Mafia Girl

Read Mafia Girl for Free Online

Book: Read Mafia Girl for Free Online
Authors: Deborah Blumenthal
them again the memories are preserved, like a prom corsage pressed between the pages of a diary.
    When I was little, I thought my dad was in construction or in the restaurant business. We would be in the car and my mom or dad would point out office towers or apartment buildings.
    “See, Gia,” they’d say, “that’s daddy’s building.”
    I thought he built the buildings. I thought he made them himself, putting one brick on top of another, the way Anthony and I built our mansion houses with red, blue, and yellow Legos.
    Later on I thought my dad was in the carting business even though I didn’t even know what carting was. Then I found out and knew they used the word carting because it sounded fancier than garbage. Well, he was in the garbage business, but not the way I thought. He was in other businesses too, like restaurants, bars, dry cleaners, used car business, casinos, and places outside the city too that I didn’t even know about.
    It was something that Anthony said to a friend of his one day about my dad being a boss. I always thought well, yes, he was the boss, the boss of his company, because I didn’t know what a boss was. But the day someone got shot down on the street in midtown and the papers reported it with my dad’s picture on their front pages, it all fell into place.
    That, plus the way I began to get treated.
    For the first time I felt this divide: people were either keeping their distance or just the opposite, trying hard to be my friend, inviting me places where I didn’t fit in. I wasn’t just me anymore after that. I was a part of something bigger and I felt split down the middle. There was the Gia I was to myself, my family, and my friends, and the one that everyone else saw and either wanted to be close to or steer clear of, like I had a contagious disease.
    When I finally understood about my dad, it hurt just to think of it.
    “Does dad kill people?” I once asked Anthony. He looked at me, annoyed.
    “No,” he said, leaving it at that.
    “Does he tell other people to kill people?”
    “Do your damn homework, Gia,” he said, turning back to the TV.
    I had a hard time believing all that. I knew what my dad was really like so how could that be true? No one cared about us more than him. He was always there for me and Anthony, bringing us presents and taking us out for fancy dinners, the circus, and Broadway musicals. Actors came out to meet him when they knew he was in the audience.
    Whenever we needed advice, he always had the answers. And if we got sick and stayed home from school, he’d sit by our beds and tell us stories.
    His kind side went beyond just our family. He helped everybody in the neighborhood who needed help too. He even paid the vet bills for a neighbor when his three-month old golden lab puppy nearly died after eating something in the street. The neighbor renamed the puppy after my dad, and every time the man walked the dog past our house, he would stop and cross himself.
    My dad gave to everybody, except when I was really small and we didn’t have money. That was when he told us that the love we had in our family was more important than anything money could buy and that it didn’t matter if we couldn’t put presents under the Christmas tree as long as we woke up together on Christmas morning.
    I remember coming home from school that snowy afternoon and turning on the TV. They were doing a report about a crime and the next thing I saw was the screen filled with my dad’s face. I shut the TV off because I knew he would get mad if he saw me watching.
    He was working at home in his office that day so I decided to go ask him because I had to know. I opened the door and walked in without knocking first. The office walls are paneled in dark wood, and both windows are covered with heavy wine colored velvet drapes, always drawn. I loved the way it looked from the moment he had it decorated. It reminded me of a cave. I felt safe there. Even now, my dad’s office is my

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