Page 5 of Married With Malice

More recently, Daisy became distracted by a former minor league baseball player who parks his food truck at Jones Beach. She knew him for less than seventy-two hours before running off to marry him.

I love my sisters more than life itself but occasionally it’s a challenge to be sandwiched between one sister who has the blissful brain of a woodland sprite and another who might stumble into a beehive if you don’t stop her.

However, my sisters bear no responsibility for my situation as a borderline homicidal bride who is stuck listening to our mother stammer out a very belated sex talk.

“Tell me you understand,bambolina,” she pleads.

She means business if she’s breaking out the old world terms of endearment. I haven’t heard that one since I was about eight.

With supreme effort, I bob my head. “Blood. Sheets. Don’t cry. Got it, Mama.”

I’ll nod along to anything as long as there’s an end to this encounter.

“Actually,” Brina says, “Luca will be the one getting it tonight.” Behind our mother’s back she makes an obscene gesture, like she’s stuffed with a mouthful of dick.

For that, she gets a mascara wand thrown at her face.

Brina flinches and bangs her head on the wall. Then she thinks she has a concussion and the room gets noisy between my mother fussing over Brina’s head bump and Daisy arriving with an armful of flower bouquets.

At least no one is talking about wedding night sex anymore. Small victories.

My sisters and I are the products of a mafia marriage. Giulia was scarcely out of her teens when she was handpicked to cement Albie Barone’s legacy. There’s no doubt my father was envisioning a squad of strapping sons to drop from the womb of the pretty only daughter of a Palermo mob boss.

But three years and three daughters later, an emergency hysterectomy closed up shop for good. After that, my father was just shit out of luck. If you’re married to the daughter of a Sicilian mafia don you can’t just shrug and serve divorce papers if you want to keep important parts of your body attached.

At some point it must have occurred to Albie Barone that daughters have their uses too, although he still holds stale, outdated opinions about what women are good for. While I was growing up, sometimes I would catch him watching us with a deep frown of disbelief, like he was wondering what the hell went wrong while picturing the brawny sons that should have sprung from his loins instead of us.

Inducting females into the family business was out of the question. The best old Albie Barone could come up with is trying to arrange beneficial marriages.

Not that I ever intended to cooperate with that fucking noise. I always figured if push ever came to shove then I’ve got a passport and I can borrow Brina’s suitcase of wigs from her high school theater days. Eventually my father would get tired of searching every pocket of the globe or he’d die.

Now I realize that was just the wishful thinking of youth. If mafia billionaires want to find you then you’ll be found. And then you’ll be dragged across international borders by your hair no matter how loud you scream.

Right now I can’t help but wonder where I’d be if my father hadn’t ripped away the one talent I had. My only passion.

For a fleeting second, time splits in two and I recall the sensation of gliding from one end of the rink to the other at full speed. I can feel the tingling stomach drop as my skates leave the ice for a challenging jump. I can summon the pure exhilaration of a perfect landing and revel in the thrill that I will do the same again and again and never tire.

I was fourteen when my father decided that competitive skating was unseemly. He ended my skating dreams with a casual dinnertime decree. I screamed out words of hatred and he ordered one of his bodyguards to lock me in my room. For years I wasn’t allowed to go near the ice. When I finally returned to the rink after high school graduation it was far too late to get back to competing.

This isn’t something I talk about, not even to my sisters, but my bitterness will last forever.

Meanwhile, Richie Amato is another big name mob boss in the organized crime playpen of New York. He and my father always shared mutual respect and often teamed up to keep competing interests in check. While growing up, we saw a lot of Richie and his family.

In a contest between Richie Amato and my father, it’s hard to say who wins the title as biggest chauvinistic fossil. Bet it would be a tie.

Around here, the particulars of family business have never been entrusted to the ears of women but there are plenty of rumors to pick from.

Anyone who crosses Albie Barone or Richie Amato doesn’t get to stick around and commit the same error twice. The two of them have probably killed more men than cholera.

Just last year my father’s younger brother was gunned down in a cartel-linked hit. He and Richie Amato combined forces for a revenge spree that would probably make Rambo blush.

None of those details would have interested me at all, not even the loss of my uncle, a creepy bastard who was always staring at my mother’s ass while stroking his oily mustache. However, his murder was responsible for what came next.

My father is the superstitious type. Overnight he became more paranoid than ever. His security detail tripled and no one could walk through the front door without tripping over half a dozen thick-necked human pit bulls who were skulking around with guns on their hips. For a while my father would only eat meals at home and even hired a taste tester in case someone tried to poison his pasta fazool.

In the end, what my father decided he needed the most was a permanent pact with the powerful Amato family. With that kind of combined muscle and dominance, the rest of the New York families wouldn’t dare to cough out of turn without permission.

Like my father, Richie Amato has no sons. But he did raise two nephews after their parents died. Cale, the oldest, was always expected to someday take the reins as the head of the family. Then Cale made a career change and became a farmer in Colorado instead.

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