Page 39 of Mafia Baby

Surprisingly, I miss doing secretarial work for the business. I had discovered in the week that I was working in Dom’s office upstairs at the club, that I have a good head for numbers and figures.

I had also noticed some areas where the company could save money and had helped to create a better way of managing the dancer’s shifts and work calendar.

Working at Dom’s business made me feel useful and smart, and I missed it.

Being unable to share anything about my life with the girls that I’m living with has made me feel isolated all over again. I’m trying not to slip into a depression again, like before I met Dom. I need to be stronger than that for the baby and for him.

“Girl, why do you look so sad today?” Diva asks me as I join her on the floor of the common room in the middle of the four-room apartment complex. The design of the apartment reminds me of the quads they had on my school campus.

I start stretching, trying to get deeper into the movements like Diva does. I look at her sweet face, with her big, kind eyes, and decide to say something about the baby for the first time. “I’m worried about my baby,” I admit, and then instantly start crying.

“Baby?” she says, her brow furrowed in confusion. “You have a child that’s not living with us?”

I shake my head and press my hand to my belly to indicate what I mean. I’m crying too hard to speak.

“Oh!” Diva says with understanding. She gets gracefully up out of her stretching position, and comes to hunker beside me on the floor.

She wraps her strong arms around me and rocks me a little as I cry. Its feels good to say something to someone about the pregnancy, even if I know it’s a risk I shouldn’t expose myself to. “Does the daddy know?” she asks.

I shake my head.

“Do you still talk to the daddy?” she asks me next, still rocking me.

I nod. “Y…yes.”

She’s quiet for a moment. “Well, girl, that’s one step ahead of most of us in this life.”

We both laugh a little at that, and she sits back. She hands me a box of tissues from the coffee table, and I blow my nose.

“You going to keep it?” she wants to know.

I nod again. “Oh, yes.”

She nods back. “You’re brave,” she says with a shake of her head. “But I can tell that about you. You’re tough.”

I blink at her. I don’t think of myself that way at all. After all, I was raised to be soft and pretty, ornamental. My mother had groomed me to get a rich husband and do volunteer work all my life.

I wasn’t raised to be competent. I didn’t even know how to get a job, and Dom had to offer me one.

I don’t think of myself as strong, but the fact that Diva, who said she spent multiple years of her life on the streets, thinks I’m strong speaks volumes about how much I don’t know about myself.

“I guess I don’t see myself that way,” I say with a loud sniff.

She smiles at me. “Us girls have to look out for one another,” she says. “You need anything at all, you and the baby, you tell Diva, okay? I’m here for you, boo.”

“Thank you,” I say to her, and I mean it. I think about my silly, rich friends and I realize that none of those girls actually ever cared about me.

They didn’t even know me. All they knew was that I was from a wealthy family and that I liked to drink. That was all that we ever had in common.

Diva, who my mother would have turned her nose up at, is the first real friend that I think I have ever had.

It doesn’t matter that I don’t know her real name or that she was homeless before she started dancing for Dom’s club. She’s a real, genuine, caring person who I can trust.

“Are you taking your vitamins?” she asks me next. She wags a finger at me. “Babies need those prenatals. Most of us girls take them to keep our hair and nails pretty, so they’re in the cupboard up there by the sink if you need some.”

I blink. It didn’t occur to me that I might need to take vitamins. I feel stupid as I nod and say, “I better start taking them.”

“You can start now,” Diva says. She does a tumbling roll to rise to her feet and goes into the kitchen. She gets down a little pack of vitamins for me and a glass of water. As she passes them to me, she squeezes my hand. “We all look out for each other here, boo. Remember that.”

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