12. — mother, may I.
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Staten Island, New York
Nico, Ashbourne Academy Assembly Hall
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“Francesca Dove Gallo!”
While the speaker at the podium went down the list of Frankie’s honors and achievements as a graduate, Nico stood to clap and holler his praise for the beauty strolling down the aisle leading toward the stage.
Carina stood beside him, also clapping. She stopped long enough to whistle at the same time her husband did two rows down.
Both searched for the other instantly at the sound.
One turning back. The other, looking down.
“There you go, baby girl,” Nico murmured, still clapping. Frankie’s confident walk in her cap and gown, and six-inch heels did something to him. He tampered the sudden possession building in his chest down, knowing it wasn’t the time or place. “There you go.”
“One of my proudest achievements, right there,” Carina said to his right. “Not that I’m sure I have any right to claim her or say so, at this point.”
Nico tried not to respond. They hadn’t spoken since the fight, and he didn’t know where to fucking begin with his...mother.
Nico couldn’t help himself, asking, “You mean Frankie?”
Carina sighed, smiling as Frankie shook hands with the three faculty members and took her diploma at the end. She stood for a picture, provided by the event coordinator to the parents. Then, she headed back for her seat.
“Her as a whole? No. That walk in those heels, the way she doesn’t see a soul that she doesn’t want to, though,” Carina replied.
“That’s all me. I didn’t realize how much until lately.
I mean, I did know. I just...I think seeing her graduate is a full circle moment for me. The whole last few weeks, really.”
“Let me guess, you bought her first pair of heels?”
“God, no. Her daddy did that. Let me just say, she has expensive taste, and for that, you can thank the both of us. The first time I met her, she had these little boots on with a one-inch heel. Chunky, you know. Safe for a kid. She liked mine better, though. Told me so. I guess they were prettier, or something. I can’t remember exactly what she said. ”
Her tone said she did remember.
Nico and Carina finally took their seats along with Salvatore and Sissy lower down after Frankie returned to her seat. .
“She watched me prep for Fashion Week once, shortly after Sal and I married. My last Fashion Week. Ever. I was seconds from death from how that prep felt. They had me walking in patent leather and platform stilettos for the last show. Down three steps to hit the runway. I was freaking out.”
“So, you were really prepping,” he noted.
Carina’s head bobbed. “Oh, yeah. Barely drinking water. Not eating a fucking thing. Already being told I was too old to be doing it. And then there she was, all little and observant in the corner. She watched me walk the hallway a few hundred times, easily, and never said a word.”
Nico remembered Frankie very well at that age, as finding her under the table when they were little seared itself into his memories.
“Sal sent me a video clip a couple of days later. Just before I had to close the last show I ever walked in. There she was, practicing her walk in that hallway, just like me. I would have made every call, done anything to make it possible had she one day decided to model or do runway. She’s got that baby doll, innocent look about her, but the attitude, my God.
They would’ve eaten her up. She could’ve really killed it. ”
“I guess she never did, huh?” Nico asked.
Carina snorted then. “Hell no. Way too busy chasing a ball, even in heels sometimes.”
That made him grin.
“Didn’t matter,” Carina added after a moment, “because she never wanted to be me, not really. She just wanted what I had. That je ne sais quoi, as Sissy would say. She got it, after a while.”
Another graduate’s name had a few people close to them up on their feet to clap and yell just as they had. Unfortunately, the noise gained the attention of someone else that Nico had done well to hide up until then.
Sassy, the old, white pom-poodle mix, forced her head up and out of the drawstring shoulder bag Nico had carried into the place without as much as a glance from anyone else. Carina noticed the dog immediately, barking out a laugh as she reached over to pet her.
“Did someone convince him that her is so, so, so sad again?” Carina asked the dog, a babyish coo taking over her voice.
Sassy wiggled harder, as if trying to get out.
“Nope,” Nico told her, holding on tight but petting her at the same time to get her calmed down. Eventually, she slipped back down into the bag with only a small bit of her head poking out. “And she is sad,” he added to Carina, scowling. “She’s been puking since Frankie left.”
“Yeah, imagine that the emotional support dog for the anxiety-riddled child turned out to be an anxiety-riddled dog that also needs her emotional support human. Who could’ve guessed?” Carina shook her head. “You know, I got her that, too. Sassy, I mean.”
At the call of her name, the pup poked her head back out of the bag. Nico gave up trying to get her to hide, and instead, said nothing as Carina leaned over and cooed to the dog again, petting her and then using her fingernails to comb through a knotted strand of hair falling over the pup’s eyes.
“When?” he asked, genuinely curious.
Carina pulled away from the dog, brushing her hands off on her slacks.
“Oh, about seven...maybe closer to eight. It wasn’t very long after Sal and I married.
I wasn’t good with her for those first years.
Frankie, I mean, not the dog,” she said, peeking down at Sassy again.
“I was a raging anorexic, couldn’t put the coke down, and didn’t know the first thing about being a mother except that I didn’t really want to be one. ”
Nico cleared his throat, uncomfortable.
She acted as if she didn’t notice, saying, “She was a child. A normal one, all things considered. The constant playing and yelling and...everything else. Totally normal. I just couldn’t handle it; I couldn’t deal with her.
I felt she wouldn’t listen to me, but if other people said something to her, she had no issue hearing what they said.
And none of that is an excuse for the way I did deal with Francesca when I had to. ”
Now, he was way past uncomfortable. “How did you deal with her?”
“The worst, I’d say, is when I grabbed her by the arm and dragged her down a flight of steps because she wouldn’t come to breakfast like I asked.
She had bruises for two weeks. Salvatore didn’t speak to me for a month at least. That’s also when I got Sassy.
A shitty way to apologize but the only way I knew how. ”
Sassy, with her head still poking free from the bag, licked at the side of Nico’s hand and whined as if the pup could sense he’d been disturbed. “We’re almost done, you whiny thing.”
“Oh, my God. And the whining,” Carina mumbled.
Nico glowered at her. “Okay, I get the picture.”
She shrugged. “I mean, there you have it. If you ever wonder what you might have missed out on having me as a mother, wonder no more. Literally nothing. Fucking terrible every moment I could be. I was useless to her, I would have been useless to you, and this time—”
“Don’t do that.”
Carina glanced his way. “What, tell the truth?”
“Not give yourself a chance. Let’s not pretend like circumstances didn’t help you along in the past. Things aren’t the same now, sis.”
She flinched.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
She shook her head again. “I’m not very good at being that for you, either, am I?”
Nico swallowed the lump forming in his throat, deciding if there would ever be a time for him to do it—to ask what he wanted to truly know—now might be it. “Can I ask you something? A couple things, maybe?”
Carina stared straight ahead. “Sure, but I reserve the right to not answer, or whatever.”
“Did you want to keep me?”
“I loved you,” she said instead, “but keeping you wasn’t an option. That wasn’t a choice.”
“You, uh, you turned eighteen a couple of weeks before I was born, right? Your birthday is just before mine.”
She nodded.
“So, you were seventeen when you got pregnant, and sixteen when it started—”
Carina let out a sardonic laugh that gained the attention of more than one person sitting around them.
Once the gazes had averted, she looked his way with an arched eyebrow that spoke of her annoyance.
“It started when I was thirteen. The grooming, long before that. At thirteen, it just didn’t look like how it looked when he started fucking me at sixteen.
I had two abortions before I even got pregnant with you.
He wouldn’t make me kill you, too. You actually looked like more than a blob on the screen.
His wife hadn’t been able to get pregnant again after Marco, and I kept it secret just long enough.
The tech told him you were a boy, and I could see it in his eyes... ”
She let out a slow, painful breath. “I can still see it.”
The pup licked more at Nico.
His boot tapped a beat to the floor; the rhythm kept him steady. “And his first wife? How’d that play out?”
“Saw me as a problem. By then, anyway. I think she was the first one to ever call what was happening that business between Carina and the boss. I hated her. It was a mutual feeling.”
“What about Carmen? She’s almost a decade younger than me, so you were an adult. I don’t mean to be an asshole; I’m just trying to understand.”
Her hand fluttered up to touch her upper lip, but she quickly dropped it back to her lap as if it hadn’t happened at all. “I don’t really want to talk about that one, but it wasn’t any different. I just hid her longer.”
Nico’s jaw ached. “So, you did want to keep us. If you hid being pregnant, that means—”
“With you, it meant I was a child who didn’t know what else to do; who had no one to protect her; who was just trying to survive.”
“Right, sorry.”
Her fingernails started drumming a beat against the bag in her lap. A lot like his bouncing knee.