Chapter 35 – Luigi
Chapter Thirty-Five
Luigi
D elphine eats some dinner and then I take her to Mikey’s guest bedroom where we’ll be sleeping for the night. My cousin has always had an unhealthy love of football, which appears to have taken over his life and every square inch of his living space.
What guest bedroom needs a framed picture of Josh Allen straight across from the bed?
If Delphine were to ride me, I would have to stare into the man’s eyes.
It doesn’t feel right. Tonight, there won’t be any riding.
Delphine crawls into bed and I don’t fight my urge to follow her and wrap my arms around her.
It will be difficult to let her out of my sight in the future after this.
I don’t know if I believe the story Renzo and Gino spun for me, but if Delphine is willing to go along with it, she must have her reasons.
Dragging unconscious Benny Gravina to our “family doctor” should be more than enough punishment for them to learn their lesson, especially if he dies along the way.
I haven’t bothered to check in because after tonight, I’m taking Delphine to an entirely new and unknown location to everyone but me for the duration of her pregnancy.
That means tomorrow, I have to sort out every miserable detail including a new OB/GYN and increased trustworthy security to ensure nothing happens to her while she’s pregnant and too vulnerable to fight for herself.
Until then, I can hold her. Delphine snuggles against me as we fall asleep together in bed… She’s mine. Perfectly mine.
I wake up in the middle of the night to my phone buzzing against my thigh.
Delphine continues to sleep peacefully, maybe even snoring.
I don’t want to move, especially when her soft ass cheeks nestled against my crotch nearly edge me to orgasm multiple times throughout the night.
But I have to take these calls. I know who it could be after the mad adventure tonight.
I shut the door to Mikey’s guest bedroom behind me as I step into the hallway and then follow an invisible thread to the side porch off Mikey’s kitchen. By the time I’m out of earshot, I answer my father’s expected phone call.
“Where are you?” He asks.
My answer remains intentionally vague, a detail he won’t miss. “Out of town.”
“Is the girl with you?”
“Don’t expect me to answer any questions about the mother of my child.”
He sighs. “I have offended you.”
“You will change your opinion once the baby comes. Until then, I’ll be keeping Delphine away from any more potential outbursts from this family.”
“I didn’t ask your brothers to kidnap her, Luigi. I swear. You’re my first born son. I might disagree with the way you do some things, but you’re a leader. Not a follower. I can’t expect you to suddenly be a different man from the one I raised.”
The worst part about listening to him say this right now is not being able to tell how sincere he really is. I’ve heard my father lie and cajole when necessary to achieve control for this family. Could he lie to his own son? Is my father that set on having an Italian mother for his grandchildren?
I can’t take that risk.
“The baby won’t be here for a couple months. If there’s a death in the family, I’ll come out of hiding. Until then, I need this space.”
He pauses for a long time. It took a lot of training for me to stop feeling pure terror during my father’s long, thoughtful pauses.
I want to trust that his initial bigoted reaction was out of surprise, not genuine commitment to hatred.
But I can’t take that risk with my blood.
Even if my father doesn’t see it yet, the baby growing in Delphine is ours. A Taviani.
“Do you want Renzo and Gino punished?” He asks. “They say you had the chance to kill them and you didn’t.”
I can imagine my father sipping whiskey at his desk as he ruminates solutions to this family problem.
My father isn’t above brutality towards his own family.
He might be questioning who deserves greater punishment.
According to our family “laws”, a series of mostly unspoken rules, loyalty to family surpasses all other expectations.
So why did my brothers, who were just educated in our ways at their Sicilian college, so easily give away their morals?
Angela always believed the old world education would only make them more depraved. Maybe she was right. Still, I don’t want them punished. Delphine defended them and although I don’t know why, I trust her judgment.
“I’ll take what they owe me when the time is right. Leave them be.”
“Who’s gonna keep the kids in line while you’re gone?” My father asks in a final plea for me to reveal… anything.
“We’re all adults. It’s only a couple months. I’ll be in touch, I swear.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to send them on a mission to somewhere bleak like Oklahoma?”
“I’m sure.”
I don’t bother asking my father what business he could possibly have in Oklahoma. Our conversation winds down and before long, it’s over. I slip back into bed with Delphine, feeling better every moment about my choice to protect her from the wrath of my family further down the line.
The only thing I’m missing from Delphine is an even deeper commitment — a promise before God and our families to be together forever.
I wrap my arms around her and press my hand to her tummy.
She doesn’t like me touching her too much, but it’s a miracle to feel the baby move.
As I touch her stomach, I feel something move.
It’s our little one. We don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl yet, but I sometimes imagine him as a boy with caramel skin, as if my skin color and Delphine’s were mixed in a paint pot.
He might be darker than that too and I wouldn’t mind as long as he was still proud to be Italian.
The baby responds to my hand moving along Delphine’s bump with even more movement. It feels like we’re communicating in a special, silent language.
“I love you,” I whisper to both of them. “I truly love both of you.”
Two Weeks Later
Her body changes so quickly that I hardly appreciate one part of her pregnancy before a new change or symptom develops.
I’m sorry I missed the beginning. I wish I could have been there for her then, so I’m working overtime to be there for her now.
Dad knows I’m out of town, but I didn’t explain more than that, and I also didn’t tell him how close I was going to be.
The place is Ithaca, NY, a sleepy town with an Ivy League school and nothing else going on except that.
It’s the opposite of Buffalo in many respects, with the main similarities being the upstate New York attitude.
My “safe house” is a small cabin out on Cayuga Lake and there are enough competent OB/GYNs in the area that I have an appointment for Delphine this Friday.
Everything between us feels good, except for my missing sister.
I have no answers about what happened to Angela, except her departure prompted Delphine to reach out to me and might be one of the only reasons she survived Renzo and Gino’s kidnapping stunt.
I can’t imagine what would have happened had Benny Gravina dragged her back to Pittsburgh or worse, over the border to Canada where I couldn’t trace her at all.
I don’t want to imagine life without Delphine.
It’s bad enough right now living without Angela.
Don’t get me wrong, she was still a nightmare of a roommate.
But she’s my sister. And the last time I let her out into the world without supervision, she lost the ability to do the one thing she loved the most. Mikey and Peter are right about being patient with her.
Did I somehow screw up by not being patient enough? It’s possible. Whatever the case may be, I won’t make the same mistakes with Delphine. I want her close to me and I want her to feel secure in our connection.
Each morning, I have to rub Delphine’s feet for a while so she can walk around without pain. I don’t envy the swelling she experiences daily, even if her anger can be difficult to deal with at times. She rests her feet in my lap as I position myself at the foot of the bed.
“Who are you texting?” I ask her.
“Nobody.”
But clearly, in the reflection of her glasses, I see blue and gray bubbles flying back and forth. She’s “not texting” this person a lot.
“Our contract requires you to remain faithful to me.”
She gives me a dirty look over the phone, distracted just long enough for me to snatch it from her. Delphine squeals and makes an effort to lunge for the phone, but it’s too late.
“Where is she?” I growl, squeezing Delphine’s phone tightly as she scratches at my forearms to get it back.
“I don’t know,” she says. “And if she finds out I told you I was talking to her, I’ll never find out…”
I hold the phone out of Delphine’s reach as she awkwardly tries to maneuver her pregnant body to grab the phone from me. She isn’t exactly the most coordinated woman while pregnant, so it’s easy for me to hold the phone out of reach and scan.
“When did this start?”
“Give it back, Luigi!” she says in the most serious voice she can muster.
“I just need to know she’s okay.”
“Give it back!”
“Fine.”
I hand it back to Delphine so she doesn’t topple over and injure our precious cargo for a hit of her addictive iPhone. Her demeanor settles immediately once her fingers grasp the phone. Delphine lays back and puts her feet right back up on my lap. This woman…
“If you somehow reveal to her that I told you, I will never forgive you.”
“I’m massaging your feet after you tried to fight me. I think I’ve earned at least one free pass.”
“You’re not getting the balls of my feet.”
“Tell me where my sister is or I’ll throw that phone into the harbor and give you a Motorola Razr. From 2009.”
“I don’t know where she is and she needs me to keep her secret until she’s ready to share it. I have my suspicions but… I don’t know for sure.”