Chapter 11
GINA
After the horrors of the afternoon, I yank off my wig and club outfit as soon as I get home. Then I take a long, spiritually cleansing shower.
While I’m drying off, Dante texts me. He says he’s invited his brothers to dinner and that Ciro will orchestrate all the details.
And that all I have to do is show up.
When Alice calls to hear an update about my ‘glamorous’ New York life, I tell her about shopping with Angie in SoHo.
But otherwise, I keep it vague.
Especially when she asks about the wedding night.
“Come on, Gina, spill,” she implores. “We always tell each other everything!”
Alice is right. We always did tell each other everything. But I can’t explain Dante to myself, let alone my best friend. At least not yet.
Instead of answering her, I explain I must get ready for the dinner party. Which is partly true.
Once I’m dressed, I hear the pleasant sound of Dante joking with his brothers and smell the aroma of baking pizza. I realize the party has started.
As soon as I enter the living room, Dante’s middle brother Lorenzo heads towards me with a dazzling smile, taking my hands in both of his.
“Good evening to my amazing new sister-in-law.”
I manage a smile. “I don’t know how amazing I am yet,” I tell him. “I haven’t been proven.”
“You’ll do just fine,” says Luca, the youngest brother, coming to shake my hand.
Then he kisses me on both cheeks, as if this is an afterthought.
I sense Luca is not as effusive as Lorenzo. But they both seem sincere in the way they welcome me.
“Wow. I grew up an only child, and here I am hit with two brothers at once. This is going to be a major step.”
“I always wanted a little sister. But I’ve got to be honest,” says Lorenzo, still with that broad smile. “Now that you have Dante as your husband, he’s your boss.”
I smile, but inwardly I cringe. Boss?
It’s only been a few days since I left Irvine for the Big Apple to take my place in its biggest crime family. It’s taking a while to get used to this male dominance.
Back in Irvine, Mom was the ruler. Dad silently played out his role as the slightly balding tax accountant, always burrowed up in his office, crunching numbers.
At least that’s the answer he always gave me when I asked what he did all day. “Crunching numbers, kiddo, crunching numbers.” Even then, it sounded like a boring way to spend a lifetime.
There’s a bustling sound from the kitchen, and Ciro lays out a series of Neapolitan-style pizzas on the island table.
Even from here, I can see the melted mozzarella and grilled tomatoes. As a pizza aficionado, I can tell by the aroma alone that this is going to taste incredible.
“That pizza smells good,” says Lorenzo, actually rubbing his stomach.
I’ve never seen anyone do that outside of a TV sitcom. But Lorenzo strikes me as the kind of man who grabs for the gusto life has to offer.
“Shall we dig in?” he asks me, leading the way to the open kitchen.
There, I’m surprised to see Ciro wearing a frilly pink apron.
“Yo, Ciro,” teases Lorenzo. “You look like a Julia Child drag queen. Get Dante to buy you a decent apron.”
“Leave him alone, boys,” says Dante, smiling himself now. “The man knows what he’s doing. What he wears is nobody’s business.”
Surprised to see Dante in such a good mood, I flash my husband a tentative smile.
What brought this on after the tension earlier this afternoon? It must be that his brothers are with us, I think to myself.
Dante seems to be a different man when he’s around them.
I stand back to let the men fill their plates first. “Never get in the way of a hungry man,” my mother always warned.
But Lorenzo hands me my empty plate with a bow and ushers me forward. I take an extra one, to fill Dante’s at the same time. When I serve him first, Dante looks up at me in surprise.
“Thank you,” he says. Our fingers briefly graze as I hand him the plate. I feel something like an electric live wire shoot through my body, from my erect nipples to the still tender area between my thighs.
Does Dante feel the sexual charge too?
He must.
He already knows my body as well as his own.
Still flushing at the memory of how he touched me at his office, I turn my attention to Ciro.
He’s holding up a bottle of wine. “Gentlemen, Signora Ricci, would you care for wine with your pizza?”
Though I’m not much of a wine drinker, something about the label captures my attention.
I walk toward Ciro to see it more closely.
I recognize the label at once. The wine is from the Ricci family estate in Sicily, where I first laid eyes on Dante seven years ago.
For me, it was love at first sight.
Dante hadn’t noticed me at all.
It felt like a slap at the time.
At the time, I tried to reason with myself, reminding myself I must have been just a kid in his eyes. And he was on his honeymoon, visibly obsessed with his beautiful wife Mary.
The memory of his unrequited love stings just as hard now as it did then.
I take a deep breath and remind myself I’m his wife now.
Mary’s dead.
I’ve ‘won’ him in the end.
But whatever win it might be feels hollow.
“Signora Ricci, would you like some wine?” Ciro asks, fetching a sparkling glass with an elegant gesture.
“With pleasure,” I say, accepting the glass and taking my seat near Dante.
The men eat their pizza and salad enthusiastically, but in silence. Feeling a need to fill the void, I turn to Luca.
“How do you like Boston?” I ask Luca. “I hear you’re studying at Harvard.”
“I love it. I live in what’s called the Back Bay. It’s a historic neighborhood. Maybe you and Dante will visit one day,” he says.
“Sounds fun. I’d like that,” I say, looking over at Dante. But he’s too busy with his pizza to acknowledge me.
All the Ricci men, I notice, eat pizza with forks and knives. Their mother must have been some stern disciplinarian.
“Hey, California Girl,” says Lorenzo, flashing one of his ready smiles once he’s finished his pizza. “Do you miss your hometown?”
“Not really,” I say with honesty. “Irvine was boring compared to New York. Today Angie took me shopping in Soho. It was an eye-opener. So crowded. It’s amazing how many people can fit on one square block.”
“I thought Irvine was a big city,” says Luca.
“Yes, but it’s spread out. You have to drive everywhere. And it’s boring, so boring.”
“I introduced myself to your mother,” says Lorenzo. “Nice lady. She seemed overjoyed to be back to her East Coast roots. Dante never told us why she left. Will you?”
“Uh, sure,” I say, after looking at Dante for permission to proceed. Dante nods slightly.
“To be honest, I don’t know the full story.
Just that it’s ridiculously romantic. My West Coast dad traveled to NYC for some sort of tax convention.
Mom fell in love at first sight. Then her family cut her off in shame, lest the New York organization cut them off too.
In those days, there was a lot of rivalry between the East and West coast.”
My eyes sweep over the brothers.
“My mom’s so grateful your dad decided it was high time to unite the two branches of the organization,” I say, looking at Dante.
Dante nods. “It was his last act as reigning don,” he says, crossing himself at the mention of his father. The gesture surprises me. He doesn’t strike me as a religious man.
Luca breaks the silence with a question. “If Irvine was so boring, what did you do for fun?”
“Surfed. And hung out with my best friend, Alice. She was my next-door neighbor. I worked part-time for her parents.”
“Doing what?”
“Waiting tables,” I say after a brief hesitation. The Riccis are a wealthy family. If they look down on me for this admission, so be it.
“Alice’s family owned a restaurant. As kids we watched it being built from the ground up. Just last year it received a Michelin star.”
“I worked as a server, too,” says Lorenzo, calming any insecurity I might have had about my part-time job.
“Dante made me,” he adds, with a good-natured grin. “He said it would be a good way for me to understand people. But reading people was always my skill.”
“True enough,” says Luca, pointing his loaded fork at him.
“But Dante, you’re the one who should have been a server,” says Lorenzo. “You don’t have much insight into the human psyche at all.”
“Au contraire, middle brother,” says Dante, pointing his fork at his sibling. “My mind is more calculating than a master chess player’s.”
“That’s right,” says Luca. “He’s won every chess game I’ve ever played with him. And I’m the one with the math smarts in the family.”
I smile, watching the brothers spar. That’s what I missed growing up: siblings, friends, even cousins.
Mom carefully monitored all my interactions. Alice has been my friend since we were toddlers because she lived next door. That’s the only reason Mom allowed me to get close to Alice’s family. Everybody else had to stand a mile away.
I was taught at a very early age to keep our family business private. Alice knew my dad was a tax attorney. But neither she nor her family knew he worked for the West Coast mob.
“Shopping with Angie must have been fun,” says Luca, breaking the silence. “Spending sprees with Dante’s AmEx card were the best part of Mary’s—”
When he catches the fierce expression on Dante’s face, he shuts his mouth. Then he quickly finishes his pizza slice to give his mouth a task to prevent him from talking.
“Shopping with Angie is always good fun,” says Lorenzo diplomatically, turning the conversation.
“Gina will need to shop again,” says Dante, turning his attention to me.
“Next Tuesday she’ll join me at the dinner party Silvio’s throwing at the Long Island house. She’ll need something suitable to her station.”
“Uncle Silvio has a home in Long Island?” I ask.
“It’s not his house,” says Lorenzo with an irritated tone. Dante shoots him a sharp look.
“What I mean to say is that the house belongs to the three of us. We brothers all grew up there. So did our dad.”
“So why does Silvio have the house now?”