Page 34 of My Mafia King

I never asked about her when I talked to my Italian cousins, and I didn’t travel back until my parents died and I had to take care of some family business.

The area looked the same as if not a day had passed, but not all people were there.

I caught up with that chatty cousin, and he gave me the rest of the story, and it wasn’t good.

The year after spending my summer there, the woman and her daughter moved away. She couldn’t keep up with the responsibilities of their farm, and the harvest wasn’t enough to keep them afloat.

It became unmanageable, so she sold it.

I don’t know how much money she’d gotten from selling her property, but whatever it was and whatever else she could scrape together went back into paying their debts.

It was bad all and all.

And then her daughter caught some local mobster’s eye, who made her mother a proposal.

Her daughter in exchange for a roof above their heads and some protection.

Had she not done that, someone worse than him would’ve grabbed her daughter and perhaps trafficked her.

The woman thought it was a good deal, so she handed her daughter to him. She was barely seventeen. And I don’t know what happened to her after that.

Frankly, I don’t want to know.

She got married and began her life with that man. He was close to her father’s age had he been alive.

Later, people said she was kidnapped and eventually trafficked anyway.

Others said she’d been executed with her husband after he got into a bad deal with some nasty people.

Whatever it was, she was gone.

My cousin directed me to the cemetery, where fresh flowers sat on her grave, and her picture was encased in the tombstone.

My heart stopped when I saw her.

She was even more beautiful than I remembered her.

Her long, unruly hair framed her face, and her lips were curved into a soft smile. Like she was smiling at me.

As if she knew I’d be there one day, looking at her and recollecting those hours I’d spent with her.

I had a hard time believing she was dead.

I had a hard time convincing myself I was truly looking at her burial place.

It was insane. Her story was insane.

And I sat there and tried to understand why life would go so bad so fast.

How that summer that seemed like any other summer would be the last good thing before tragedy struck.

Only a few years back, she was this pretty, soft-spoken girl who needed a friend. And I was friends with her that summer, and then our story pulled away from us as life had different plans for us.

I lost my parents. She lost her life.

As much as it pained me, I tried to imagine her life with that older man and the suffering she had gone through.

Vindictive anger and senseless madness had ravaged my soul. I felt responsible for what had happened to her and enraged to the point of insanity because I couldn’t foresee it.

---