Chapter Thirty-Seven
Cal
The house is wrong before I even open the door.
I can feel it from the driveway.
The lights are too bright, the quiet too thick, the quality of stillness that only exists when a house full of people is holding its breath.
I’ve felt it before. The night my father called from his deathbed.
The night Nico called to tell me the rivals had made a move on our northern territory.
Nights when everything changes and the air knows it before you do.
I push through the front door.
My mother is in the corner by the fireplace, sitting on the floor with Maggie on one side and Sophia on the other, both of them pressed against her like they can hold each other together through sheer proximity.
The fireplace is lit and the three of them are framed by it, illuminated orange and gold.
My mother’s face is a thing I have never seen before and hope to never see again.
She looks up when I come through the door. I swallow. Not prepared to handle any emotions besides the ones I’m currently keeping bottled up inside of me.
She’s on her feet before I can cross the room, her hands finding my face, my shoulders, my arms, checking me the way she has since I was a boy, running her hands over me like she might be able to feel damage through fabric.
No physical damage this time, just emotional.
“Calogero,” she says my name in relief with a sob in tandem.
I take her by the shoulders, a small squeeze of reassurance. “Not right now, Ma.”
“Yes.” Her hands tighten on my arms, and she looks up at me with eyes that will not be moved, not crying, just worn. “This is for right now.”
She pulls me down to her level and wraps both arms around me and I feel just for a moment the relief of being held by someone who loved you before you knew what love was.
My shoulders drop half an inch. My jaw unclenches. I breathe in the smell of her perfume, and I am briefly, impossibly, someone’s son for a single moment.
I look up beyond her shoulder and see Nico at the back door.
The moment is over. And now I need to be someone’s boss.
He tips his head toward the guest house. His face is doing something I haven’t seen it do in years—something careful and serious underneath his usual ease.
My mother feels me stiffen.
She pulls back and looks at my face and then at Nico and then back at my face. She lets go. She steps aside. She doesn’t say it, but I know she wishes she could stop it. She never wanted this for us, but she knew it would come one day.
Was there ever any other option than for us to get pulled in one way or another?
I look at my sisters.
Sophia has tears streaming straight down both cheeks, not bothering to wipe them.
Maggie is holding her own hands in her lap, squeezing them white.
They are looking at me the way you look at someone you are terrified of losing.
The way you look at a person and try to memorize them in case it’s the last time.
This is what they would look like if they lost me.
The thought lands strange. And then it lands correctly.
Because Max is me. She has been mine for nine years and that means she is theirs now too; they know it and she doesn’t even know they know it and now—
I look away, cutting off the emotions.
I move toward Nico.
He opens his mouth.
“I—Cal, listen,” Nico, who has never stuttered a day in his life, who came out of the womb talking and has never once been at a loss for words, stutters.
“Dad’s been gone awhile now. And you’ve been—God, Cal, everyone knows you’ve been doing what you do, stepping in, handling all the things the best you can, but everyone assumed it was—that it was temporary, that you weren’t—”
I look at him.
Just look at him.
He stops.
I walk past him and push through the back door harder than I should into the night.
The guest house’s great room is full of men.
I know this before I open one of the double doors because I can see the density of them through the glass. I push the door open, step inside and the low conversations that were happening halt.
All the eyes and heads in the room turn towards me and I brace myself.
The room is one large open space—a great room with a dining table that runs almost the full length of it, dark wood, eighteen chairs. Seventeen of them are occupied.
Older men cluster at the far end near the head. Younger ones standing at the edges of the room, backs against the walls, some faces I know and some I don’t, but they’re here, which means they belong here.
I stand in the doorway and stare at the table.
At the far end, the head chair is empty.
I look at it for a long moment.
Around me no one moves.
I can feel every eye in the room tracking me the way someone tracks a thing it isn’t sure about yet—not hostile, not welcoming, just waiting to be told what to do or what to think.
But I can’t focus on them or what they think.
Because all I can see is that chair.
I have seen my father sit in that chair more times than I can count. I have stood at the edge of this room as a boy and watched him hold court from it, watched men twice his age defer to him, watched the way power arranged itself around him like furniture around a fireplace.
I hated it. I hated the way he loved it. I hated that I understood why.
And I hate that the expectation in this moment is that I sit in it, become him.
I think of the men who died because of decisions made from that chair.
Orders given with a wave of a hand, a nod, a silence.
Men in our family. Men outside it. Men who had families of their own and went home in boxes or not at all because my father decided they were a problem to be solved.
The specific brand of violence he considered efficient.
The accounting he kept where human lives were entries in a ledger.
For what?
For this room. For this table. For that chair.
To leave behind a legacy that another family wants to destroy.
For me and Nico to have to pay for his sins.
No—for Max to pay for his sins on my behalf.
I glance at Nico, who has followed me in and stands in front of the double doors behind me.
And I see it on his face—the slight tightening around his eyes, the set of his jaw.
He called them here. He asked them to come.
And now he’s seeing what I’m seeing, which is forty-some men looking at me with the neutrality of people who are withholding judgment, who are here out of loyalty to a dead man and a name and a history and are not yet sure if any of that applies to me.
I told you, Nico probably thinks.
He tried to tell me they wouldn’t just accept me.
I’ve been the interim. Been the placeholder.
And they know it.
Nico looks through me, waiting.
I look back at the table.
I stalk forward.
The room parts without being asked—the men standing at the edges shift back slightly as I come through the center, past the staring faces.
I come to the head of the table and I stop.
I stand in front of my father’s chair.
It’s wooden. High-backed. Dark with age and use. There is nothing remarkable about it except that for thirty years it meant something in this room.
I turn around. Face the room.
Every face looking back at me.
Seventeen men seated around the table, countless men standing around the room—and Nico at the doors.
I look at the chair again. I look out at the room again.
I scrub a hand across my jaw and let out a short, disgusted laugh.
I walk with purpose back to Nico, give him a look and he steps aside.
With both my hands, I push hard on the double doors, and I don’t wait to watch them open. I turn to walk back to the table, the path unoccupied as the men standing in my way steer clear of my path.
The doors bang as they hit the walls of the guest house as I make it back to my father’s damn chair.
Then I reach down, wrap both hands around the top rail of the chair, and lift it above my head.
I turn and hurl it.
It flies through the open double doors and hits the concrete of the back patio with a crack that echoes off the walls of the house. One leg splinters off. The seat skids. It comes to rest against the far wall of the patio in pieces.
The silence in the room after it lands is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.
I look at every man in the room. My eyes stop on the man to the right of where the chair used to be—older, sixties, silver at his temples, a face carved by decades of doing what my father asked without question.
Ferraro. My father’s consigliere. His most trusted.
The man who has been in more rooms like this one than anyone else here.
He meets my gaze and doesn’t look away.
“If anyone wants to leave,” I announce, and my voice comes out level and certain and loud enough for even the man at the very back of the room to hear it clearly.
I turn back.
I point at the doorway.
“There’s the fucking door.”
Nobody moves.
Nobody breathes.
From my left I hear it—just barely, just a thread of sound—Nico. Snickering. And then, from beside him, my cousin Mikey, twenty-three years old and constitutionally incapable of keeping his fucking mouth shut, excitedly mutters under his breath: “Let’s fucking go, brother!”
I don’t look at them. My eyes stay on the table.
“If you stay,” I say, “you play by my rules.”
I look back at Ferraro.
He holds my gaze for a moment—a long moment, the kind that has weight.
Then he stands. Slowly. He adjusts his suit jacket with both hands, smooths the lapels, buttons it with one hand, pushes his chair in.
His face gives nothing away and I think he’s going to walk.
He’s going to take half the room with him and we’re going to do this with whatever’s left. Fuck them.
He takes two steps toward me.
He extends his hand.
I shake it. I keep my face where it is while the shock absorbs inside of me somewhere.
“Your father would be proud,” he says it loud enough for every man in the room to hear it.
Then he drops his voice, just for me.
“It’s about fucking time.”
He claps a hand on my shoulder once, firm, and turns to face the room.
“You fucking heard the boss.”
Someone pulls the double doors shut.