Chapter Text
I'm accustomed to a smooth ride
Or maybe I'm a dog who's lost its bite
I don't expect to be treated like a fool no more
I don't expect to sleep through the night
Some people say a lie's a lie's a lie
But I say why:
Why deny the obvious child?
The dream is a memory they share, though they remember it differently.
It rips Michael awake so violent he shouts with the force of it; Kay’s eyes open to his hands moth-jarred and abrupt in the space above their bed, palms out as if to take a knife. Her feet jerk up by instinct and she opens her mouth for a scream, but she only finds a shaky exhale that comes out as the smallest noise, a kind of startled cough.
His arm against her ribcage, his feet kicking out against the comforter, and she abruptly feels the heat of the dream like a separate conscious presence.
‘Michael-’
He’s blinking damp-spiked black hair out of his eyes; in the half-shade moonlight cracked through the curtains, she can see him coming up. Still practically asleep herself, Kay rolls to her knees in her nightgown and slides careful hands up to his hips as she used to do a few times a month after the war, almost reliably so after he’d had more than two drinks or on the Fourth of July. She swallows her sleep-mouth and takes a real breath.
‘Michael. Michael - wake up. You’re here - darling. You’re here. Wake up. You’re home in bed.’
His hands come up again, gentler and trembling; she takes them firmly and murmurs quiet nothings of approval.
He hasn’t done this in some time. Kay’s instincts come from a conversation, terse and nearly lost in translation, she had with the baker’s daughter Katerina a year after Michael told his family about her: she remembers her line every time they wake up like this. Does your husband have bad dreams? Kay’d asked timidly about Enzo, the handsome fresh-off-the-boat Italian soldier made sinless and American, she understood later, by the incontrovertible blessedness of Michael’s family name. Katerina gave her a dark unreadable look with all the shrewdness of the circle to which neither she nor Kay was entirely privy. He sleeps with the war in his stomach, she said. Sometimes it gives him indigestion. It’s not something he can control.
Michael is drenched in sweat and already impatient, clenching his jaw to try and stop his teeth from chattering. He pushes at his eyes with one hand and tugs at his sticking undershirt with the other, shifting his weight with a wordless grumble. There’s a trace of his old embarrassment she hasn’t seen since he was much younger – it really has been a while.
‘Tell me about it?’ she asks gently, keeping one hand pressed mindful against his hip as she settles back beside him.
She’s so used to him shaking his head – maybe the name of the place, or a word that’ll reference the longer story he’s told her just the once – that it catches her a little off guard when he hesitates.
The dream is a memory, so whole and sudden Kay feels the back of her throat catch the nausea that’s turning him pale:
When he had a different name and they took the bus from Hanover to Buffalo at the end of every month, the cops got them both for the first time. Kay had been picked up once before but, Michael explains quiet, his eyes narrowing and searching for words along the lines of the blankets bunched between them, he didn’t know that at the time. Hadn’t realised. He understood the consequences of himself, to the degree he could back then, but hadn’t thought how this might extend to girls like her. They’d still been very new. Kay remembers: the way a smile would start tugging at the corners of his lips minutes before he’d ask her to dance.
They were always in separate cells. Probably they still do it this way.
Bashed the bars with billy clubs, rang in the early morning from midnight with a clatter that felt like the cell block walls were howling for the people they enclosed, who heard or felt their own howls rising helpless with the dread that came with each passing half hour. Sometimes they took someone out and the ones left behind would try to bounce prayers around corners and corners where they couldn’t see, or sometimes could.
‘I thought about calling my father,’ Michael says, and touches her hand. ‘Do you remember?’
No. She wasn’t there. She wasn’t thinking – about him, she knows, but doesn’t say.
He doesn’t say what they did to him, but in the near-dark Kay can see it flicker across his narrow distracted face.
‘I just kept thinking about you,’ he says. He repeats himself. He can’t quite look at her; his gaze has gone distant over her shoulder, frowning and exhausted. ‘I got their badge numbers, but I kept thinking about you. What they might do. I guess I thought, if they treated me like that-’ His laugh rasps too loud in their still room. ‘But they didn’t even know who I was. Stupid.’
What happened in the dream, she wants to know? But it’s just that – his own memory come back violent and vivid, or as he sees it a memory that belongs to who he was. They differ somewhat in their interpretations of where that person begins and ends their relation with the man whose shoulders tremble a little still in bed beside her. He hisses out a long breath and closes his mouth without asking for what or if she remembers.
Easier to close the door, Kay thinks as she covers them both with the blanket again and Michael slides against her, his hand on her stomach and his knee fitting against the back of hers. The recollection has somehow become his in the telling, with the addition of his father’s implied presence: the distance from her own memory feels safe and cold again.
This is easier, letting Michael call it his business and fold it away in a drawer. Easy, to maintain a constant as what he calls his business changes within the space of a week. The past is his to remember for the reason Kay knows his father gave him: it’s over this, the Don said just before he died, he will always have the least control.
He may be a goddamn bastard and she will never forgive him for what he’s done, but her brother can cook in a way he couldn’t before Sicily. She allows him that, as she does even the men she hates.
Connie’s not one to keep quiet at the dinner table. Today she lets it happen around her, dishes and shouts swinging past her head, silverware passed by three pairs of hands, summer pressed steam staining her blouse and lifting her curls as she rises past the kids to get the cups. Michael stands even-footed at the stove in his rolled-up white shirtsleeves, head bent over the sauce as he listens to Peter talk and talk; her hip brushes his as she stands on tiptoe to reach the salt. Connie can feel his attention shift and jerks her chin irritable at Peter instead.
‘Hey, gimme the pepper!’
It’s beside Michael’s left hand, but Peter, leaning wet-faced against the counter with his buttons undone against the muggy July heat, glances up without pausing and passes it across the stove.
‘-‘cause we ain’t got a lotta time on our hands this month, you know, and honestly, Mikey, I ain’t got a lot of time for cops right now, eh? And you know what that son of a bitch says to me? He tells me, okay, but we’re gonna have to roll over and play-’
The sauce goes on the table; Mama raps Victor’s dirty knuckles with a wooden spoon and the kids dive for their turn at the sink; Michael opens a bottle of wine and the men passing through wait their turn for the bowls after grace.
Tom passes her the spaghetti, just as quiet as Connie is today, though it sits more natural on him than it’s ever done her. She’s already noticed how he and Rocco move around her, now – more polite than family, leaning back further than her wedding day. The least they can fucking do. Kay, sitting beside Mama, hasn’t spoken to her in a week. She keeps her eyes fucking demure on the sauce as it passes from her hands to Mama’s, Mama’s to Tom’s, Tom’s to Connie’s. The usual din clatters up and the ugly hot sear through her stomach that comes as she takes the bowl ebbs, brief: let it be.
‘-said I’d call Johnny in the morning.’
‘You can call him after dinner,’ Michael says calmly, taking a slice of cheese for his pasta.
‘I just tried the casino, said he ain’t off the plane yet. Tommy, you know what time he’s getting-?’
‘It’s delayed.’ Tom stretches out easy and takes the bread from her niece across the table. ‘Nothing to worry about. All the summer tourists heading out that way – I hear it’s cooler out in LA than here today.’
She sees Michael nod in the corner of her vision, and the lesser soldiers seated at the table today duck their heads as if in parody, quick, to close the matter. When Sonny went out the door and didn’t come back business at the table did the same, smooth as when they were babies and fewer men shared the stove.
They’re going to Vegas, is what she knows, from this and other small quick-muffled conversations she’s ducked upon in the hall. Johnny Fontane is helping negotiate some entertainment deal in one of the casinos Michael wants to pick up, and then some. Gambling’s been their business for a while but she understands that this is different, that the kinds of negotiations needed for these deals won’t be happening in Pop’s old office. She ain’t stupid, and Michael has already started to make it clear what kind of operation he’s running.
He’ll be good at it, she supposes, and sets her teeth. She’d be damn good at it too, in a world where she ended up looking just like her youngest brother.
Mama pronounces the meal excellent and there’s a loud chorus of approval for Michael’s cooking. Victor looks at Connie imploringly over the table, his tiny face and fists and his cousins on either side evenly stained with sauce.
'Are we going to the beach now, Ma?'
She realises abruptly she hasn't said a word all meal. 'Huh?'
'Uncle Michael said we're gonna go to the beach!'
A clamour of agreement from the kids. Connie looks helpless and furious down the table to her brother, feeling her hands clench into fists beneath the checked tablecloth. She hates how calm he is, raising his eyes to look back as he wipes his hands with a napkin; how he can speak to her son and promise him something independent of her raging resolution to take him and the baby away; how she is allowed, by his grace, to sit here on the condition last week's outburst never happen again. A week in their family's life is considered enough time to grieve. Mama still wears black for Pop but, like a ferociously good Corleone woman, she says nothing at all.
Connie knows she should go and here she fucking is, helpless as her mother, as fucking Kay and her New England everything. She opens her mouth and can't say anything, Victor watching her with round hopeful brown eyes.
Michael taps the table with his knuckles and crosses his legs. 'Is that okay, Con? Peter said he'd take the kids.'
'I don't want Peter-' Not that it's Peter, who changed her diapers, but that he's sitting at her brother's right hand watching her with shrewd dog's eyes and knowing. She fumbles for words and ignores Mama's pursed lips.
'I'll take them,' Tom offers suddenly from her other side. 'My day's free if Johnny's delayed-' He raises his eyebrows at Michael and gets a nod. 'You wanna go cool off, kids? I want some ice cream.'
This raises the usual screams. Connie gets up, washes her plate, and goes to look in on the baby upstairs, her heart roaring in her chest.
When he was born, everyone said Michael Rizzi looked like his father; they've already started the switch to his godfather and namesake. Connie's never believed in these comparisons – it's a fucking baby, after all, and looks exactly like his brother did at that age, bunched-up and pink with a snub nose – but she looks for Carlo all the same as she lifts baby Mike from his crib and adjusts him whimpering sleepy on her shoulder. Her kids sleep in her old room when they're in this house; she turns to the gilded full-length mirror she got for her sixteenth birthday and examines the pair of them. Her hair has come out of this morning's shape and spills over Mike's matching black wisps, his mouth half-open in a yawn against her shoulder, and she has to blink at the stark set of her mascara against her dark eyes. Michael looked tired too, she supposes, like he didn't sleep last night. Good.
She pats Mike absently on the back, though he hasn't been fed yet this afternoon. It'll be weird if he does turn out looking like his father. Part of her hopes he does, to remind Michael of what he's done well into his godson's adulthood and coming of age perhaps as the ironic inheritor to everything Michael builds for himself, with him unlikely to come up with his own kids as far as Connie can tell despite him occasionally mentioning something to the contrary. Part of her doesn't give a single shit.
A week has given her enough time to understand it was the principle of the thing, above all, rather than the death itself. Carlo was her business. She'd had plans, or at least she'd thought she had.
Footsteps on the stairs; she swings around tense and ready to snap, but it's only Mama, solemn and quiet in the door as she watches her daughter and grandson. Connie hefts Mike on her shoulder and shifts her weight to her other leg, feeling the sweat on the soles of her bare feet stick to the tacky wood varnish floor.
'Cosa c'è?'
'He's just waking up.'
Her mother gestures curtly; Connie hands her son over and wraps her arms around herself in the space he leaves.
'You were rude to your brother,' Mama observes, rocking gently as Mike's protests take on a little more conscious indignation.
Connie stares with eyes narrowed. 'I don't care.'
'You should.' Mama shakes her head once, sharp, at the giddy furious way Connie straightens up even in this oppressive heat; she juts her chin over the baby's shoulder as if to keep him from the conversation. 'No, I told you – you don't be stupid right now.'
This was the closest thing they'd had to a full and honest conversation about what their family does, last week – better late than never, Connie thinks bitterly. Mama had held her so tight and shook her so roughly she left bruises, as she cried and cried and then fought against the grip. You understand? she repeated again and again. You understand now?
She shrugs now and says nothing. Mama studies her in the quick, peculiar way she has only with her children and grandchildren, her ringed hand finding the small of the baby's back and holding him still for a moment.
'Don't be stupid,' she continues, careful, 'so you start thinking you're helpless. You ain't that.'
'I fuckin’ feel it, Ma.'
'Yeah, yeah. But you got some options, now.'
'Like you did with Pop, huh? Michael can't-' Can't take my son, can't kill my husband, can't make me do a goddamn thing, can't touch me. He can, he can, he will. Michael, small and delicate-boned still, once mistaken for her twin, now treats his part inherited, part chemical-made access to violence with a bone-deep easiness that is both familiar and terrifyingly alien. 'He's just-'
'Michael knows who he is,' Mama cuts in flatly, and raises an eyebrow. 'It took him long enough. You still got some work to do.'
Connie makes an angry incredulous noise. 'You think Kay's gonna stay with him when she finds out?'
She hears Tom calling her name at the bottom of the stairs. Mama crosses past her to lay Mike back in the crib, somehow calmed out of his afternoon tantrum, and turns back as Connie pushes for the door.
'Constanzia.' Connie glances back; she looks small in the middle of the little faded bedroom, tired, suddenly, as the rest of them. 'I only got the three of you, now. We been through worse.'
Because we come out with our name, Connie thinks, light-headed as she takes a few steps and sees Tom looking up expectant with – bizarre – a picnic basket over one arm. Tom who hasn't even got their name and wishes he did. 'You coming?' he asks.
I'm going, she wants to say, but her throat feels as swollen as it did at the table and so she nods and descends. The silhouette at the end of the hall tugs at her eye past the banister: her brother is looking back over his shoulder after her footsteps either out of instinct or his own intention, eyes dark in the drawn-blinds afternoon shadow of the kitchen and the phone pressed to his ear.