It was the same day she’d put him on that Greyhound bus bound for Portland. It had been late at night, and they’d been riding in a taxi all over town. He remembered watching the meter creep up. Wondering why she was burning money, like they had any to spare. Mamma kept looking behind them, like they were being followed, but they weren’t. No headlights on those wet streets. Just pools of streetlight.
At the bus station, she’d bought a ticket and hustled him to the gate before he knew what she’d planned, before he could put up a proper fight. She gave him the lecture, said her piece, about how she was leaving Rudy, that she’d get away, she swore to God, but he had to be good, she had to know he was safe first. She still had things to do.
What?
he’d asked, blubbering so hard the snot ran down his face.
What the fuck do you still have to do here? Why not just come?
Watch that language, punk,
she scolded, herding him toward the entrance of the bus. Then she unclasped her necklace, the antique pendant that she never took off. She put it around his neck. It was warm from her body heat.
Keep this safe for me,
she said and hugged him from behind until he thought his ribs would crack. The bus driver said something snotty about hurrying up. Mamma mouthed off to him, but without her usual spark. Then she shoved him up the steps—
go, go, quick, quick!
into the sweetish, stale stink of the bus. Row after row of strangers’ grotesque faces peering up, full of hostility, indifference.
The bus took off, swaying and lurching. He’d looked out at her face, staring up from outside. Stark and pale, dark eyes huge, receding into the distance. The last time he’d seen her in lif.
He’d worn the necklace from that minute on, like a talisman. When Mamma died, he’d become terrified to let it get cold. He’d gotten the notion somehow that as long as the gold pendant stayed warm, he could imagine that it was her warmth. The last of her warmth.
Even though all the rest of it was in the hard ground.
Then Rudy and his goons came to the diner that morning, eighteen long years ago. Rudy had recognized the necklace and ripped it off his neck.
And that was that. Gone. That warmth had gone cold.
“Did you see my locket?” Rachel was crowing to Val, lifting up her dark curls, twirling and preening for her father. He held out his arms and she climbed up onto his lap, getting her due of kisses.
Like a drumroll on the edge of his consciousness. A crescendo of anxious urgency. Something he was supposed to do, see, understand, but what? It swelled, louder, until it filled him up. No room for his lungs to expand. Feelings pounding on the door of his higher brain functions from below. Demanding to be translated into conscious thought.
He tried to relax, open up, fishing for it. Running over everything he’d seen, thought, remembered. Mamma. Rachel’s necklace. Mamma’s necklace, warm from her body. Rachel’s delicate neck, like the stem of some heavy-headed flower, so beautiful it could break your heart.
Did you see my locket?
He closed his eyes, trying again, following vaporous trails of emotion, of thought while the drumroll got louder, the knocking more desperate. The scent of his mother’s perfume, mixed with the tang of fear sweat. Her icy hands, fumbling in the dark, struggling with the clasp. Her hands had been trembling. She’d kissed the back of his neck.
Go, go, quick, quick.
“Zia,” he said. “Remember Mamma’s necklace?”
Zia Rosa turned from a tray of cupcakes that she was frosting. “Yeah, sure. The one Rudy took. Your great-grandmother’s from the old country. A courting gift to your
bisnonna
from your
bisnonno
.”
“That was a locket, right?” he asked. “One that opened?”
She frowned. “ ’Course. Magda kept a picture of you in there. Same one I got in my wallet. A lock of your hair, too, remember?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t know it could open at all,” he said. “It never opened for me. Maybe it was soldered shut.”
Lily touched his wrist, a worried line creasing her brow. She’d caught his vibe. It made her uneasy. “What is it?” she asked.
He seized her hand. “Tell me again, Lily. Exactly what your father said at the hospital when you saw him last.”
Lily sighed. “Bruno, please. I’ve been over it a thousand times. He told me that you had to lock something, but he didn’t say what, and I have no idea what he—”
“No.” He cut her off. “No, just repeat his actual words. Word for word. No paraphrasing. Verbatim. Please, Lily.”
And the drumroll crescendo was suddenly audible to her, too.
Her face paled. She swallowed, blinking as her eyes flickered to the side, narrowing in concentration. “He said . . . he has to lock it.”
“He has the locket,” Bruno repeated softly.
Her eyes went wide. She pressed her hands to her mouth. “Oh, God, Bruno. Oh, od. Magda had a locket? And she gave it to you?”
He nodded.
“Well? Where is it?” she burst out. “Who has it?”
He shook his head. “It’s gone,” he said.
She looked around, frantically, as if the locket should be lying around in plain view. “What do you mean, gone? You mean lost? Stolen?”
“Both, in a sense,” he said.
Zia took over for him. “That filthy
figlio di puttana
Rudy, he took it,” she informed Lily. “That day they came to the diner and attacked Bruno. Three big guys, against one twelve-year-old boy who just lost his mamma.
Teste di cazzo
.”
Lily turned to him, her eyes wide. “Good God. How did you—”
“Kev,” Bruno said. “Kev beat the living shit out of all three of them. In about thirty seconds. Bam, pow, and it was over.”
Lily glanced over at Kev. He gazed back, impassive. “What about Rudy, then?” she asked. “What happened to him?”
Kev got up, snagged two unoccupied chairs from the other end of the table, and hauled them over to Bruno and Lily’s side. He took the frosting-smeared knife from Zia Rosa’s hands and placed it on the bar. He positioned the chair behind her. “Sit, Zia,” he said.
The others were starting to gather around, too. Kev pulled up the other chair, seated himself opposite them.
“What happened then was that we loaded the thugs into the back of Tony’s old pickup and covered them with a tarp,” Kev said. “Then we hosed blood into the gutter while Tony drove away with them.”
“And with the locket,” Lily repeated, as if desperately hoping to be contradicted.
No such luck. “And the locket,” Bruno echoed. “Rudy put it in the pocket of his jeans. Tony didn’t know. Kev had no clue. I was in shock.”
“Were they, um, alive?” Lily asked, delicately.
“They were when we loaded them up,” Kev said. “More or less.”
“Wishing they weren’t,” Bruno commented. “Rudy had a fork sticking out of his crotch.
Every man in the room recoiled instinctively.
“I doubt they lived out the day,” Kev said quietly. “Knowing Tony.”
Zia snorted in disgust. “After attacking Bruno? Not a chance.”
Bruno felt lightheaded. “Zia, do you have any idea where Tony took them? I knew better than to ask.”
Zia Rosa shook her head. “You know how Tony was. If anyone got in trouble, he wanted to take the rap. Plus, I was a woman.” She rolled her eyes. “He figured, three can keep a secret if two of them are dead. He took those guys out into the woods somewhere, put ’em down like dogs, and put ’em in a hole. And we ain’t never gonna know where.”
“He left around six
A.M.
,” Kev said. “He got back late in the evening. We don’t know which direction he went, or how far he drove.”
Davy harrumphed. “That’s a lot of woods.”
They all pondered gloomily how much woods.
“He might have put them on his property,” Bruno said. “That way, he’d have been more or less sure not to be seen or stumbled over.”
“True,” Kev said. “But that’s still a hundred and forty acres of rough ground lots of it steep mountain slope. A lot to dig up, without any assurance that they’re actually there.”
Bruno sagged. “Shit, shit,
shit,
” he hissed. “One little clue, and bam, the door slams shut in my face. I wish I hadn’t even thought of the goddamn locket. It’s worse now than it was before.”
“Not for me, it isn’t,” Lily said.
He looked up. Lily’s eyes were glowing. “This way, I know I’m not crazy,” she said. “And you all know I’m not lying, too. That’s worth a whole lot to me, Bruno. You can’t imagine how much.”
He swallowed, bumping over the knot of old grief. “I was already convinced,” he told her.
Her smile made his heart skip. “I know you were,” she said. “Thank you. But even so, proof is nice to have. It makes me feel, I don’t know. Less like it’s all my fault somehow.”
“I never thought that,” he insisted.
Their hands caught, twined. Clung. Wonder unfurled inside him.
Rachel’s curly head suddenly ducked under his arm and popped up between them. She held up her plastic necklace. “You lost your locket? You could have my locket if you want,” she offered.
The lump in Bruno’s throat swelled so big, he was speechless. Something about Rachel’s big, worried eyes behind her glasses in her innocent bit of a face, it just turned his screws that last brutal turn.
He grabbed the little girl, hugged her, and hid his hot face in her cloud of dark hair, struggling with all his strength not to totally lose it.
“Thank you, sweetheart,” he said thickly. “You keep your locket. It looks better on you than it would on me. Turn around. I’ll put it back on you.” He clasped the trinket around Rachel’s neck, dropped a kiss on top of her fuzzy head, and tried not to think about that last, tight hug before Mamma shoved him up onto the steps of the bus.
Zia Rosa was all fogged up, too. She gazed at the little girl and mopped beneath the lenses of her glasses, then seized a napkin from the holder and noisily blew her nose.
“Dolcettina mia, che carina,”
she burbled. “Goddamn Tony. He shoulda told me. He shoulda trusted me more. But he couldn’t. He didn’t trust nobody.”
“It’s not your fault, Zia,” Kev said.
“It just ain’t right. I know what I woulda done with them stinkin’
stronzi
. I’d have done like my
papà
used to say. Your
bisnonno
.”
Bruno glanced in Rachel’s direction. “Whatever
bisnonno
used to say, you censor it big-time, Zia,” he warned.
Bisnonno
had been a pretty hardcore kind of dude, if family legend was to be believed.
But Zia was off and running. She switched languages, thank God, letting out a torrent of picturesque and uniquely nasty Calabrese dialect. Bruno and Kev, the only ones would could understand it, glanced at each other and tried not to smile.
First shadow of a smile that he’d seen Kev crack since he got here. Maybe the worst was over. Good old Zia, always providing the comic relief. Hell on wheels didn’t begin to describe her.
When Zia wound down, red in the face, Lily poked his arm. “Translation, please,” she said.
Bruno groaned. “No way.” He gestured at Rachel. “It’s foul.”
“So paraphrase,” she urged. “Give me the gist of it.”
div>
Val laughed and put his hand behind Rachel’s shoulders. “Come, Rachel,” he said gently. “Into the playroom with you.”
When Val had herded the little girl safely out of the kitchen, Bruno concentrated to remember the sequence. “OK, so it started out with graphic descriptions of the various sexual aberrations of all the guys who came after me in the diner, most specifically their unhealthy fondness for barnyard animals. Then we moved on to these guys’ kinky long-dead ancestors, and this bit about the unspeakably obscene things they did in the woods with Santa Anna and San Girolamo—don’t ask me to explain, because I don’t get it, either. And fountains of blood, teeth flying, dismembered corpses of vanquished enemies, yada, yada, and then the part about pissing on their disassembled bones until the day of the second ascension of
Cristo Santo.
And then—”
He stopped, his mouth hanging open. Everyone staring at him while that drumroll crescendoed again. His hairs prickled. He had to consciously remember to breathe.
“Zia,” he said, as soon as he could control his voice. “That bit about pissing on the bones. Is that really something
Bisnonno
used to say? Or did you add that part in yourself?”
“Ah, nah, Papà always said that when someone got in his face,” Zia assured him. “He was
un uomo cazzoso.
Everything bugged him.”
Bruno looked at Kev. Kev was starting to smile. And nod.
“Did Tony ever say it?” Bruno persisted.
“Of course. Tony was
cazzoso,
too. Don’t you remember?”
“Oh, yeah,” Bruno said. “I do remember. And how.”
Kev’s face split into a huge grin. Bruno’s, too. He shook with laughter. At least, he hoped it was laughter. Better not to check. But he covered his face, just in case. His shoulders were shaking.
“What?” Lily grabbed his shoulder. “Is something wrong?”
“No,” Kev said. “Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s fine.”
“Then what’s going on? Why is he falling apart?” Lily yelled.
Bruno lifted his face, wiped his eyes. “I’m not. I just figured out where to dig, that’s all.”