by Hazel Parker
“Brett,” my father said. “What the hell did Gio just mean?”
Brett shook his head. He didn’t need to answer. We knew the truth.
Gio means to split us apart and get whatever he wants.
Chapter 20: Pierre
Polozzi. Like Polozzi Furniture.
The scene folding before me was unlike anything I could have ever expected. I had tried to make as few presumptions as I could about Layla’s family, in part because, at the age of forty, I did not feel a compelling desire to make friends with any significant other’s family. But I also did so because I just genuinely had no idea what to think.
But as far as introductions to families went, it was only a minor understatement to say this was the most insane, most fucked up, most bizarre introduction a man could have ever asked for.
I held Layla’s hand the whole time, but I knew it did no good. I had never felt her so tense, and I had felt her at some pretty stressful moments. For my part, I had to turn my focus inward and practice some breathing techniques I knew to stay calm. I felt like I had walked into a “come to Jesus” moment for the family that I did not belong at. I barely deserved to be meeting the family in the first place, let alone taking part in a discussion this serious.
And now to learn that one of them had married a Polozzi, of Polozzi Furniture, and that the whole thing might have been arranged…
My world and Layla’s seemed a whole lot more interconnected than I think either of us had ever anticipated. I could not really say that it made things any better or worse; everything in the room seemed going downhill so fast that it was sort of a Pyrrhic victory to say anything was “better.”
“Brett,” Alf Ferrari finally said, his voice raspy but cold. “What was Gio referring to? And you know full well that you had better answer honestly, least of all for the purposes of your inheritance.”
Inheritance? Is he basing what the grandkids get based on their marriages or something? I couldn’t decide if I should have felt grateful that the attention in the room had temporarily shifted away from me and onto a new target. Sooner or later, I’d have to pay the Ferrari piper.
There was also a bit of a juvenile, sophomoric amusement at the fact that Brett was the one in the spotlight, but I tried not to give it much attention. I’d be back in the middle of things soon enough.
“Brett?” Bill Ferrari said.
Brett sighed, folded his hands, and moved his neck around. He looked our way, and that was when I saw something I hadn’t seen since the start of the phone call—Layla wasn’t burying her face in her hands anymore. She was looking at her brother, almost as if to say, “I got your back.” Maybe I misunderstood the look, but it very much seemed the kind of thing that was meant to encourage Brett.
And sure enough, as he started to speak, he did so with a conviction that belied the nervousness and fear he’d shown seconds before.
“Chelsea was originally hired not just as an assistant at Ferrari Wines, but to marry me after six months so that I would not lose my share of the inheritance. In return for staying married to me for something like two years after your death, she was promised ten million dollars.”
Jesus Christ. This family. I really liked Layla, but I was beginning to think that my background wasn’t nearly as twisted as this one. At least mine had everything laid out in bare, straight facts. Tragic, but unquestioned facts.
“But a funny thing happened along the way. We actually, genuinely fell in love with each other. When she got pregnant, it wasn’t cause for alarm. It wasn’t something that scared me or made me wonder what I’d gotten myself into. I mean, yes, every guy feels that to some extent, but it was overcome quickly. I knew I really wanted to be with her forever. So once I knew she was with child, I married her as quickly as I could.”
“Brett—” his grandfather tried to interject, but Brett kept going.
“Grandpa, I’m sorry I deceived you, but you need to really understand that Chelsea truly is the love of my life and the mother of my child. Grandma knew. She gave her blessing on her death bed.”
Alf leaned back. He looked...nostalgic, almost.
“I’ll admit how Chelsea and I got together was deceitful, and I’ll admit that there was a really good chance it would be nothing more than a stage production running for a long, long time. But at this point? We love each other. Our marriage is just as real as Nick and Izzy’s. I couldn’t even tell you what the terms of the contract are now at this point, because why would we need it? We’re not getting divorced; we haven’t even entertained the notion of divorce. Maybe it started as a contract between mafia parties or whatever you want to say, but now it’s a love between two people.”
Alf smacked his lips, looked up at the ceiling, and then gave everyone in the room a look. He only looked at Layla and I for a moment, but the glare felt powerful all the same. There was something withering about the gaze of a man who had seen it all, experienced it all, lived through it all, and still felt that you deserved an intense glare.
I couldn’t help but feel like I was in the middle of a TV show, and I did not mean a good one.
“Who is Chelsea in relation to the Nimico family? Why are they involved?”
Brett’s eyes, perhaps inadvertently, drifted to his uncle, Nick. His father picked up immediately on it and did nothing to hide his exasperation.
“Again, Nick? Again?”
“What do you mean, again?” Alf said with stunning ferocity.
“Bill,” Nick said, ignoring his father for the moment. “Your son came to me for help. He needed help. I, being the good uncle that I am, thought it was a good thing to help him out.”
“Oh, yes, sure, it was a great idea to, once again, entangle my children with a part of our family business we all swore to keep them from.”
“Your children?” Nick said. “Perhaps strictly speaking, yes, but you may want to take a look at them. Do they look like children to you? Even Leo is past the age when most people would have graduated college.”
“Don’t you tell me how to talk about my kids—”
“Everyone shut the hell up!” Alf roared. Nick and Bill, as if having heard a lion roar, immediately jumped and went quiet. “Give me a minute.”
The room went deathly silent, almost to the point that I wondered if anyone else was breathing. I leaned back into the couch to see how Layla was doing, but I did not dare look at her. No one was moving any more than they had to.
I still felt responsible for dragging Layla into this, but by now, it was clear that my actions were less the cause of all of this drama and more just the final spark that engulfed an already-burning field of oil. The fires just had not reached noticeable levels before this.
How no one had thought to tell me to go the fuck away and never talk to Layla again was beyond me.
“Almost sixty years ago,” Alf said, “Layla, Brett, your grandmother almost died because of Gio. The four of you had an aunt that you never got to meet because she was killed in the front yard in the same attack that almost took Mary’s life.”
Jesus...I could feel Layla’s hand shake. I knew there was nothing I could do to comfort her.
“I have spent every day of my life since that hour giving thanks for life, but also understanding how precious it is and how quickly it can be lost. There are enough natural dangers in the world to worry about; I don’t need the pride of an Italian, myself or Gio, to cause more trouble. I have fought tooth and nail to keep that part of our lives away from you so you would not suffer as Bill, Frank, and Nick did. No one should have to suffer seeing a little girl die from a bullet.”
My God. Unfortunately, I know what it’s like to lose a child.
No wonder this family is all sorts of fucked up.
“But it seems that…”
Alf could not finish. The tone of his voice suggested he was about to blame someone, maybe even himself. But he just kept quiet.
I no longer saw the Ferrari family as this distinct unit that Layla had miraculously
come out of, but instead a version of my own. Would I be like Alf in fifty years, still bitterly remembering the day that my two sons and first wife died in a car wreck? If I had kids that lived to adulthood, would they know about them? It was easy to sit here and say that I would share everything with them, but the fact that I could barely admit to myself that that had taken place made it quite unlikely that I’d just so easily give up the story to them.
And to think that Layla was just now learning this for the first time...it hurt me, having experienced what I had. How would it make Layla feel to know her grandfather and father had kept a family member’s death a secret from her her entire life?
“Nick,” Alf finally said, his voice wavering. “What did you do? Tell me everything you’ve done that has involved the grandkids.”
“Very well,” Nick said. Amazing how Nick and Bill will kill each other, but the instant Alf speaks...“Nick, the athlete of the family, he was the first to reach out to me. After his now-wife got assaulted by her ex, he asked me to work my connections. I warned him that once this box was open, there was no closing it. I told him over and over again not to do anything with it. But he was adamant, and, Bill, I know you will disagree with me, but a woman was nearly beaten to death. Your son was old enough to weigh the consequences.”
Bill just shook his head, but he didn’t say anything.
“I put a word in through the Nimicos. The attack was supposed to be violent and ugly, but not fatal. I guess it got carried away. Brett just told you what happened on his end, so I don’t think any of this will be a secret, but I knew that the Polozzis had a girl in her early twenties. I made some calls to the Nimicos, who were close to the Polozzis, and they took care of the rest.”
“And were there any—any—conditions that they set?”
Nick bit his lip. He looked like the kid who had just learned parents could tell that the lid to the cookie jar had been moved, meaning even if he found cookies to put back in, evidence still existed.
“He just made statements about how payment would come at some point, but he never got more detailed than that,” Nick said. “And I suppose whatever business deal this Mr. Perocheau guy has is what he was talking about.”
And it comes full circle.
“Fucking hell.”
And then Alf turned his eyes on me and no one else.
I was forty years old, a billionaire, investor in several successful businesses, a man who feared nothing, could speak to anyone from a janitor to the Queen of England, and could converse in eight different languages. I had met presidents, dictators, leaders, military generals, other billionaires, celebrities, and star athletes. And I felt scared to death right now.
“This is not your fault, Pierre,” Alf said. “But for better or for worse, you have accelerated things that I hoped would never reach the grandkids. I do not blame you for being slow to get involved with Gio Nimico, but like it or not, he has forced all of our hands, and you are now a part of this.”
Of all the things that Alf could have said, that arguably was the nicest, most even keeled option. It did very little to assuage me, though; I knew I was going to have to see Gio again, and I knew I was going to have to agree to something with him. I knew I was going to have to rake my friend Marco over the coals somehow, but for now, the only thing I cared about was Layla’s safety. If that came at the cost of a friendship…
“The rest of you, stay here,” Alf said as he stood up. “I need to think about how to get you idiots out of this bullshit.”
No one said a word as Alf moved out of the room. For a man who had just scolded his son for using curse words, Alf sure was unafraid to use them to express how he felt.
The room went deathly mute. No one looked at anyone. Everyone felt like they had a reason to feel responsible.
And now, everyone had no choice but to wait on the Ferrari patriarch. Even me.
Because, like it or not, I was in for good.
Chapter 21: Layla
Everyone in the room except Pierre was family. These were people I had spent almost every waking hour of my life with. These were people I saw cry, I saw get married, I saw express unbelievable amounts of love, and I saw get into massive fights.
And now, I felt like I didn’t know a damn thing about them.
I had an aunt that had died young?
Our family really was connected to the mafia?
Gio’s father and Alf had known each other? Shit, Gio had been the one to kill my aunt?
I had spent all my life aggressively attacking those who dared to say our family was close to the mafia, accusing them of racism and stereotyping. Even my close friends who cracked jokes got a scolding from me. I’d defended them, and now I found out it was all true.
My family had, at best, lied by just not saying anything. At worse, they had deliberately lied to us multiple times.
What the fuck was I supposed to think now?
“If Nick had just kept his hand out of the fucking cookie jar…” my father said.
“Shut your face, Bill,” Nick responded. “Don’t drag your kids’ mistakes into my life.”
“My fucking kids’ mistakes?” Bill roared. “Who is the fuckup that returned to Las Vegas against his parents’ wishes!”
My entire family was coming undone at the seams. By now, it barely mattered what actual words were being said by any of my uncles or my father. What mattered was that trust was broken all across the board, that no one could believe anything from the past, and that now a man I didn’t know existed until this past Monday apparently had not just my family but also Pierre by the balls.
I was pissed. I was furious. I was mad as hell.
I was angry at my grandfather for setting rules so strict and so archaic, so out of date that my generation had no choice but to make questionable decisions in order to satisfy his stupid rules for the sake of life-changing money.
I was angry at my father for pretending that we were just a happy Italian family when, in reality, we had more dark secrets than a family with the last name of Capone. At least that family had no secrets and was honest about it all.
I was angry at Uncle Nick for indulging my brothers. He could have said no.
I was mad at Uncle Frank for not realizing what was going on and putting a stop to it.
I was mad at Nick and Brett for pulling in the darker side of our history for their own benefit, though of everyone in the room that was family, I was on their side the most.
But most of all...the person I was most angry at? The person I wanted to yell and cuss and tell them I hated?
It was me.
I was infuriated at myself for going with Pierre to Rao’s. It wasn’t like Gio knew that Pierre and I were a couple of sorts when we had landed in Vegas. It had taken a split-second reaction for him to realize he knew me, then realize he could use our relationship as leverage. If I had just let my ego go and not gone with him...if I had not felt the need or the urge to speak to him as a business partner...if I had just gone to the damn hotel room…
My fathers and uncles were now dropping every swear imaginable in the book toward each other. I had never heard such anger and fury from any one of them. But I had also become largely desensitized to it all after the last few minutes.
I leaned back into the couch. I looked at Pierre, who was either a master of keeping his composure or was already thinking in his head about how he was going to get the hell away from us. Who could blame him? He was a man who had everything before he saw me last weekend; he didn’t owe me or any Ferrari shit. My grandfather was wrong; not only was he not entangled, he was the person who could most easily walk away and suffer no consequences.
“Sorry,” I said, too frustrated to be sad.
“You have nothing to apologize for,” he said. “This is my fault.”
The argument was getting bad enough that Brett stood up to try to get between my father and uncles. If that was happening, if there was genuine concern about things potentially turning physical, I did
not need to be a part of it. I stood up, motioned for Pierre to follow me, and guided him to a nearby porch.
The porch itself overlooked a grassy hill and provided a view extending several dozen miles. It was quite a sight to behold, the kind of thing that an estate of this value would have earned. It was also precisely the kind of thing that I needed, if for no other reason than because I could not imagine the conversation Pierre and I were about to have would be any better than the one I was hearing inside.
“You probably want to leave, don’t you?” I said.
Pierre sighed and did not answer at first, which only confirmed my worst paranoia. This time, though, I could not hold on to anger at him. It was not his shitty actions that would drive us apart, but my own paranoia in coming with him to the restaurant. The family drama was a mere icing that solidified the decision.
“I would be lying if I said I am anything other than disturbed,” Pierre said. “I do not enjoy feeling guilty. I have always done my best to avoid entanglement in situations I believe to be corrupt or unethical. But I also have an unsurpassed desire to be with you.”
I cracked, not knowing what to say.
“Pierre, that’s sweet, but please don’t charm me—”
“I am serious, Layla,” he said. I believed him, but it was almost like I did not want to believe him; like if I chose not to believe him, it might allow us to live uncomplicated lives away from any further hurt. “If we can get through this, don’t you think we can get through anything?”
“I...I mean...yeah, but...fuck!”
I was all sorts of emotions. Angry, sad, disappointed, frustrated, confused, bitter, resentful, tearful, exposed, embarrassed...you name it, I felt it. There was even a flicker of some odd, distorted form of giddiness, like a part of me almost relished seeing stuffy old men finally curse and fight like they’d probably wanted to for some time.