19. Kylie #2
“The biggest mistake of my life has red hair and is walking away from me right now.” His voice cracked.
Just slightly. Just enough. “And the woman I love - love, present tense, with everyone here as witness - built everything good I have. Twice. Once when she married me, and again when she gave me a son I don’t deserve. ”
Phones were definitely recording now. I could see the screens, the angles, the absolute disaster of this moment being documented for posterity.
“I’m not asking for forgiveness.” He was still on his knees.
Still looking at me like I was the only person in the square.
“I’m not asking for another chance. I’m just asking you to know - to really know - that whatever you decide, whatever you need, I will spend the rest of my life trying to be worthy of the years you already gave me. ”
The square was silent.
Everyone was watching.
And I-
I strode forward, grabbed him by both lapels, and hauled.
“Get UP, you enormous idiot, these people know me.”
He came up grinning.
Because I was holding his lapels.
Because I hadn’t let go.
Because for all my walking away, all my refusing, all my carefully constructed walls. I was standing in the middle of the Saturday market with my hands fisted in his shirt, and I wasn’t letting go.
“You’re impossible,” I said.
“I know.” He didn’t sound remotely sorry about it.
“That was mortifying.”
“I know.”
“Miss Dot is definitely going to have opinions about this.”
“I know.” His hands came up to cover mine. Gentle. Warm. “But you’re still holding on.”
I was.
I didn’t let go.
The dunk tank was Dante’s idea.
“For the Marlowe restoration fund,” he said, with the particular innocence of a consigliere who knew exactly what he was doing. “The don in a dunk tank. People would pay good money.”
“Absolutely not,” Giovanni said.
“The theater needs a new roof,” I pointed out.
“I’ll write a check.”
“You’ll get wet.” I smiled at him. “Consider it penance.”
The street fair was in full swing by afternoon, games and food trucks and the kind of organized chaos that made small towns feel like families. The dunk tank sat at the end of the row, already drawing a crowd.
Giovanni removed his jacket with the dignity of a man going to his execution.
Folded it precisely.
Handed Dante his watch like he was going to war.
Then he climbed into the tank, full suit, dress shoes, everything, and sat on the platform with an expression of profound resignation.
“Three throws for five dollars,” the barker called. “Dunk the don! All proceeds to the Marlowe Theater restoration!”
The line formed immediately.
He survived the first thrower. The second. A teenager with a baseball scholarship came close but couldn’t quite connect.
Then it was my turn.
Giovanni looked at me through the tank’s clear wall. Raised an eyebrow.
“You’re enjoying this,” he said.
“Immensely.”
I took the first ball. Tested its weight. Drew back my arm-
And missed.
“Interesting technique,” Giovanni called.
“I’m warming up.”
Second ball. Closer this time. The target wobbled but held.
“Still warming up?”
I picked up the third ball.
Our eyes met.
I thought about three years of lonely dinners.
About a marriage that had starved while I tried to pretend I wasn’t hungry.
About all the ways he’d failed me, and all the ways he was trying now, and the man who’d put himself on his knees in the middle of a Saturday market and refused to get up when I told him to.
I threw.
The target collapsed.
Giovanni Ferraro, don of New York, hit the water with a splash that soaked the first three rows of spectators.
He came up laughing.
Actually laughing, head thrown back, hair plastered to his forehead, suit probably ruined, looking more ridiculous than I’d ever seen him and somehow more beautiful for it.
The whole square watched my face give me away.
Walking back to the truck afterward felt like something out of a dream.
Giovanni was still damp, his shirt clinging in ways that should have been illegal.
Nico was asleep against his shoulder, exhausted from the overstimulation of his first street fair.
I had my arms full of fair junk, a stuffed elephant Giovanni had won at the ring toss, a bag of kettle corn, the kind of useless trinkets that accumulated at events like this.
The truck was parked at the far end of the lot.
He opened my door first. Waited while I climbed in. Then rounded to the driver’s side, settling Nico’s car seat into its base with practiced efficiency before sliding behind the wheel.
I didn’t realize my hand had moved until I felt the warmth of his knuckles against my fingers.
On the tailgate. Where I’d set the elephant down, where his hand had landed next to mine.
We both looked at it.
Neither of us mentioned it.
He put the truck in gear and pulled out of the lot one-handed, his left hand on the wheel, his right staying exactly where it was.
Touching mine.
All the way home.
***
Nico woke up as we pulled into the driveway.
Giovanni lifted him out of the car seat, still damp, still slightly ridiculous, and settled our son against his shoulder with the easy confidence of a man who’d learned to do this in the dark, alone, during the months I’d sent him away.
“Hey, little one.” His voice was soft. Fond. “Did you like the fair?”
Nico made a sound.
A babble. Nothing unusual, he’d been making sounds for weeks now, the preliminary attempts at language that every baby made.
But this sound was different.
This sound had consonants.
“Did he just-” I started.
Giovanni had gone completely still.
“Say it again,” he whispered to Nico. “Come on, piccolo. Say it again for Papa.”
Nico looked at his father with eyes that had deepened from newborn blue into the exact blue of the man holding him. He reached up, grabbed Giovanni’s nose with one small hand.
And said it again.
“Dah.”
Clear, deliberate, unmistakably a word.
“Oh my God,” I breathed.
“Dah,” Nico said, more confidently this time. “Dah-dah.”
Giovanni’s face, the face of a man who’d survived his father’s cruelty and built an empire and gotten on his knees in a Saturday market, crumpled into something raw and beautiful.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice breaking. “Yeah, that’s me. That’s-”
He looked at me.
Nico’s first word came earlier than any book swore it could, but my son had never once cared what a book swore, and it wasn’t mama.
It was definitely, unmistakably, dada.