of a child, those big blue eyes, blond hair only slightly enhanced with a bottle. Her body boasted an abundance of flesh that she had trained to swing in just the right way. (Once, I overheard a junior high kid in Vegas call her “Tits McGee,” but after I slugged him he never did it again.)
Lilla Russo was her real name, though she went by Lily Ross most of the time. She was Italian, her family had been Mafia-adjacent, or so she said. I wouldn’t know—I never met my grandparents, who had cut her off entirely after she had a baby (me) out of wedlock with a Colombian poker player. (I’m not sure which sin was the unforgivable one: the baby, the lack of a ring, or the lover’s country of origin.) She once told me that my grandfather had been a mob soldier in Baltimore, with half a dozen bodies under his belt. She didn’t seem to want to be around her family any more than they wanted to be around us.
The first years of my life were dictated by my father, whose gambling career kept us moving like migratory birds, our resting spot changing with the seasons or whenever his luck ran out. When I think of him now I mostly remember the lemony scent of his aftershave and the way he used to pick me up and fling me so high in the air that my hair would graze the ceiling, laughing at my screams of terror and my mother’s shrieks of protest. He was less of a grifter than a bully.
Back then, my mother worked odd jobs—waitressing, mostly—but her main job was defending me from him: barricading me in my room when he came home drunk, putting herself in the way of his fists so that they wouldn’t land on me. One night, when I was seven, she didn’t quite manage to get me out of the way, and he threw me against the wall so hard that I temporarily blacked out. When I regained consciousness, there was my mother, blood dripping down her face, pointing my father’s shotgun at his crotch. Her feathery, soft voice hardened to something sharp and lethal: “If you touch her again I swear I will shoot you right in the balls. Now, get the fuck out of here and don’t come back.”
And he did, skulking away like a dog with its tail between its legs. Before the sun rose the next morning, my mother had packed up the car. As we drove out of New Orleans—headed to Florida, where she had “a friend who had a friend”—she turned to look at me in the passenger seat and grabbed my hand. “You and I are all each other has,” she whispered hoarsely. “And I will never, ever let anyone hurt you again. I promise.”
She didn’t, either. When a boy at our next apartment building stole my bike, she marched straight down to the courtyard and pushed the kid up against the wall until he cried and told her where it was hidden. When the girls in my class teased me about my weight, she went straight to their homes, rang the doorbells, and screamed at their parents. No teacher could give me a failing grade without facing my mother’s ire in the school parking lot.
And when confrontation wouldn’t solve the problem, she would just whip out her ultimate solution. “OK,” she’d say to me. “Let’s move and just try it again.”
* * *
—
Chasing off my father had unintended consequences. My mother couldn’t pay the bills with part-time waitressing anymore. Instead, she moved into the only other profession she knew: crime.
My mother’s hustle was soft coercion. She used seduction as a means of access: to a credit card, a bank account, a chump who might cover the rent for a while. She targeted married men, misbehaving cads who were too afraid of getting caught by their wives to file a police report when $5,000 suddenly went missing from their checking accounts. Powerful men too wrapped up in their own egos to admit they’d been conned by a woman. I think it was her revenge on every man who had ever underestimated her: the English teacher who molested her in high school, the father who disavowed her, the