Carla was still looking at the gun like it was a poisonous snake on her kitchen table. “Get rid of that fuckin’ thing! I don’t want little Anthony playing with it!”
Ted looked over at Vin, who took the gun and hid it in the red flour can on Carla’s counter. Carla watched him, trying to decide whether she should protest any further.
“Maybe I’ll send Richie over,” Teddy said to Vin, who was taking a long drag on his cigarette. “He can sit here in the kitchen and make sure nothing happens.”
“Oh no,” said Carla, forgetting the gun and wagging her head furiously. “I am not having Richie Amato in my house.”
“Why?”
“Don’t you remember?” She put her hands on her hips. “I used to go with Richie. You wouldn’t treat a dog the way he treated me. Whatever bad you can say about Anthony, at least he ain’t Richie.”
She looked over at Vin, who was sitting down and putting his feet back up on the kitchen table. “Hey, get your damn feet down and stop smoking in here. Don’t you know I’m pregnant?”
Vin took his feet off the table and grabbed an empty beer can out of the garbage, so he could put his cigarette out in it.
Teddy was looking up at the little peels of paint that looked like fish gills on the ceiling over his head. “Youknow you could use a paint job in here,” he said. “You sure that Anthony’s providing for you?”
“He provides,” said Carla, going to get a glass of water.
“You don’t sound too sure.”
“What do you want me to do, Uncle Ted?” She whirled around to glare at him and the tinfoil in her hair made a soft tsshh sound. “Walk out on him? With two kids and another on the way?” Her pale hands and red fingernails flew up in dismay. “What choice do I have? I can’t just pack up and leave. Either I make my marriage work or the roof caves in. So don’t go talking subversive to me, Uncle Ted.”
“Where do you get a word like that?”
“I heard it from Anthony,” she said, without embarrassment. “So don’t try turning me against him. I got too many responsibilities depending on him.”
“I still say he’s a bum,” Teddy muttered under his breath.
“And I say you don’t know him,” Carla lashed back, her face turning red. “Anthony was the only boy who’d talk to me in high school and we pledged our love. We may be having our problems now, but we’ll work them out. And if we can’t, I’ll be the one to take care of it.”
She glanced over at the flour can where Vin had left the gun. Teddy stood up and started to put his arms around her, but there was too much flesh between them.
“Carla, you’re a very special girl,” he said. “Any man who doesn’t appreciate you, doesn’t deserve to be around himself.”
18
I FORGOT ABOUT FINDING a bar and took Rosemary back to the Family’s stash house in Marvin Gardens. The apartment was empty that night, though you never knew when somebody was going to come by to drop off some money or pick up a gun. The white shag carpet fired off little static shocks as I walked in.
Rosemary took a look around the place and saw the bar next to the kitchen, the wall with the mirrors on it, and the black leather couch from Dave D.’s that folded out into a bed. The lamps all had identical bulb-shaped bodies and shades thick as plaster. The door to the other room was opened just enough so you could see some of the swag stored in there. My father had just gotten in a shipment of Iranian pistachio nuts and Nigerian hand soap from someone he knew in New York. I hoped Rosemary wouldn’t ask me about any of it. She was probably already thinking it’d been years since a woman had a say in how the place looked.
“Let’s go for a walk on the Boardwalk,” she said abruptly.
It was a beautiful night, with a soft breeze coming off the ocean and amusement park lights blazing from the other end of the Boardwalk, but I hardly noticed it. I was too busy thinking about all the things that had happened since my father killed Larry. Now I had Nicky coming after me and my family. I figured that he wouldn’t do anything right away. It would be better to wait and torture me. But I knew I had to get my wife and kids out of the house soon to protect them.
“Hey,” said Rosemary. “Are you a made guy?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, right.”
We walked along quietly for a couple of minutes as a light from a Coast Guard ship cut through the fog on the water.
“You know, I always thought you had to be Sicilian to be a made guy,” she said. “You don’t look like any Sicilian to me.”
“How come you know so much about it?”
“I read books. Just because I dance doesn’t mean I can’t read.”
“My father now,” I told her, “he’s Sicilian.”
“What do you mean, ‘my father now’?” She stopped walking. “Isn’t he your real father?”
“You know, it’s very rude asking questions like that. Something could happen if you ask too many questions.”
“Oh, I am so scared.” She opened her eyes wide.
“I mean, how would you like it if I started asking questions like that?”
“Go ahead.” She opened her arms and the wind riffled through the light hair in her armpits. “Ask away. I’ve got nothing to hide.”
“All right,” I said, seeing that she was trying to provoke me anyway. “How did you know a blow job cost twenty-five dollars when we were talking about it before?”
“Because I used to be a hooker,” she told me matter-of-factly.
I just looked out at the ocean. A tide was sweeping over the beach like a strong white arm.
“Whooaa,” I said.
“Are you surprised?”
“Well, shit.”
“It was just for a little while.” She joined me at the steel railing. “And I do not have AIDS, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’ve been tested.”
“Yeah, but how’d you end up doing a thing like that in the first place? I mean, you don’t seem like a skeezer.”
She sighed and brushed back her dyed-blond hair. “You know, you fall into these things a little bit at a time. I think a lot of it had to do with my second kid.”
Now I was really confused. She’d only shown me the picture of one little girl. “Who was your second kid?”
“The one that didn’t make it.” Her lower lip came up like a gate protecting the rest of her face. “She was born too soon. I always used to blame my husband, Bingo, because he was a heroin addict, but I wasn’t really taking care of myself in those days either. We were going to call her Melissa. Anyway, we were waiting in the hospital four days after she was born to see if she’d make it. She was a preemie and she had some terrible blood infection, you know.”
She sniffed. “I used to go to N.I.C.U. and look at her under the bilirubin lights with all those tubes running in and out of her.” She paused. “She was so little and helpless in that little glass box. It was hard to believe she was real. And I remember this sign up on the walclass="underline" BABIES ARE GOD’S WAY OF EXPRESSING HIS OPINION THAT THE WORLD SHOULD GO ON. So I made a deal with God. That if he let her live, I’d make my life over and be good all the time.”
Her jaw got tight. “And then he let her die,” she said quietly.
It was scary watching her talk about it, because she didn’t do anything dramatic like start to cry or put her face in her hands. She just stood there, with her body getting more and more tense, from trying to keep it all inside. It was like watching someone tear themselves apart without moving a muscle.
“So after that, I said fuck it.” She gripped the steel railing. “I couldn’t kill myself or let my life go all to hell, because I already had Kimmy to look after. So I just decided I’d do whatever I had to to get by and be there for her, but I just wouldn’t feel anything about it. And after that, you’ll put up with anything. I mean, if you can stand having a junkie for a husband, it’s not that far to turning tricks to support his habit and feed your kid.”