by Mia Ford
I picked up the bottle of ketchup and held it out to him. “Do you need the ketchup?”
“No,” he said quietly.
“Then what is it?”
“Did you hear what I said?” he asked, sounding irritated.
“I guess not,” I said, setting my fork aside. I took a deep breath and held it as I put my hands in my lap and balled them into tight fists. I was getting the feeling I’d had that day I came home to catch him packing the moving truck. Something bad was coming our way again. I just knew it. I braced myself for the worst.
“They’re gonna kill me,” he said quietly. He put down his fork and pressed his palms to the table, one on each side of his plate, as if he was trying to keep the table from floating in the air. He looked up with tears in his eyes. “They’re gonna kill me. And there’s nothing I can do.”
I shook my head to make sure I was hearing right. I let my eyes go around his face for a moment. I guess I didn’t pay much attention to him anymore because it was as if I was staring at a stranger. I hadn’t noticed how old and worn out he had become. He was only fifty-seven but looked to be closer to a hundred. His once pleasant face was pudgy and red from the drinking. Little blue veins mapped the skin beneath his eyes and across his thickening nose. His skin had an ashen pallor, like a man who had not seen the sun for a very long time. He had put on weight and was losing his hair. And he had big tears in his eyes. That was the thing that caught me off guard and told me that something was wrong. I’d never seen my father cry. Not even when they were lowering my mom into the ground.
“Who’s going to kill you?” I asked with a little disbelieving smile on my face. My father wasn’t a kidder, but I thought, surely, he can’t be serious. His expression told me he was. “Jesus, Daddy, what have you done?”
He took a deep breath and let it shudder through his body. When he took his palms from the table they left a perfect outline of sweat on the surface. He rubbed his hands together and avoided looking me in the eye.
“I have debts,” he said, wiping his nose on the back of his hand. “I owe people.”
“What kind of debts?” I asked, already knowing the answer but wanting him to confess out loud. I laced my fingers together in my lap to keep my hands from shaking. “Daddy, what debts and what people?”
He glanced up for a second, then quickly looked back down at the plate still in front of him. He looked like he was praying as he quietly said, “Gambling debts. And who the people are don’t matter other than they want their money by the end of the month or they’re gonna kill me.”
I took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. It was sad, but I wasn’t that shocked by what I was hearing. Honestly, I was more shocked that it hadn’t happened sooner.
“How much do you owe, Dad?” I asked the question calmly, even though my insides felt as if they were being ripped to shreds. “Dad? Look at me and tell me how much you owe.”
His eyes came up slowly as he blew a long breath through his round cheeks. He wiped the snot from his nose on his hand again and brushed a knuckle from the other hand under his eyes. “Seventy-five thousand dollars.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, dad! How can you lose seventy-five-thousand dollars playing cards?” I barked at him without meaning to and he flinched at the tone of my voice, like a pup being scolded by its owner. My fists came up and settled on the table, ready to be thrust into the air or into his nose.
“I lost it playing cards,” he said. “And betting on horses.”
My mouth literally fell open and my head bobbed as if it had gotten too heavy for my neck. “Horses? Dad, what the fuck do you know about horses?”
“Don’t use that language in this house,” he said, giving me a frown. “Your mother wouldn’t approve.”
“My mother wouldn’t approve of you losing seventy-five-thousand dollars either!” I screamed. I was suddenly furious with him and I couldn’t help but pound my fists the table. “Oh, my god, dad, what the fuck were you thinking?”
“I don’t guess I was thinking,” he said. He folded his arms over his chest and leaned back from the table as if he thought I was going to punch him and he needed to be out of arm’s reach. “I just got caught up at the track. I was ahead in one race, so I doubled down and won that one, then won another.” He looked at me, pleading for understanding with his eyes. “I swear, Katrina, it was like I could do no wrong. Like God was finally rewarding me after so many years of losing.”
“I don’t think that’s quite how God works, dad,” I said, huffing at him. “Otherwise there would be slot machines in church. Then what happened?”
He shrugged and looked away. “So, I doubled down again and, well, the horse didn’t win.”
“Oh my god,” I said again, covering my eyes with my fingers and shaking my head. “These people that you owe the money to, who are they?”
“People you don’t know and don’t need to know,” he said forcefully, as if he was warning me to stay away. “But they will kill me if they don’t get their money. I have no doubt of that in my mind.”
I held out my hands to signal that I needed to catch my breath and process what he’d told me. I got up from the table and went to the coffee pot on the counter and filled two mismatched cups. I had bought a pecan pie for dessert, but I knew there was no need to slice it. You don’t tell your daughter that you’re going to be killed by hoodlums then ask for a slice of pie. At least not in this house.
I didn’t bother putting anything in the coffee. We both drank it black to save money. I set a cup in front of him and sat back down with mine. I could feel my heart racing in my chest as I held the cup to my lips and blew a cooling breath over the surface. The mist settled beneath my eyes.
“I’m sorry, Katrina,” he said, his voice hoarse and low. He took the cup between his hands and stared down into it, as if he thought it held the solution to his problem. “I’ve been a lousy father to you. And now, well, I don’t know what to do.”
He glanced up at me with tears in his eyes and quickly looked away. If he expected me to feel sorry for him or to defend his fathering skills or was just fishing for compliments, he was shit out of luck. He had been a lousy father and I would never tell him otherwise. He blamed his heavy drinking on his grief and his incessant gambling on his desire to make a better life for us. It was all fucking bullshit and we both knew it. He was a degenerate drunk and a chronic gambler before he met my mother and resumed it quickly after she died. She kept him tempered during the marriage, but I think after a while she, like me, got tired of trying to keep him on the straight and narrow and just let him run free.
He could blame his shortcomings on her death until the cows came home, but we both knew the truth even though we’d never spoken the words. Still, he was my father and the only family I had left. Even with his faults, and they were many, I knew he loved me in his own way and would never intentionally put me in danger, but this could affect us both in tragic ways. If these people were as ruthless as I thought, they would probably kill him, then come after me. Or at the very least force me to sign over ownership of the bar, the only asset the poor Donovan family had left.
I hated him at that moment, but he was all that I had left, the last link to my mother, the one person who loved me completely and unconditionally. She said loving me was as easy and natural as breathing in the spring air. I won’t lie, after cancer took her I cried myself to sleep many nights, often wishing that it had been my father who had died rather than her. But life wasn’t built on wishes, she’d say.
The best thing I could do to honor my mother was to set my own course and follow it. That’s why I had applied to MIT. I wanted to be a cancer researcher, even though I had no idea how I would cover the massive tuition even if I was accepted into the program at the ripe old age of twenty-one.
I would apply for grants and loans to supplement the ten-thousand dollars I had managed to save working as a dishwasher, fry cook, and busboy in the bar since I was fourteen. Seven years of hard lab
or and that was all I had to show for it. Ten grand wouldn’t pay for one-quarter’s tuition at MIT, but it was a start… Then it hit me. That money, the money I had saved for my future, now might have to go toward saving my father’s life. Fuck.
I finally broke the silence by asking the obvious question. “How are you going to pay them back?”
He let his shoulders go up and down. “I don’t know.”
“Is the bar worth anything?” I asked. “Can you get a loan on the building?” I knew the place wasn’t worth much. Tommy’s Bar & Grill, and the ramshackle building that housed it had been in his family for years. It was originally started by his grandfather, Tomas Donovan, then passed down to his dad, Thomas, and finally to him. It was all we owned and it wasn’t much. The bar occupied the entire bottom floor and we lived in the tiny eight-hundred-square-foot apartment upstairs. I had my own bedroom and he slept on the couch. There was a living room and kitchenette combination and one bathroom. That was it. And every day I expected the building to fall down around us.
“The place is already mortgaged to the hilt,” he said, looking around the room and shaking his head. “The business account is low. The credit is maxed out. We operate week to week. All our savings are gone. There’s nothing I can sell that’s worth anywhere near what I owe.”
He glanced up, but when our eyes met he quickly looked away. I felt a chill creep up my spine. I said, “When you say our savings are gone… What does that mean?”
The answer came when he wouldn’t look me in the eye. He stared down into the coffee cup, which had grown too cold to drink. I asked again, “Dad, what does that mean?”
“It means I already lost our savings,” he said, almost too quiet for me to hear. “It’s gone. Every last cent.”
“When you say our savings, you don’t mean my savings? My college money?” He didn’t have to answer. I knew the truth by the look of guilt that was washing over his face like a fine sweat. My fingernails cut into my palms as I tightened my fists on the table. My breathing grew heavy until it felt like my lungs were going to burst. I gritted my teeth and willed the tears back from my eyes.
“Dad, my college money…”
“It’s gone, Katrina,” he said, whispering. He started to cry again. “Every cent. It’s all gone.”
CHAPTER TWO: Nicky D’Angelo
“I fucking hate Sundays, man,” my cousin Tony said as he pounded back the tequila shot the waitress had just set it front of him. He immediately ordered another round, though the three shots in front of me were so far untouched. He picked up the bottle of beer he was using to chase the tequila, drained it dry, and slammed the bottle on the table.
“Why do you hate Sundays so much?” I asked, sliding one of my tequila shots across the table to him. We’d only been there for half an hour and I could already tell that it was going to be a long afternoon, probably followed by a long night if Tony didn’t find a girl (or girls) to occupy his time. Tony didn’t skip a beat. He picked up the shot and splashed it down his throat.
He sighed and smacked his lips. “Because the only bitches here on Sunday are all fucking second string pussy,” he growled, swishing his hand through the air at the assortment of nude dancers and topless waitresses who were milling around the club, doing their best to suck every last dollar out of the patrons like vampires suck blood from their victims. The girls glanced our way every now and then, but they knew better than to approach the VIP area uninvited. Tony could be a real prick when he was in one of his moods, so like good dogs lying in the yard, they knew to only come onto the porch when their master called. And Tony considered himself to be their master, without a doubt.
He picked up another of my shots and grumbled into the glass. “I don’t know why all the best girls have to get off work on Sunday. Surely to shit they’re not all in fucking church. I’m gonna complain to management.”
“Aren’t you management?” I asked.
He grinned. “Whatever.”
I smiled and sipped my beer. I smiled a lot when I was around Tony, depending on his mood. He was a lot of fun to be around, at least until he got shitfaced and wanted to fight some poor schmuck who had looked at him wrong or was taking away the attention of some girl he’d had his eyes on. Of course, Tony never did the fighting himself. He never had, not even when we were kids. That’s what Jimmy Fist was for. Jimmy sat next to Tony scanning the room with his beady eyes as if Tony was the president and he was a Secret Service Agent on steroids. Jimmy was three hundred pounds of hard muscle toting half a pound of brain. He was a humorless pit bull of a man who wore tight Armani suits and black t-shirts with a large gold cross dangling from a thick gold chain around his neck. Most people thought the cross meant that he was religious. They were wrong. The cross was hollow and the top screwed off. It was where Jimmy kept Tony’s stash of blow when they were out on the town. The only time Jimmy Fist went into a church was to steal the collection plate when we were kids or to beat up a priest when we were teenagers because Tony said the guy looked like a pedophile. He probably wasn’t, but that didn’t matter to Jimmy. He just did what Tony commanded him to do.
“That girl is a five out of motherfucking ten,” Tony said, rolling his eyes at one of the nude dancers who was leading a drunk guy in a suit toward a private room for a lap dance and whatever favors he could afford to buy. He tapped the air with his finger like he was pecking on a typewriter. “That one’s a seven, that one’s a six, that one’s not even on the fucking scale. Christ, Nicky, I wouldn’t fuck her with your dick.”
“That’s good because my dick is not available for you to use,” I said.
“Your dick’s too small for me to use,” Tony said with a laugh, bumping Jimmy with his elbow. Jimmy grunted without smiling and cut me a sideways look. Jimmy and I were not friends. Never had been, never would be. I thought he was a fucking thug and he thought I was a condescending asshole. We were probably both correct to a large degree.
Tony was still grumbling about the lack of what he called “Grade-A pussy” working the club that afternoon. He considered himself to be quite the expert on gentleman’s club pussy and pussy in general. Lord knows he’d had more than his share of it, paid and free. Tony was a good-looking guy, not too tall, not too thin, with the dark Italian looks of the D’Angelo family, with coal black hair and olive skin and deep-set brown eyes that could cut through you like a laser. A lot of people mistook us for brothers rather than cousins, though I was a year older, a couple of inches taller, and had about twenty pounds of muscle on him thanks to my rugby playing days at school and the daily workouts I did with the personal trainer who came to my office every afternoon. The only heavy lifting Tony did was dragging his ass out of bed every morning. And sometimes he had to call Jimmy to help him with that.
I listened to Tony rate more girls as I sipped my beer and watched the naked girl who was dancing on the main stage at the center of the room. She was rubbing herself against the silver stripper pole to some George Michael song like she was getting fucked by the invisible man. She was a redhead with big hair and big tits and an ass you could set a drink on. Her pubes were waxed clean, so I had no idea if the carpeting matched the drapes. Her clit had a silver ring pierced into it. Ouch… I was wondering how it felt to have a metal rod pushed through the hood of one’s clit when she caught me looking at it. She used her fingers to pull back her mound to give me a better look at her cunt. She gave me a dreamy look and grinned. There was a large gap between her front teeth. She stuck her tongue through it. I quickly looked away. Tony was right. Sunday was for the second string at best.
“Maybe all the best girls rest on Sunday because they work so late on Saturday night lap dancing for pricks like you,” I said thoughtfully, as if I was hypothesizing one of the great mysteries of life. “On Sunday, you get the leftovers. Although, some of them are still pretty hot.”
“Yeah, if you like a gap between their front teeth that you can shove your dick through,” he said, nodding at the dancer who wa
s still looking my way. He sat back and shook his head. “I’m gonna have a little talk with Mavis,” he said, referring to the former stripper-cum-manager who managed the dancer’s schedules. “If she’s gonna bring out the second-string pussy on Sunday afternoon she ought’a at least discount the motherfucking lap dances. Or put them on a sliding the scale. The hotter the bitch, the more it costs.”
I snorted a laugh and rolled my eyes at him. “When’s the last time you paid for a lap dance, motherfucker? Or for a drink, for that matter?” I oversaw the accounting for the club and handled the public set of books (someone else handled the private ones), so I knew who paid and who didn’t. Granted, the club was owned by Tony’s dad, my uncle Gino D’Angelo. Neither Tony or I had ever paid for anything in all the years we’d been coming here; drinks, pussy or otherwise. I reminded him of that fact and added, “You can’t complain when the shit is free.”
“Of course, I can,” he said with a smirk, reaching for my last shot. “Just because it’s free doesn’t mean it has to be low quality. If I think it’s shitty, the customers will think it’s shitty. And shitty pussy is bad for business. You graduated from a big fancy school. You know what I’m talking about. It’s simple economics.”
“I must have been out the day they covered shitty pussy and its effect on the economy.”