Page 5 of The Woman in the Garage

We didn’t exactly talk details about our work with the women in the family. If shit went down, we wanted to make sure they had plausible deniability if the cops ever tried to lean on them. That said, they were part of a mob family; they understood a lot of the inner workings.

Some days involved meetings. Others, working on new money-making schemes. But a lot of days were just days when we did our rounds. Meaning, we played bag man for the family, collecting the protection money from local businesses.

As a whole, the family made most of its money from the docks. And we all contributed to scoring new jobs that came through them. Or working security to make sure shit went smoothly over there.

That said, if we wanted to make more money—and we all did—we had to find our own jobs. Some legit—like Lucky’s pizza places, Luca’s restaurant, and Matteo’s wedding venue—others not so much. And when it came to mafia business, the protection racket was the oldest in the book. You give us a little cash each month; we make sure no one fucks with your business.

Normally, lower-level guys in the organization would be the bagman. But we didn’t run a crew like the New York Families. We were a small operation run entirely by blood relatives.

That meant that some of us had to do the dirty work. Most of that fell on me and my brother Dante. Sometimes on our cousin Milo, since he was the youngest and greenest of us. But Milo had been proving himself hungrier than me and my brother. He was always off doing some big job, bringing in money, proving his worth.

I was happy to have my place in the Family, but I was also happy to be somewhere in the middle in terms of work. I made more than enough money to afford a nice lifestyle.

And I liked to sleep in.

Smush nodded as she gathered all of my bathroom supplies. “Are you all done up there?” she asked.

“Yeah, but can you toss down my phone?” I asked, patting my jacket and pant pockets, realizing I must have left it on the counter.

“I better not hear it spouting some alpha-male-bullshit podcast,” she told me over her shoulder as she made her way up the back stairs to the second floor.

The house was a somewhat new purchase on my part; one I’d only made after a lot of nagging from my mother, who insistedthat no woman was going to see a future with a man who didn’t have a nice, comfortable home for her to raise her babies in.

What can I say? Giulia Grassi could be a bit… traditional about gender roles. And, hey, I kind of needed the tax shelter, so I went ahead and bought the house. I wasn’t like my brother or some of my cousins, though. I wasn’t interested in fixing up an old place. So I went ahead and bought a house that had been completely gutted and redone by the previous owners.

“Here,” Smush said, holding out my phone to me, still crooning out some Billy Joel until I slid my finger to silence it. “You know what you need?” she asked, going back to her reusable bags to start shoving them into one another.

“What’s that?”

“Some damn furniture,” she said, waving around. “You literally don’t have a dining table. Or a couch. Art on the walls. Window treatments.”

“The windows came with those built-in blinds,” I said, shrugging. “They do their job.”

“Men,” Smush said with an eye roll. “Maybe Aunt Giulia is right; you do need a wife.”

“Hey, I have you to keep the house running.”

“If you think making sure the toilet paper doesn’t run out is running a house, there is no helping you,” she said, leaving out the back door.

Alone, I did a tour of my house, trying to see it through the eyes of someone who wasn’t living there. Well, sleeping there, at least. I didn’t spend much time at home, save for early mornings or late nights.

It never really occurred to me that maybe the reason I avoided the place I called home was because it was so damn empty.

There was no place to sit and watch the games when they were on, so I just went over to one of my brothers’ places. There was no dining table, so I went to my mom’s place for dinner.

My bedroom was the only space that had any furniture, and even that was minimal. I had my bed and nightstands simply because they’d come with me from my old place. But I relied on the big overhead light because I hadn’t thought to buy lamps for the nightstands. There was only a small dresser, so everything I wore was in the walk-in closet.

Aside from when I’d first moved in, my mother hadn’t been to my place. I could just hear what she’d have to say about it if she came around this long after I’d started calling it home to find it so empty.

“What woman would want to settle down with a man who can’t even remember to buy a couch?”

Maybe she had a point.

Where the fuck did you even go to buy a couch?

I shook my head at myself as I tucked my phone in my pocket. I would figure the decorating shit out later. First, I had to go scrounge up some money from the local businesses.

The first stop on my list was Phil’s Autos. It was a place that had been around my entire life. Just a simple, old-school mechanic shop with six bays, four lifts, and a group of mechanics who seemed to know what they were doing. The place was always pretty busy, anyway.

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