Page 24 of Four Aunties and a Wedding

“Choi, touch wood!” Second Aunt says. “Of course not, you so silly.”

I relax a little. “So what happened to him?”

“The mafia get him to do all sort of bad thing. Stealing fromhis teacher in school. Then steal from principal office, aduh, so bad. He get find out and of course they expel him. Then his family lose face. Sooo ashame! They beg him stop, get out of mafia, mafia so bad, but no, he says must get me Mercedes. So finally they throw him out.” Second Aunt sighs and shakes her head dramatically.

“Like, disowned him?” I say.

Second Aunt nods. “So mafia take him in, raise him as their son.”

“Wow. Then what?”

“Then he get older, we hear he take over mafia, then become mafia lord, the end,” Second Aunt says simply. She stops doing Tai Chi and sits down. “Wah, feels good to stretch. Eh, where is my tea?”

“Wait.” I blink. “That’s it? That’s the story? What the—why would you tell me that story?”

Ma sighs. “Don’t you see, Meddy? Because Abi is so... he is so not impress, you know? He so small and so quiet and always mooning after your Second Aunt. But someone like him can become mafia lord, so I think mafia not that scary.”

“What? That’s not how this works! That’s why you told me the story, to tell me that even someone as lame as Abraham Lincoln could become a mafia lord? When was the last time you even saw him?”

Second Aunt barely looks up from her tea. “Before he leave neighborhood to join mafia family, maybe he fourteen, fifteen.”

“You don’t think he would’ve changed a heck of a lot since then? He’s probably really scary right now.”

They all laugh. “Oh, Meddy, you don’t know what he like. He always so shy, always so polite too, call me Big Sis,” Big Aunt says.

I grab my phone, open up a search window, and googleAbraham Lincoln Irawan. My eyes widen. Wow, how did I not know about this guy before tonight? There are over a thousand hits, most of them news articles from Indonesian news outlets.

MAFIA KING ABRAHAM IRAWAN RESPONSIBLE FOR MURDER OF HERMANSAH CAHYADI

SCOURGE OF JAKARTA ABRAHAM IRAWAN ESCAPES TO PAPUA NEW GUINEA

I open up the Images section and yep, there are hundreds of photos of him. Just as I had feared, he looks completely and utterly terrifying—he’s muscled, sure, but that’s not the half of it. There are tattoos all over his body, all the way up his neck and down his hands. He looks like the kind of person who could fuck shit up. “This him?”

My family leans over and four mouths drop open.

“Wah! What happen to him? Ih, look at all the tattoos,” Second Aunt says, shuddering.

“Aduh, so scary,” Ma says.

Big Aunt nods, eyes wide. “This little Abi?” she whispers. “Oh dear.”

“He got hot,” Fourth Aunt says. They all glare at her and she shrugs. “What? He did!”

I take my phone away and they all protest, but I lock the screen. “Look, all I’m trying to say is: mafia is freaking dangerous. Look at this guy! You guys thought you knew him, but look how he’s turned out. He’s killing people left and right. So I think we need to take Staphanie and her family seriously.”

Ma purses her lips. “Well, Staphanie and family not look like that.”

I sigh. “You have a point, but that doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous.” Seriously, why is she being so chill about this?

“Meddy is correct,” Big Aunt says, “we play safe. We go police.”

“No, we can’t do that,” I say hurriedly. “Remember? I told you how they’d tell the cops about us and Ah Guan if we canceled the wedding? We’d all go to prison, even Nathan. Even Jacqueline and Maureen!”

Big Aunt mutters a curse in Hokkien. “Terus gimana? What they want us to do?”

“They want us to have the wedding as planned and pretend that we don’t know anything so that they can take out a target.”

“What this ‘take out’ mean? Taking away? Like when you say, ‘get Chinese takeout,’ like that?” Big Aunt asks.

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