Total pages in book: 114
Estimated words: 109562 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 548(@200wpm)___ 438(@250wpm)___ 365(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 109562 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 548(@200wpm)___ 438(@250wpm)___ 365(@300wpm)
She gags, struggling for breath when I walk from the room.
Anya waits outside next to the Corvette. “I’m sorry you had to see that.” She sounds apologetic. “She has better days. Bertrand normally warns me when it’s this bad.”
I open her door. “Get in the car.”
She bites her nail as she obeys.
If I felt like killing Mary before, the urge is now a thousand times greater. She’s a waste of space, but she’s still Anya’s mother. Blood is sacred. For that reason alone, I won’t off her until she gives me a reason, and I hope to God she does.
Instead of driving home, I head to the Bronx.
“Where are we going?” Anya asks.
I don’t reply. She doesn’t speak again until I pull up at the old house with the cracked walls and peeling paint and park across the road. The number still hangs askew on the rusted gate, the nine drawing a six. An old man with a crooked back is hunched over on the lawn, hacking at the weeds with a pair of garden shears. It’s a lost battle. They’ll be twice as high tomorrow.
“Why are we here?” Anya asks in a soft voice, but I think she already knows.
I clench the steering wheel, not turning my gaze away from the man who’s too stooped for his age. “This is where I grew up.”
My gut twists, memories assaulting me. Most of those memories are only fragments now, disjointed pieces from my earliest recollections. I keep them like the childhood treasures I hid in the hollow of a tree trunk. Like those chipped marbles and broken costume jewelry with mud-encrusted cracks, random bling that I picked up in the park, they’re pretty to look at, to take out of their hiding place from time to time and admire in the light of the sun. Like those fake diamonds and broken glass, their only value is sentimental. As factual data, they’re worthless, full of holes and missing information. Full of sad parts I fight hard not to remember.
Yet I cling to those shards of my past that are like blurry black-and-white flashes from an old movie projector—my mother rubbing eucalyptus oil onto my chest when I cough through the night, a five-year-old me mowing the lawn to surprise my father when he gets home from work, and the look of pride on my mother’s face when I made my first cup of tea and served it to her with a dandelion from the garden. I’m not even sure if those glimpses of a loving family are real or if I simply fabricated them. If you lie to yourself for long enough, you eventually believe it.
Anya puts a hand on my arm, pulling me back to the present. “Is that him?”
I know who she means. “My father.”
“I’m sorry, Sav.”
Turning to her abruptly, I cup her cheek. “You don’t have to be.” Urgency infuses my tone. “This is who I am. This is where I come from. That man over there? That’s the man who hates me. So, you see, we both have pasts that we’d rather sweep under the carpet and pretend they don’t exist. You never have to be ashamed of who you are, not with anyone, and especially not with me. The only thing you should feel is pride.” I tear my hand away from her face and put the car into gear. “I sure as hell do.”
“For what you achieved?”
“For what you achieved.”
She only stares at me, and I’m glad. I prefer it that way. I don’t like to talk about my childhood or my failure to make my parents proud. I made my choices. I’m happy to live with them. Nevertheless, the pain that flays my chest wide open when I drive away is always fresh. What gets to me is seeing my father so broken and knowing he’d rather die in that hellhole than take a penny from me. I guess he’s right to hate me. A part of me never stopped blaming him for letting my mother suffer and waste to skin and bones when my money could’ve paid for the cure.
Fuck.
I don’t even know why I brought Anya here. I haven’t showed the sad, dilapidated excuse of a house to another soul, certainly not to Rachele who picks her friends and the people she associates with like she chooses her stylish outfits in the morning. She would’ve been appalled. Horrified. If she ever saw this, she wouldn’t have touched me with a ten-foot pole.
“Saverio?”
I take my eyes off the road for a second to look at Anya.
She fiddles with the strap of her bag in her lap. “Why did you tell Bertrand we’re getting engaged?”
Honestly? I have no fucking idea. Maybe it was how he judged me with that wise old gaze that said I wasn’t good enough for Anya. He was right. I’m bad for her in every way. But she already knows that too.