The Spia Family Presses On (28 page)

“Mia?” a voice called behind me. I turned, and there jogging toward me was Adonis, or Giuseppe, if I wanted to use his formal name. I preferred Adonis. It had that ethereal quality that I so needed at the moment. Thinking he was just another Wise Guy in my sea of Wise Guys was simply too disheartening.

So yes, it was weird that he was calling me by my name and was jogging toward me—my own personal fantasy coming to life
—
but in this family nothing surprised me anymore.

The morning sun glistened off his shiny hair, which was loose now, and strands curled around his face and down his neck. His white T-shirt clung to that incredible chest, and his muscled arms appeared to have enough strength to pick up several of our olive bins with one of those luscious arms tied behind his back. The vision was sufficient to make me want to run right for him and tell him to take me away from all of this madness.

Oh wait, Adonis was part of the problem. He was a suspect even though he said he didn’t whack Dickey. There was absolutely no evidence that I should believe this imported dude.

Pity, we could have had so much fun.

Adonis slowed as he came closer. I quickly pulled on my heavy gloves wanting it to appear as if I’d been working all morning. Why I wanted him to think this, I didn’t actually know, but I decided to go with it.

“Hi,” I said.

“Buon giorno. Sono Giuseppe Nardi,” he said with a little bow.

“Buon giorno,” I said in my best Italian. “Somehow I didn’t think I’d be seeing you this morning.”

“Ah, but I can no go home. Maybe I stay. Make my home, you know?” His eyes were the color of a Farga olive from Spain. A light green color when harvested early, but a sweeter oil when left on the tree to turn a dark purple which made the oil sweet and light with hints of almond. I wondered if he tasted like almonds.

Wait. Did he just say he was making this his home?

“Excuse me? But what did you just say?”

“That it is good to see you again.” He smiled and the earth moved. All right, maybe the earth didn’t move, but it should have. The man was a sexy menace to my otherwise unstable world.

“No. I mean about making this your home. Are you staying somewhere in Sonoma?”

“Yes. I stay in your mama’s house. She got a nice house, your mamma. Many rooms.”

This was not a good idea. This man, no matter how much I wanted him, was an active member of the mob and we didn’t allow active members to live on our land. It was the only thing that kept us from FBI scrutiny, and we had all agreed to this when we first settled here eight years ago. No way was Adonis
—
regardless of his spectacular smile or his Farga eyes or those incredible arms
—
going to change that. My mom was like a kid who took in stray animals, only these were stray thugs.

Possibly not the best idea.

“You could have one of the apartments over the shops. Two of them are available right now, but the apartment comes with certain restrictions. Uncle Ray will have to fill you in with the details. You may not like our rules,” I told him.

And there it went. My entire ship had just plummeted to the ocean floor pulling me down with it. I had asked an active mobster to give up his toughness and join the recovering “family.”

Yeah, like that was going to happen.

It was as though I had no control over my words, my thoughts or even my actions. It was almost as if I was drinking again, but I was stone sober. Not a good sign for my future.

“Ah, I go see Ray. This is good. Grazie.”

Deep inside, I knew how wrong this was, but I couldn’t help myself. The guy had some kind of magnetism that turned me into his slave. I grinned my approval.

Now that I had his attention, I thought I might as well ask a few questions. “By the way, last night, you said you had asked Dickey for something. What was that something that he refused to give you?”

“Why you want to think of such things? It is a beautiful day, yes?”

“Yes. It’s a beautiful day, but I was just wondering, that’s all.”

He threw me a wicked smile. “That is why I stay. I can not go back to my country without this thing. If I do
—
” He ran his index finger across his neck and made a slicing sound. “But maybe you know something you maybe want to tell me.”

“About Dickey?”

“Yes, about the something?”

“The something?”

“Yes.”

“No. Not a thing . . . about the something.”

I moved and the ring tickled my cleavage. It gave me a shiver. “I have work to do,” I told him.

“Ah, yes. The olives. I will help with this tree.”

He pulled on the gloves that were stuck in his belt behind his back. “I go up the ladder and pick. It is better this way.”

“No, thanks,” I said and grabbed hold of both sides of the ladder and carefully climbed to get up into the tree. I liked to pick up high. The olives were a little riper on the top of the tree and came off the branches easier. Plus, I could smell the olives from up there.

Call me strange, but I loved picking olives. I always felt at peace up in an olive tree. Some of my best memories of my dad were in Italy during a harvest. We had spent the entire day together picking olives, him training me on what a ripe olive looked like as opposed to a rotten one, or an overripe one. How to use a rake. How to secure my ladder in the tree. How to let go and trust the limb to support me.

That one day had begun my love for olives and olive oil.

“It is a big orchard. Many trees,” Adonis said.

I carefully raked the thin branch clean, the olives gently falling into my bucket then I turned slightly to get a look at Adonis, who stood off to my right.

That’s when I heard it, a hint of a crack, almost a whisper, and as if in slow motion, the rung broke under my feet and I grabbed for the tree, but I couldn’t quite hold onto it. My gloves were too cumbersome. I felt myself slipping out of the tree and with one more, sharp crack, I suddenly plopped right into Giuseppe’s open arms. Then we both toppled to the ground. Me lying prone on top of him.

For a moment, neither of us said anything. I was simply trying to catch my breath and understand what had just happened.

Then he spoke in Italian, “Dear God, are you all right?” And he began running his hands over my body. A pleasant sensation if I hadn’t just nearly died.

I pushed him away. “I think I’m okay.”

Funny how I suddenly could understand him. I guess my Italian significantly improved when death, or broken bones were imminent.

He switched to English. “Don’t move. I get the help.”

“Everything okay over there?” Maryann yelled from the next tree.

I sat up. “Yeah. Just lost my balance. I’m fine.”

“You need my help?”

“Nope. We’ve got it covered.”

“Okay,” she said and that was that. Nothing short of a broken appendage stopped Maryann from picking. She was like a one woman machine. Every year we had a contest to see who picked the most olives and Maryann always won.

“I carry you to bed,” Giuseppe said.

“What? No,” I told him, but I clearly liked the vision. “I’m fine. Really. But I wouldn’t be if you hadn’t caught me. Thank you.”

“It was my pleasure,” he said with a sensual smirk.

He stood and extended a hand.

When I was back up on my feet, I went straight over to the tree to check out the branch. I couldn’t understand it. I had never fallen from a tree. I was always so careful.

As soon as I walked closer I could see what had happened.

“Ah, the ladder, she was rotten,” Giuseppe said.

“Impossible. I just bought it this year.”

He leaned it back from the tree, tilted it on its side and there it was. We both saw it.

Someone had cleverly cut the very rung I had been standing on. Not all the way through, but just enough so that after I stood on it awhile it would break.

I was just about to collapse in a torrent of hysterics when he said, “This is not so good. You have an enema.”

“Enemy,” I corrected, chuckling at his bad English.

He smiled, shrugged and we laughed out loud. One of those tension releasing kinds of laughs. All I could think of was what a great laugh he had. The man was a total charmer and I was a sucker for a charmer.

He slipped his hand under my chin. “When you smile you look just like your papa.”

His words felt like a slap. I backed away from his touch. “My papa? How would you know that?”

My heart raced, and there was a lump in my throat. I could feel my entire body stiffen. How could this man know my dad? That seemed totally impossible. In my blind lust for his touch, I must have misunderstood him. My dad was one of the mysteries of my life. As far as I knew, no one knew if he was alive or dead. It seemed impossible that this Young Turk could know anything about him when my own family didn’t.

He held a finger over his mouth. “Shhh,” he whispered, turning away from Maryann, and the rest of the pickers. I pulled off my gloves and followed right beside him, anxious to hear what he had to say.

“Your papa, how you say? He no can come out. Too many enemies in America, but he got a lot of friends in Italia.”

It just seemed impossible for this Italian import to know where my dad was living when we had been looking for him since I was twelve. How could this be true? I needed more information.

“So,” I said. “You never actually saw him?” I figured this Turk didn’t know what he was talking about.

“Ma-sure. Your papa, how shall we say, an important man in Calabria. He send me here, you know, to ask for the . . . ring and if he no give, then to do some work.”

I decided to play along with this elaborate hoax. It had to be, right? “Do some work on Dickey?”

He shrugged and bobbed his head in complete gangster fashion letting me know I was exactly right, but not really saying it out loud. “I call him. We meet. We talk and he say no. Then before I can, you know . . . another person do my work.”

“But why did my father want Dickey’s ring?”

He shrugged again, grinned and looked at me as if I was the silliest person alive. “I no ask this kind of question. I am a picciotti d’onore, a soldier. I follow the orders from the capobastone.”

It hit me like a ton of olives! I was convinced he was telling me the truth. My own father, the man who had disappeared like Jimmy Hoffa, was not only alive and well, but he was some kind of boss in the worst mob Italy had to offer, ‘Ndrangheta, and he had put out a hit on his own cousin, Dickey.

I so needed a drink.

Fifteen minutes later, after having picked only slightly more than a bucketful of olives, I called it a day. Giuseppe packed my now broken ladder back in my truck and I left him on the side of the road with Federico giving him picking orders.

I was on a quest for a big, overflowing glass of wine. I was absolutely going to drink it this time. And not just one glass, the entire bottle seemed like the way to go. I even decided on red rather than white. It reminded me more of blood, and blood was the word of the hour. My blood, my dad’s blood, and Dickey’s . . . we were all related, but that didn’t seem to matter in this family. Vendettas mattered more than blood, and heaven help the person who stepped in front of a personal vendetta.

I drove my truck, loaded with my viciously tampered with ladder, back to the barn and parked behind my mom’s house, completely distracted by my quest for wine.

Heading straight for the case I’d shelved in the barn the night Dickey was murdered, I figured I’d grab a bottle of Leo’s Pinot, and show up on his doorstep wearing my best rueful smile. We’d have great make-up sex and I’d be over this ridiculous sobriety I’d enforced on myself forever.

Whose idea was this sobriety gig anyway? Certainly not mine.

After my tryst with Leo, I’d return refreshed and renewed to help my mom and aunts prepare tonight’s feast. There was always a big feast the last day of our first harvest. We had one more harvest that would take place sometime in early November when the remainder of the fruit was at its peak of ripeness. That would constitute a major party, but for now, we celebrated all the hard work and the fact that it didn’t rain during the harvest. Rain during harvest is the single most destructive natural force for olives. Even a mist can hamper a successful harvest. Fortunately, neither of those scourges had taken place, so we were in for a fantastic harvest, and what looked like a profitable year.

I had phoned Lisa on my short drive back to the barn, wanting to share the news that my dad was alive and well and playing Godfather in Italy, plus I wanted to tell her the sinister details of my attempted demise, but she still wasn’t answering.

Opening the barn door, I was eager to get on with my new found sobriety freedom when I ran smack into Nick Zeleski. There were several other men in dark suits who were busy snooping around. Two police officers from Santa Rosa stood watch just inside the door. I figured the whole group must have parked in the tourist lot, and had come in through the opposite door or I undoubtedly would have seen them, even if I was utterly distracted by my desperate wine need.