. That just makes me even angrier.
I shake my head and drop into the desk chair.
My thoughts are scattered this evening. One second, I am thinking about Giuseppe. The next second, it is Dad. The next, Dani, and now, I am wondering how the fuck my father thinks forcing a woman on me is going to make me a more capable don. Or is that even his intent? That’s the problem with us. We never talk openly about what we’re feeling.
I pick up the photograph of Mother and Father that sits at the corner of his desk, with their names written at the bottom in their own hands. Hazel De Maggio’s script is elegant, curving.
My mother’s hair is long and deep black in the photo. Her smile is full and her body sturdy. She was a strong woman then, just as she is now. I wonder what she would say about all this. She has been in Italy for months with Grandmother, preparing for the opening of her new restaurant. I am sure Father misses her. Even in this picture, I can see how he keeps a protective arm around her shoulders, holding her close, looking straight into the lens with a slight furrow to brows as if he fears that even the person looking at the picture years after it was taken will try to take her from him.
I don’t like what it says. How important she is to him. How essential.
So I turn instead to the photo of me and Levi as five-year-olds.
Despite everything, it touches me that Father chooses to display this here. It’s our first day of school and I’ve got Levi in a headlock, shoving him in the head as he tries to lift me off the ground. Mother is in the background, a smile on her face.
I find my hands straying to the drawers since it’s not often I’m in here alone. The top drawer is locked. I pick up a paperclip and study it, wondering if I still have the knack. When Levi and I were teenagers, we learned the art of lockpicking together. We tried our hands at breaking into movie theaters and taking our girlfriends there, once hosting a five-course meal in one of Father’s upper-class restaurants—all after hours, of course.
After a few fumbling moments, I manage to pick the lock.
A notepad rests on top of a bunch of documents. I pick it up and the message stabs at what passes for my excuse of a heart. In Father’s writing—the same script as the photo signature—I read: What to do with Angelo??? He is a good boy, but I think loneliness is making him rash. It is underlined and dotted and scrawled as if he wrote it down just to see the thought reflected in physical reality and then sat to stare at it for hours, hoping he could coax some answer out of his own handwriting.
The thought of that scene—Father hunched over this pad, eyebrows knotted in concern, thinking of me—makes me feel faint and strange.
For one wild second, I weigh the question myself. Is he right? Is being alone weakening me in some immeasurable way?
But I have always been alone. I am who I am. I have never apologized for that. I do not intend to start doing so now.
My mind returns to Levi’s proposition. If Father really does believe that having a wife is what I need, then perhaps I should just play his game for the time being. Annoyingly, my mind tosses up Dani as candidate number one, two, and three. I push that aside.
I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from consuming her every chance I got, painting her body in tongue strokes until she was hot and squirming and aching for more. I would trace the pink curves of her pussy until I found the throbbing nub of her wanting clit, circling it, sucking it, feeling the quiver in her hip bones as she got tight and wet and—
I jump to my feet, laughing at myself, carefully ignoring