Chapter 27 – Amanda
Twenty-Seven
Amanda
Just before Ethan’s bike turns onto Mallory’s street…
I know I’m about to hear something that will fundamentally change the course of my life when I see Mallory. She has no mascara on. I’ve never seen her without mascara. I didn’t know she had see-through lashes… Her entire condo smells like red wine and weed. She wraps her arms around me and greets me with a voice that sounds weak, not her usual peppy self.
“How big is this secret?”
“Red wine or white wine?” she responds, trailing her hand along the wall as she stabilizes her footing on the way to her kitchenette.
“Red.”
I’m angry enough at Ethan to drink a whole bottle of wine. Fuck it, I’ll join Mallory and we can get drunk like we did after our finals our first year in grad school. I don’t remember any of that night, but it was a nice change to forget fucking everything going on for once. I know all the psychological reasons this is a dark place to go.
But it’s either I get wine drunk or I end up in Ethan’s bed… Wanting a life with a man who is a violent, criminal redneck with an unhinged sex drive and disturbed sense of morality.
“Good,” she says. “I have this great Malbec you’re going to love. ”
I can’t tell the difference. All wine gets me the same place. Mallory pulls out a chair for me as she sets a giant wine glass in front of me. We bought those together at Marshall’s. Mallory fills the wine glass so tall that it just looks like a drunk text waiting to happen. She finishes off the bottle by pouring it into her glass and she sits across from me.
“I have to leave Boston,” Mallory groans.
“Because of the secret?”
“Yes,” she says. “But it’s… I only didn’t tell you to protect you.”
My heart pounds. Ethan was right?
“I didn’t think… I didn’t connect the dots because it’s just been so many years. I’m thirty-eight. I left Pittsburgh at nineteen and I haven’t looked back once.”
“Deep breaths. I’m listening.”
Mallory’s eyes well up and she mutters, “Fuck,” before chugging about half her wine glass. She presses her hand to her chest as the wine burns down her throat and then she looks at me again, tears gone.
“My last name isn’t Knowles. It’s Corsini.”
“Okay… Your parents got divorced, right?”
A name change? How is it a revelation that a white girl has some Italian in her? I try to look sympathetic, especially because Mallory is drunk and looks scared to death after saying that name out loud. Corsini. It doesn’t mean anything to me.
Mallory shakes her head. “Not divorced. My dad… had my mom… killed.”
Her kitchen is quiet except for the appliance hum.
“He’s the leader of the biggest mob family in Pittsburgh and… those guys who broke in were after anyone close to me, hoping to get to me or send a message. I don’t know what my father wants.”
My father. She says it with such disgust. I’ve been a therapist for long enough to know that nobody talks about their own blood with so much hatred in their voice unless they have a good reason. I knew Mallory wasn’t close to her family, but I didn’t know how deep it went.
“He has people everywhere and I don’t even know if I’m safe right now. I just… I only put it together when you told me what Ethan said when you came back to Boston.”
The news hits me hard. My professional experiences of the past prepared me well for listening to shocking confessions, but I still didn’t see this coming. Mob family? She never seemed like she had unlimited money, but she did wear fur coats sometimes… Her heart seems so heavy and this secret doesn’t make her a bad person. She wanted to keep me safe and I would have done the same for her, if hiding my identity would have kept her safe.
It’s not like she’s a criminal herself.
“If you’re in danger, we should talk to Ethan. Or go to the police.”
“No!” Mallory says. I can’t tell if she’s this intense because of the alcohol, or if she’s serious about us not getting help. “We can’t go to the police.”
“Okay. We can talk to Ethan, then.”
“Do you trust him?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“This is about our lives, Amanda.”
“I know.”
“So do you trust him?”
She sips her wine. I can’t believe Mallory’s ass right now.
“Is now the time to talk about guys?”
Mallory is that friend who will be fighting for her damn life but make time to talk about your situationship. She uses a stronger word when clapping back at me.
“If we’re going to trust your boyfriend with my life and going up against a fucking crazy Italian mobster… yes.”
Boyfriend? When did I ever call Ethan my boyfriend? I hate the smug look on Mallory’s face and I pour some wine down my throat to avoid the question and catch up to her drunkenness.
“We don’t need to bring this up.”
Mallory grins. “Sounds like we do.”
“Shouldn’t we be packing duffel bags and getting strapped?”
“Is that what your man has been teaching you?”
“He kidnapped me.”
Mallory shakes her head like I’m the crazy one in this situation.
“He saved you,” she says.
I’m too scared to ask if she uses this logic with her clients.
“He’s… a country boy. He’s in a biker gang. He’s white.”
“So? I’m white.”
“You know what I mean…”
“He’s a criminal. He’s hot. ”
“Mallory, ew.”
“Listen, he’s not my type. I prefer the bad boys who go rock climbing and disappear to hike the Appalachian trail.”
She means very skinny white boys with ponytails. Not my type at all.
“He’s… I guess I trust him.”
“Was that so hard?”
“Yes.”
“Have you told him how you feel?”
“How I feel? Mallory, don’t be gross. I don’t have feelings for him.”
She laughs. “You are crazy.”
I raise an eyebrow. Mallory has always been the crazier one between the two of us.
“I’m not.”
“You haven’t exactly tried very hard to get away from him.”
“Mallory!”
“You made it over here tonight. So no doubt, he screwed up but… I don’t think you would care unless you liked him.”
“Ethan is a total pig.”
“Who would do anything to protect you and has an insanely perfect body.”
“Life isn’t just about that.”
“He also moved you to a nicer part of Boston and he simps around you all the time like a lost puppy. You literally have a 6’5” bad boy wrapped around your finger. Most women can’t even get their vibrator to keep a charge. It’s so bad the robots have turned against us.”
Mallory’s complaint is suspiciously specific but… she has a point about Ethan moving for me and the way he looks at me. I’ve caught him giving me that lost puppy look a few times.
“Okay…”
“Do you love him?”
“Mallory!”
“What? It’s better than talking about my shitty ass family?”
Mallory sighs and then chews on her lower lip. I feel the weight of her secret and sense that her fear is totally genuine, even if I don’t know the depths of the story. It makes sense that we were drawn to each other. We both have our own reasons for seeking distance from our families.
“I’m sorry,” I muster up eventually. Because I’m still nursing my own surprise and unsure how you comfort her friend that her mob family apparently wants to murder people in her life – possibly her.
“The mob is extremely sexist,” Mallory says. “My father wanted to marry me off to some dickhead twice my age when I turned eighteen. My brothers inherited cars and office buildings and strip clubs… but I was nothing more than an object to be sold.”
She sips more wine. I’ll need some more too if I want to hold space for her without making this situation about the shock I still feel from finding out about my best friend’s family secret.
“You made it out though,” I offer her. “And if you did it once, you can do it again.”
“True,” she says. “But I… If my dad wants me back, there must be a reason for it, because I’ve been gone twenty years.”
And she says he killed her mother. Geez. I don’t know how anyone could forgive that. I put a hand on Mallory’s forearm. Tears well up again, but she tries to suppress them.
“I was so stupid to think I could ever get away. I grew up in that life. With a dad who missed Christmas dinner so he could go rip fingers off his enemies. They talked about life like it was cheap. All they cared about was money and power… I don’t want to face it, Amanda.”
“Do you know what they want with you? Is it something that… I don’t know, maybe something a lawyer could handle?”
It might sound slightly dumb, but mob families operate at least partly above the law. Even Ethan’s criminal friends must have their legitimate businesses, otherwise we wouldn’t have our apartment or the one we stayed at with Deb out in Brooklyn.
“I don’t know if they want me for revenge or for some other purpose. But the night before I left… my own father organized for my future husband to rape me. I never want to see him again.”
“Then we’ll leave Boston. We can take the practice with us and…”
Mallory shudders and buries her face in her hands. “We can’t. We can’t. Because they know my name. They’ll always have this power to find me and hunt me down either through my job or my name. It’s too late.”
“What do you mean, Mallory?”
“I either go alone or I go back to them.”
I hear a loud thud from outside Mallory’s front door. I flinch, but she’s too drunk to notice the sound at first.
“Did you hear that?”
“Huh?” Mallory asks.
“Do you have a gun?”
“I’m a Boston liberal, Amanda. What do you think?”
She’s also a white woman in a mob family, so I would think her first choice would be using her second amendment rights to protect herself.
“Does your neighbor come home around this time?”
“I don’t hear anything,” Mallory says.
Then we both jump, because a sharp elbow collides with Mallory’s front door, splitting the old wood open. My nails dig into Mallory’s forearm and her eyes meet mine, wide and afraid. Why the hell did I leave Ethan’s house without a gun?
* * *