What about my brothers? What about all the little Esthers? What about Bo Johnson and Maude Alexander?”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“I can’t quit. I can’t stop. I can’t run away. I can’t even do it to keep you safe. Everybody’s watching us. Not just the bad guys. Everybody’s watching. They’re counting on me, Benny. They’re counting on us.”
“Yeah. But I don’t give a shit about anything but you,” I confessed.
She shook her head, denying me. “That isn’t true. You aren’t like them. You aren’t like Sal.”
“You can tell yourself that, Baby Ruth. But you and I both know it’s not true. I am like them. Everybody’s rotten. And that’s why you’re crying.”
“That’s not why I’m crying!”
“What do you think this was? Tonight? Downstairs? That was me mobbing up. And you know it.”
She hissed out a long, pent-up breath and glared at me. “That wasn’t you mobbing up. That was you nailing yourself to the cross. That’s what that was. And you’ve been doing it since we met. News flash, Benny. You aren’t Jesus Christ, and you can’t save me.”
“Esther,” I groaned.
“Everyone underestimates me. Even you.” She swiped angrily at her tears and then wagged her dripping finger at me. “They always have. But I’ve never been a fool.”
“I don’t underestimate you, Baby Ruth. I overestimate my ability to keep up.”
Her smile was tremulous, replacing her glower, and I wrapped her condemning finger in my fist and brought it to my chest.
“When did you learn ‘Ave Maria’?” I asked.
“At Gene’s bar in Detroit.”
I stared at her, dumbfounded. She stared back at me, defiant, daring me to contradict her.
“Don’t underestimate me, Benny Lament. Not again. I’m smart. And I know exactly who you are.”
“Who am I?”
“You’re my partner. My manager. My lover. My friend. We are friends, aren’t we, Benny Lament?”
That day in Pop’s apartment seemed like a lifetime ago.
“Yeah,” I whispered. “We’re friends, Baby Ruth. I’m your friend, I’m your man, and I’m your biggest goddamn fan.”
I leaned down to kiss her, but she avoided my lips, dancing around the split edges and swollen places to save me from pain, but I needed her there most, and I gripped her hair, holding her still so I could taste her mouth and chase the new ache in the bottom of my belly. She opened sweetly, letting our tongues brush where our lips couldn’t, and for a long time we simply kissed, seeking what we could not find. We needed peace. We needed safety. And there was none to be had.
So we found pleasure instead. Distraction. Communion. Everything that hurt became a distant hum, drowned out by the immediacy of her skin and her scent and her soft shudders. I was clumsy, playing her body the way I’d played the piano in the lounge, one-handed and wishful, wanting to do more than I was able, able to do more than I’d believed.
We loved each other for a long time, and we didn’t talk about Rudolf Alexander or the outcropping of unknowns that waited for us in the morning. Esther fell asleep near dawn, her emotion spent, her passions sated. But I could not sleep. I had to stay alert. I had to stand guard. And I could not sleep in this room.
I groaned out loud, sickened again, and Esther stirred. I willed myself to be still. To think. To examine.
I wasn’t even sure what it meant, the finger in the glass.
Was it a threat? Or a reminder. Or maybe . . . a settled debt.
An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
A finger for a finger. It was Sal who’d orchestrated it, I had no doubt. Rudolf Alexander had lost a finger, and I had another chain around my neck.
“We have an understanding,” Sal had said, but I didn’t understand any of it. They all had so much shit on each other that once something slipped, the whole house of cards would come down.
I knew one thing . . . and I’d always known it. You were either in or you were out. You couldn’t do family halfway. If you tried, you just kept getting pulled in deeper and deeper until everyone shared the same sins, simply by sharing the same name.
Sal said it was finished, but it wasn’t finished. None of it. Severed fingers and twisted arms only led to new bedfellows and old enemies waiting to pounce, and Bo Johnson was still out there. Bo Johnson and a thousand sins no one had ever paid for.
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