Bound to My Mafia Stepuncle novel · Chapter 12 of 32

Chapter 12: Everything

Angelo drove us back down the Schuylkill at half past four in the morning.

He kept checking the mirror constantly.

Twice he took an exit for no reason and got right back on.

"Anybody?" I said.

"Not yet."

He parked my Corolla at the curb on Washington Avenue, right under the gym windows.

The red neon sign in the window, CORSO BOXING, buzzed over our heads.

His apartment was one flight above the gym, up the same narrow stairs.

I had never been inside.

It was one long room under a slanted ceiling.

A kitchen at one end, a bed at the other.

Books stacked against the walls because he'd never bought a shelf.

A radiator that knocked like someone wanting in.

The neon from downstairs came up through the front window and turned everything faintly red.

He locked the door behind us.

Two bolts and a chain.

Then he leaned his back on it and looked at me across the room.

"Sit down," he said. "I said I'd tell you everything. I'm going to do it now, before I lose my nerve."

I sat on the edge of his bed in my damp jeans and my rain-soaked sweater.

He didn't sit.

He stood at the window with the red light on his face and told it to the glass.

"I was twenty-seven. Paulie called me at two in the morning. He said there'd been an accident at the terminal and to bring the van."

The radiator knocked.

"When I got there, there was a container on the ground by berth four. A tarp over what was under it. Paulie was standing next to it smoking a cigar."

I held onto the edge of the mattress.

"The crane operator was still up in the cab. He couldn't climb down. His hands were shaking too hard."

Angelo's voice stayed flat.

"Paulie told me to get him out of there. To pull the tapes out of the gate shack. To wash the cab down and fix the log so it said the man under the tarp walked where he wasn't supposed to."

"Did you?"

"Yes."

Just that.

Yes.

"I burned the tapes in a barrel at our concrete yard. I fixed the log. I drove the operator home to his wife in my van."

He turned from the window and looked at me.

"In the van he said one thing. He said Paulie told him to let it go. To let the box drop when the steward walked under it."

I couldn't breathe.

"That's how I knew it wasn't an accident," he said. "Before that I told myself it was. That I was just cleaning up a mess."

"And then?"

"The next morning I went to Paulie's restaurant and told him I was done. No more jobs. Ever." His mouth twisted. "He laughed at me. I went to Domenic. Domenic said he'd handle it."

"He paid my mother."

"I didn't know that until tonight." He closed his eyes. "I didn't know it was your father until tonight. I never looked under the tarp. I never asked his name. I didn't want him to have one."

The neon buzzed.

I looked at his hands.

The split knuckles.

The hands that had washed down that cab, and wrapped mine in tape, and turned my hips in the mirror.

I wanted to tell him my father's name.

We hadn't said it out loud in our house in eight years, and it wouldn't come out now.

"Did you ever do anything for Paulie again?"

"Never."

"Did you ever hurt anybody for him again?"

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