The Woman at the Docks (Grassi Framily)

"And yet?" I prompted, sensing she wasn't done speaking.

"And yet I can't help but feel that I can trust you."

"You can," I assured her.

I didn't give my word often.

You never knew who might screw up, need to be punished, need to be taken out. So you couldn't give them any assurances.

But I gave her one.

And I would do everything in my fucking power to keep it.

Chapter Six

Romy

Beauty is a curse.

Those were words my mother had said to us so often that they were a fundamental part of our psyches from a young age.

She claimed she cried when we were both born because we'd both been too pretty, would only grow up into very beautiful women. And that beauty, it does something ugly to men, mi vida," she explained to me one evening as we were cooking dinner in our makeshift apartment in a rundown neighborhood a couple weeks after she'd officially left my father.

At that age, I had no reason to doubt those words.

My mother had been the kind of stunning that had men stopping in their tracks, getting slaps from their wives when they passed her on the street. She'd been thin but curvy in her youth, all boobs and hips and butt. Even being naive of such things, I had always been fascinated by the way a sundress—her daily attire—slid over her curves, wondering if I would inherit a figure like hers once I grew up. Her hair had been a long sheet of gleaming black around a gentle face with large dark eyes and flawless skin.

So she'd been beautiful for sure.

And my father had something evil in him.

It was faulty logic, of course, that her beauty had done that to him, but I hadn't known better at the time.

She'd been so pretty it could be hard to look at. And yet my father would throw her across a room like a rag doll, would pull her up by her throat and spit in her face, calling her names no child should ever hear about their mother.

Whore.

Slut.

Bitch.

Cunt.

"We should all run away," I whispered to her one night, clinging to her on the bathroom floor while she sobbed, her eye nearly swollen closed, her lip bleeding, a small patch of hair missing from right behind her ear from where my father had pulled her up by it.

"That is a nice fantasy, Romina," she'd told me, giving me a reassuring squeeze. "But we live in a not-so-nice reality. I'm sorry to say it. But it is true. We can't leave."

"But why?" I begged, my heart turning to dust in my chest.

"We have nowhere to go, mija," she told me, reaching up to stroke my hair.

"We can go back to your home." She'd told me about Venezuela all the time. About her family. About the food. About their way of life. It seemed clear to me that she missed it.

"No, we can't."

"Why not? Our family is there."

"It is not how it was anymore, Romina. There is unrest. There are many people snatched off the streets. We can't go back now. Someday, I hope."