Chapter 1 – Luigi Taviani
Chapter One
Luigi Taviani
The older you get, the harder it is to handle your liquor.
I hate going out. Drinking is pointless pain and empty calories.
Going out with a certified hot mess like my sister Angela only makes mornings more difficult.
But if I don’t take her out to get drunk, living with her turns from annoying to impossible.
I should drop her off at Alcoholics Anonymous next time. I’m shot. I roll out of bed soundlessly for my morning routine. My palms hit the floor as I land in a perfect plank. I don’t care how badly my stomach hurts, I crank out the work.
200 pushups, no questions asked. Hangover status? Irrelevant.
Once I get my body moving, memories from the previous night flood in and worse -- emotions. I hate what drinking does to me. We’re Italian, how much more drinking do we need when we chase every meal after 11 a.m. with red wine?
Around one-hundred pushups in, I hear Angela stomping around outside my bedroom door. This marks our sixth month of living together, and she’s only become slightly bearable since her feet healed enough for her to go on runs. The rest of my sister’s personality still reeks of her troubled past.
She drinks twice as much as I do, but she still gets up before noon to make my life a living hell, even when she’s out all night. She needs a boyfriend. And no, it doesn’t make me feel better that neither of us have a choice.
I’m living with my sister. I just have to accept it.
After Angela’s divorce, her ex-husband threatened to kill her and because of our truce with the Pittsburgh mafia family, we can’t do much about the threat except to keep Angela out of the bastard’s sight until he finds a new wife, or passes away.
He broke her feet. The bastard broke her feet and we can’t even kill him.
Now my 32 year old sister is my responsibility, and the one thing she loved, that might have been a profession, if not at least a hobby to get her out of my hair, she’ll never be able to do again.
Why dad thinks it’s my job to look after her and not his remains a mystery to me.
I don't care if I "don't have a family and have plenty of time to look after my sister".
And I definitely don't care that she's family either. We’re Italian, so I can’t leave her out on the streets, but I am far from happy about this.
Before I finish my last set of twenty push ups, I hear Angela's needy fists pounding on my bedroom door. Anger flares up in my chest as I push through the end of my workout, tuning Angela out as much as possible.
"LUIGI! You're out of filters!" she screeches. Her voice echoes painfully around my head. I grunt out the last few pushups, ignoring Angela's pounding as it grows louder and more intense. For a small woman, her voice sounds like a goddamn megaphone. How is she this loud, this early?
Italian families are... exactly the reason why I have no interest in starting a family of my own.
Why the hell would I want even more people banging on my bedroom door demanding coffee filters in the morning? While Angela pounds out the beat to Grindin' on my door, I find a black t-shirt that doesn't smell like a nightclub and throw it on before swinging the door open with a glare.
Angela smirks up at me with witchy green eyes. Dad’s right. Her hair makes her look… unpleasant and unattractive. Would it kill her to look better?
"Get your feminist ass to the corner store and buy filters yourself," I growl at my sister, who looks absolutely thrilled that I look like shit. "You're not as dumb as you look. You can handle it."
"Or good morning, as we say on planet earth," Angela replies, rolling her eyes and continuing to derive far too much pleasure from my misery.
I'm not in the mood for her to 'mean trouble', especially when it's enough trouble for me to look after her.
"I'm not getting you coffee filters. Drink tea."
She gapes at me like I just suggested getting shot at point blank range. I have coffee filters. I don’t know why my sister can’t find them, but I have a complete mental inventory of the contents of my home.
Like a typical Italian woman, Angela won’t let it rest – nor will she solve the problem on her own. There can’t be any other race or ethnicity of women as annoying as Italians.
"You have absolutely no respect for family," Angela says loudly, shifting straight into guilt tripping me.
Italian women are demanding, exasperating and frankly... a burden.
"Angela. I have a headache. You're a grown ass woman. Let me have a glass of water before you beat down my door."
"Can't," she says. "Dad's coming over. I need to prepare mentally."
"What?" I don’t mean to betray my immediate frustration. It’s never good to give your siblings ammunition to manipulate your emotions, especially not siblings like Angela.
Angela shrugs. "He’s probably going to chew me out about my spending–”
"What did you do?" I growl, pushing past Angela towards my kitchen and interrupting her before she can blame her perpetual screw up on our father.
I walk straight to the cabinet where I showed her the filters yesterday and slam them on the white countertops, which Angela has already covered in coffee grounds. She follows me out to the kitchen muttering some inappropriate words about me as I solve her problems for her.
Six months of living with Angela hasn’t driven me to suicide, which I find shocking on its own. The first week was the hardest. I drank every night that week and caught her drinking milk directly from the glass bottles. Angela…
We reached an agreement about the milk, but living with her reminds me of living with a very messy mouse. Perhaps a family of messy mice.
I wipe up the coffee grounds as she scurries over to my coffee maker with the snatched up filters. She looks all twitchy, which annoys me almost as much as the news that my father plans on visiting the penthouse. I sense this is Angela’s fault.
"When is dad coming," I mutter as I rub my temples and pace in front of the apartment windows as she shuffles about my coffee maker. If I have to watch her make the coffee, my impatience will kill me.
The streets are gray, and thick gray clouds cover the water. I press my forehead against the floor to ceiling glass windows, wishing I could fall out instead of having a meeting with dad while hungover.
I bought this building because of the view of the Outer Harbor, but collecting rent is a pretty sweet deal too. Dad was clear, I can’t solve my problem by giving Angela one of the vacant units.
I have to... deal with her. Watch her. Keep her close. If I didn’t know any better, I would say he wants to punish me.
"He’s coming for lunch,” Angela says, dumping way too many ounces of ground coffee into the filter before slamming a bunch of buttons recklessly until she hits the correct one. Reading the machine might work faster, but I have to choose my battles with this woman.
"You cooking?" I ask her - an innocent question, I might add.
Angela glares menacingly at me while the coffeemaker bubbles behind her. Everything that woman does is out of spite. She cut her hair short after dad expressly forbade her from doing so, she went to ballet academy and then dropped out…
Now, she's here. Creating more problems than anybody in the family needs right now, not like Angela knows about the family business dealings. Women and business don't mix.
"Why? Because I'm the woman?" Angela replies sharply as she clenches the back of her jawline and scowls at me with the hatred she normally reserves for dad.
"Because it's lunch time and we're Italians. If you don't want to cook, I'll order from Caravello’s."
Angela wrinkles her nose. "Fuck you. I make much better gnocchi than Gianna. I don't care if she was actually born in Sicily."
That was too easy.
"Perfect. I have everything you need in the fridge."
"But no girlfriend..." Angela mutters.
"Excuse me?"
"Nothing. Want some coffee, dearest brother?"
"Yes," I respond as calmly as I can, considering Angela tests me constantly. "The big mug."
Angela throws open my cabinets and tiptoes to reach my shelved mugs.
She completely destroys my system to get a mug from Buffalo University that I keep behind all my others.
I used to date this Ukrainian girl who left it behind.
It's Angela's favorite -- of course. She grabs the big mug for me -- plain, white, no fuss.
"Cream and sugar?" she offers while dunking enough white mocha creamer into her coffee to cause Type 2 diabetes.
"No. Black."
I take a bar stool at the kitchen counter and stare into the black coffee, willing my hangover away.
"Why does dad want to see you, anyways?" she asks. "I hate having him around my business, but I know he's not coming here just to grill me about my spending."
"Are you sure?" I mutter, glancing at the shopping bags from the Coach Outlet my sister left all over my L-shaped couch.
"Yes. I have my sources."
"I don't know," I grunt, taking a sip of coffee, grateful that Angela didn't make good on her threats to poison me from last night. (Long story.)
"Whatever it is, don't expect me to take your side."
"I don't expect you to be in the room when men discuss business."
Angela rolls her eyes, snatches her coffee off the counter and disappears into her bedroom, slamming the door behind her. She hates men for absolutely no reason which makes it incredibly easy to piss her off and get some peace.
I'll have enough trouble when dad gets here. I need to think.
Angela skips breakfast, but I don't. I can't. I have a routine for eating that enables me to keep 270 lbs of lean muscle on.
It's good for the family and good for my health.
I cook steak and eggs for breakfast with a side of home fries and avocado to add the additional fat required to hit my macros.
While the last of the food heats up, I tidy Angela's shopping bags and rearrange my kitchen to its natural, pristine state.