The Mafia King My Sister Threw Away novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Atwells Avenue

Raf and Carla say the spite out loud, she sets her terms, and takes the books of a crime family; Sunday dinner is at his mother's, and Paola is invited.

I slept four hours on a friend's couch in Johnston with my mother's recipe box under my head.

At seven I tried to buy a coffee, and the card was declined.

I tried the other card.

I stood at the counter of a gas station with a line behind me and called the bank's automatic line.

Our joint account held eleven dollars.

Craig had moved fifty-eight thousand dollars out of it at 11:40 the night before, while I was driving around the block trying to stop shaking.

I paid for the coffee with the last cash in my wallet.

Then I drove to Atwells Avenue, because I had nothing left to lose and a very good reason to be furious.

Colucci Provisions sat between a bakery and a shuttered shoe store, with a green awning and a window full of cured meat.

The door was unlocked.

Inside, a heavy man in a wool cap sat on a stool with a cough drop in his cheek.

He was reading a ledger the size of a bible.

"You're the sister," he said.

"I'm the other sister."

"Pio Gallo." He didn't offer a hand.

"Upstairs. He's been up since five. He doesn't sleep when he's insulted."

The office was a long room over the kitchen, with a window onto the street and a desk the size of a car.

Raf stood at the window with his sleeves rolled to the elbow.

The burn scar ran across the back of his left hand, shiny and pink.

He didn't turn around.

"You came," he said.

"My husband emptied our bank account at midnight," I said. "I need money. That's the only reason."

"That's a good reason."

"And I want my sister to see me," I said. "Wherever she is. Doing well. In her face."

He turned then.

His face had no smile in it, but something happened around his eyes.

"Good," he said. "Because I want the same thing, and I'm not going to pretend it's something nicer."

"You're hiring me to spite her."

"Yes."

"You don't even know if I'm good."

"Three years ago your firm audited my laundromats," he said. "You found my cousin's bookkeeper stealing."

He nodded to a chair.

"That was you."

I sat.

I had not expected to be remembered.

"The books are a mess," he said. "Six businesses. A restaurant, a market, laundromats, a trucking yard, a parking company and the building."

"My father kept them in his head. My uncle kept them in shoe boxes."

"That's what you'd pay me nine thousand a month for?"

"You said triple. You make what, three thousand?"

"Five thousand two hundred."

"Then nine thousand four hundred," Raf said. "I'm not going to haggle with the woman who's counting my money."

I looked at the pile of shoe boxes in the corner.

Then I said what I had decided on the drive.

"Three rules."

"Go."

"I do the books of your legal businesses. Nothing else."

"I don't carry anything, and I don't count anything that isn't on paper."

"Done."

"Second, nothing in this office is for sale except my hours. I take your money for numbers. Nobody gets anything else for it."

He looked at me for a long second.

"Understood," he said. "That's the only rule I'd have made myself."

"Third. I can quit any day, and what you've paid stays paid."

"Nine thousand four hundred a month, paid on the first, and you can walk out the door whenever you like."

His eyes dropped to my hand, where the ring had been.

"Your husband did that to you in your own house," he said.

"It took you ninety seconds to put him in the cake. I want someone who can count like that."

I almost laughed.

It came out wet and wrong, and I turned my face to the window until it passed.

He didn't say a word.

He just waited, and I hated how much I liked that.

"All right," I said. "Where do I start?"

"Pio," Raf called.

Pio carried the ledger up and set it on the desk with a thud.

"The last bookkeeper retired to Florida," Raf said.

Pio coughed into his sleeve, and I decided not to ask.

I picked up the first shoe box.

Then I called my old boss's voicemail at the firm.

"It's Carla Benedetti," I told the machine. "I'm resigning, effective now. I'm sorry for the short notice."

Raf was watching me from across the desk.

"I thought you'd cry," he said.

"I will," I said. "Not in front of you. You're my employer."

The corner of his mouth moved.

"His mother heard about the party," Pio said from the door.

"Somebody called her at six this morning. She says you eat with us Sunday."

"Pio," Raf said.

"She says the table's set for forty. She says she's already got a place for you at Raf's right hand."

"My mother is a woman of strong opinions," Raf said. "I'll tell her you can't."

"I'll come," I said.

I had not planned to.

Pio's cough drop clicked against his teeth.

"One more thing," he said, not looking at Raf.

"She invited Paola two weeks ago, for Sunday. She wanted to meet the girl her son was bringing."

Raf closed his eyes.

"Nobody's cancelled it," Pio said.

I looked at Raf, and Raf looked at me, and neither of us said what we were both thinking.

Then I opened the shoe box and began to count.

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