when I made out the outline of Gianna Miceli.
“Gianna?”
She approached me tentatively, one hand outstretched. “Alison.”
Gianna Miceli and I had a complicated history. We had attended St. Thomas at the same time, and although she was two years older than I was and we shouldn’t have had anything to do with each other, we found ourselves linked together by tragedy. Gianna’s daughter, Kathy, had been murdered earlier this year, an event that had rocked the campus and my own world. A couple of sordid things come to mind when I think of her death: one, that she had been found in the trunk of my car, and two, that she had had a relationship with my ex-husband. I hesitate to call it an “affair” because what nineteen-year-old girl sets out to have an affair, a word that has serious and somewhat tawdry connotations? I preferred to think of it as a relationship because I was sure that Kathy thought that’s what it was.
I walked toward her and embraced her, at the time the obvious thing to do. The dark circles under her eyes highlighted the grief etched on her face and it was apparent to me that she was still in the depths of a fathomless despair. I held her at arm’s length. “What are you doing here?”
She motioned to a dorm across campus. “I came to clean out Kathy’s room. This is the first day I’ve been able to face it.”
Students had been in the dorms for a couple of weeks already, so Gianna was a little late to the task. I guessed that the Housing Office had decided against opening the room to new students and would leave it unoccupied for at least the year, if not longer. I looked down at her, her face illuminated by a spotlight hanging off the dorm behind us.
“How is the rest of your family?”
She shrugged. “Fine.”
“Max is getting married,” I said, for want of something else to say.
“Who’s Max?” she asked.
I started to explain that she had known Max at St. Thomas but gave up. It didn’t seem to matter if she remembered Max or not. I decided to shut up.
Clearly, we had nothing to say to each other. Despite the history we had we were nothing more than acquaintances bonded in death and tragedy. I thought back on our shared time at St. Thomas—she was the rich golden girl whose father had a dubious occupation; on the surface, he owned a restaurant but talk ran to his now-confirmed Mob connections. When she took up with Peter Miceli in her junior year, a fat, prematurely balding guy with absolutely no game or brains to speak of, we were all very surprised. What I remember about Peter was that he was always trying to get me to ride in his Trans Am and that I always declined. Even then, when I should have been throwing caution to the wind and living the life of a carefree coed, my common sense ruled. I had been right about him all along but it still didn’t explain to me why this seemingly bright, attractive woman had ended up with him. It only explained why I hadn’t.
I remember Gianna pouring her heart out to me and Max one night at Maloney’s, our favorite bar back in the day. Sal Paccione was her boyfriend and the bartender at Maloney’s. His reputation was one of a nice guy who was basically a gigolo; although Gianna seemed to overlook his wandering ways, they were obvious to any girl who had ever bought a beer from him at the bar. Except for me, of course; I thought he was just an inordinately friendly guy. A lingering glance, an extra hand squeeze when change was returned, a wink in your direction—I always thought it was his way of drumming up more tips, but Max assured me that he was a cad, plain and simple. The night that Max and Gianna and I had spent at the bar, it was clear to us that she had had enough but she wasn’t prepared to do anything about it. Until she caught him kissing one of the other bartenders in the alley behind the bar.
Then, all hell broke loose.
Gianna, unbeknownst to me and Max, was a woman with a temper. A tiny, hundred-and-ten-pound spitfire, who turned that bar into the eye of a hurricane in about ten seconds flat. Rumor had it that her father had paid for all of the damage and then