My Mother Sold Me to Pay Her Dealer, and the Man Who Took Me From Him Has a Use for Me novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Cara

Ignazio brings his mother's bread and calls her cara; Bronwen's mother phones to ask whether the debt was paid.

At ten the next morning someone knocked, and a voice I did not know said, "Cara? I won't come in. I only brought bread."

I stood at the door with my hand on the bolt.

It was a warm voice, soft and unhurried, a grandfather's voice.

I opened the door the width of the chain.

A man of about sixty stood in the hall holding a cloth-wrapped loaf in both hands.

He had silver hair combed straight back, a navy cashmere coat, and a gold ring on his smallest finger.

He smiled at me with real kindness.

"Ignazio Corvino," he said. "Valentine's uncle. My mother, Carmela Corvino, made this at six this morning, and she said I wasn't to come back without telling you it's still warm."

I took it through the gap.

It was warm.

The smell went into me so hard that my eyes stung, and I stood there holding a loaf of bread like a fool.

"You're thin," Ignazio said gently.

"I'm fine," I said.

"Of course you are. You walked out of that place on your own feet, and I heard it from three men before breakfast."

He shook his head, smiling.

"My nephew could stand to learn from that."

He looked past me at the room, at the bed, at the dress on the floor.

His face did not change, but his voice dropped.

"This is the top of the mill, away from everything, and it was my idea," he said. "The family house is no place for you yet, with the old women and the visitors."

"Thank you," I said, because my mother had raised me to.

"Valentine only went to that bar because I told him to," Ignazio said, sadly.

"He did?" I said.

"On Wednesday I told him: go and see for yourself what Hudak is doing with our name. I would have gone myself, but he does not take my advice twice."

He lifted the loaf's cloth corner back into place with one finger.

"You'll want to see about your work, too. The hospice. They think you've been sick."

I had not told anyone in the building what I did.

"I'm standing here in a stranger's socks," I said. "How do you know my work?"

"Valentine's man went to your apartment at dawn for your things, and your landlady talks."

He said it so easily that I felt foolish for asking.

"I know the man who owns the clinic your mother goes to, as well," he added. "I'll speak to him about her scripts."

I said nothing.

"Eat, cara. And if anyone troubles you, in this house or any other, you come to me. I've known my nephew since he was in diapers. He's a good boy, and he is not a talker."

He patted the doorframe once and went away down the hall.

I stood holding the bread.

Then I shut the door, shot the bolt and ate half the loaf standing up.

At noon the same heavy driver left a phone on the tray.

It was my own old cell, the one with the cracked corner.

Marek had taken it from my coat pocket on the ninth of October and I had not seen it since.

There was a sticky note on it in a block hand.

CHARGED. NOTHING DELETED.

There were forty-one missed calls.

Thirty-eight of them were from the hospice.

Three were from my mother.

The phone rang in my hand while I was looking at the list.

Mom, the screen said.

Anne Treadwell, forty-nine, had been Mom in that phone since the day I got it, and I looked at the word as if it belonged to somebody else.

I stood in the middle of the carpet and let it ring four times.

Then I picked it up, because I wanted to hear what she would say.

"Bronwen?" my mother said.

Her voice was thin and wet and a long way off, the voice she used in the second hour of a bad night.

"Bronwen, baby, is it you? Oh, God. They said you were fine. A man called and said you were fine."

"Mom," I said.

"Did he pay it?"

I listened to her breathe.

"Did who pay what?" I said.

"Valentine Corvino. They said he came to the bar and took you and paid it off. Is it cleared? Bronwen, I need to know, because Marek's people came by yesterday and said I was clean, and I don't understand."

She had not asked if I was hurt.

I stood at the window with the snow coming across the frozen river, and I felt something go very quiet in my chest.

"You sold me," I said.

"I know, baby," she said. "I was sick. You don't know how sick. I'd have done anything."

"You did."

"Don't say it like that," she said, and her voice cracked. "It was only a few weeks. He said he only wanted somebody to help in the bar."

"He kept me in a room with a lock on the outside for nine weeks, Mom," I said. "He and his men did what they wanted to me. You can hear that, or you can hang up."

For a long time the line was only breathing.

"Is the debt cleared?" she said at last, very small. "Because if it isn't, they'll come for the house."

I hung up.

My hand shook so hard I set the phone on the table, face up, and stared at it.

It rang again.

I let it go to voicemail.

It rang a third time, and at last I picked it up and said nothing.

"Bronwen."

Her voice was different now, flat and quick, an addict's clear moment.

"He paid it," my mother said. "I can hear it in you. Listen to me. If a man like that paid four thousand dollars to get you out of that bar, then you're his now. That's how it works with them. Be good to him. It's safer than being on your own."

I hung up for the last time.

I sat on the floor with the loaf in my lap and the phone face down beside me.

I thought about Anne Treadwell in her green nylon jacket on Rutger Street, on that Wednesday afternoon, saying he only wants to talk.

Four thousand two hundred, she had said then.

Not four thousand.

She knew the exact number, and so did the clinic on Oneida Street that wrote her scripts, because I had paid its copays for three years out of my night shifts.

Ignazio had said at the door that he knew the man who owned that clinic.

I had not asked him how he knew where my mother got her pills.

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