Speak Low (Speak Easy 2)

But once the baby was born, a girl we named Vincenza Kathleen, I realized school would have to wait. I didn’t mind—taking care of Vinnie and keeping accounts for the boarding house kept me busy, although Joey, true to his word, did all the cooking for us. How he managed that plus the restaurant and his bootlegging operation was a mystery to me, but he was smart, hard-working and ambitious, although never so much that ambition overshadowed his devotion to his family.

Unlike Enzo DiFiore.

We didn’t cross paths with him for a while, but I heard he married Gina and took over her father’s distilleries after Vito Meloni’s mysterious death—shot one day while exiting a diner, the victim of a sniper across the street whom no one seemed to notice. The sniper even entered a woman’s nearby apartment and called a cab, explaining that his car had broken down, and waited in her front room for twenty minutes before the cab showed up.

Yet she was unable to identify him.

Evelyn told me Rosie was Enzo’s mistress of choice for a few months the next year, even staying at his apartment at the Statler. But he grew tired of her and eventually took up with someone else, leaving Rosie to move back home until she married a divorced executive at Ford, moved into his house in Grosse Pointe, and never set foot in J.L. Hudson’s dress department again.

As for Evelyn, she married Ted that winter and had twin girls almost as quickly as I had Vinnie. We often met for walks with our girls, pushing the buggies and laughing about how much our lives had changed in just one year. For the most part, it felt like my life began when Joey and I fell in love, and I never even thought about those insane weeks during July of 1923.

Until one day when Enzo showed up at the restaurant with a blond on his arm that was not his wife. Sometimes I helped Joey down there if he was short-staffed, and I happened to see them at a corner table. Immediately, my stomach filled with dread and I sought out Joey in the kitchen.

“It’s OK,” he assured me. “He came in about a week ago demanding payment. Apparently, territory has been renegotiated once more and this is his block now.”

“And?” My heart was pounding with fear. Not again.

“And I paid him. And I’ll keep paying him as long as he stays out of our lives and doesn’t interrupt my bootlegging. We settled on a number and agreed to put the past behind us.”

I relaxed a little. “And you trust him?”

“I wouldn’t go that far. But I don’t think he’ll bother us,” he continued, his eyes going dark. “Because I told him if he comes near you or our family, I’ll fucking kill him.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Congratulations,’ and he handed me a hundred dollar bill.”

It didn’t surprise me at all. Doling out favors on the street was part of Enzo’s vision of himself as an all-powerful, benevolent mafia don, just like the men he’d seen growing up in Brooklyn. “God, what an asshole,” I said.

“Yeah. I told him to keep it. We don’t need his money.”

“No, we don’t.” I wrapped my arms around Joey’s waist.

When I went back into the restaurant, I looked at Enzo, and he raised his glass to me in a silent toast.

I nodded. That’s right, asshole. Here’s to me. I have everything I want, and you’ll never be happy. Life isn’t about owning things or people or money, but you’ll never understand that.

The next time I saw Enzo’s name, it was in the newspaper—he’d been arrested for shooting his brother in an argument over who was stealing money from Club 23.

It didn’t even faze me.

As for the rest of my family, Bridget surprised us all by marrying Martin after he graduated from dental school, and they sold the store, bought a home on the east side near Daddy, and raised the boys there, as well as their own two girls that followed. Eventually, Joey and I bought a house in that neighborhood as well, and our eight children grew up playing with their cousins, just as it should be.

Yes, eight. Four of each, within ten years.

We never did get very good about precautions, and we couldn’t keep our hands off each other.

Molly and Mary Grace both went away to college—paid for by Daddy, who finally put some money away—but both of them returned to the Detroit area to raise families. In fact, we rented our apartment to Molly and her pharmacist husband Jeff, and they lived there happily for many years.

I did become a nurse, eventually. It took me a while, what with eight children and all, but by the time the second world war broke out, I was working for the Red Cross. Two of my daughters followed me into medicine—one became a nurse; another, a doctor.

Prohibiti

on ended, of course, and with it went a large portion of our income. But Joey had saved a good deal of cash, and at that point he and Jeff invested in a chain of drug stores that took off, and while we were never overly rich, we were certainly wealthier than either of us had been growing up.

And as the years went by, the summer of 1923 took on an unreal quality—as if it had been the plot of a movie or a book, the events so dramatic it didn’t seem as if they could’ve happened to us in real life. But then Joey would dig out that handkerchief, the one with the words still written on it in red lipstick, faded but still legible. And we’d know it was all real.

The beginning of us.

THE END