A smile tugged Carmine’s lips at those words. She flew. “I’ll drink to that.”
“You’ll drink to anything.”
He raised the bottle. “I’ll drink to that, too.”
Dominic stood up and walked away, rejoining his table at the front of the room with Tess and Dia. Carmine stared at the bottle of liquor in his hand, realizing his brother had just done the one thing he had been too stubborn to do—concede.
Carmine hesitated before getting up and strolling over to their table. He paused beside it, his eyes silently scanning them, before slipping into an empty seat.
Dia tentatively smiled from her seat beside him. He gave her a small smile, the warmth and acceptance in her expression comforting.
The three of them talked about weddings and families and the future, but Carmine didn’t say much. There really wasn’t anything he could say. His future was set in stone and it wasn’t anything to gush about, or anything he could even share. It was nice, though, being around them again. There was no anger or resentment, no guilt or blame for the things that happened, or the ones that didn’t. There was nothing but love and friendship at the table, and even some long-overdue sympathy.
Vincent came over for a few minutes, laughing and joking around. Carmine felt a strange sensation brewing inside as he watched them. They were his family—his real family—the ones who had been through it all with him.
But still, even then, he felt the void, the part that was missing. He felt her absence, when he wanted nothing more than her presence.
And, if he were being honest, he felt something else then, too . . . a craving for the sensation he had had the night before.
* * *
The Rosewood Room was near the Children’s School of Music and just down the street from an old closed down theater, one that used to play movies for a quarter in the summer of 1972.
Vincent had been just a kid at the time, slightly rebellious yet highly impressionable. He would often leave his house on Felton Drive, two blocks past where he later settled with his own family, and slip away to that theater without his parents knowing. It was at a time when he and Celia came and went as they pleased, not long before the brutal underground wars broke out that changed everything. Before their parents tightened their grip and started monitoring their every move . . . before they came to the realization that they needed to.
His mother had been strict and maybe already a bit delusional, refusing to let them watch television, not wanting to poison their minds, so he would lie whenever she asked and tell her he was going to the park with friends.
The Godfather came out that year. Vincent saw it one cloudy Tuesday afternoon in July, sitting in the back row of the packed theater. Those three hours altered his life, turning everything he thought he knew upside down.
Until then, he only had a vague understanding of the Mafia, based on the things he had witnessed and his mother’s volatile rants. He thought it was a club, maybe part of a union, considering he had seen his dad take money from Teamsters. But reality made itself known that day, playing out on the massive flickering screen.
Vincent had been so fascinated by the film, so rocked to the core, that he hadn’t noticed a dozen of his father’s close friends sitting in the audience with him.
He ran home that afternoon with a million questions running through his head, absentmindedly navigating a path he knew by heart. Two blocks over, one block down, cut through the small alley the next street over, then it’s only four more blocks south to his home. He could zigzag through the streets without thinking, making it there within minutes.
And years later, as Vincent strolled away from the wedding hall after taking one last look at his family, his feet seemed to instinctively remember the way. He walked past the old theater, surveying the boarded-up windows and crumbling bricks, and he thought back to that day he watched The Godfather. He intended to question his sister when he made it home, but he never had the chance.
As soon as he opened the front door of his house and ran inside, his father’s boisterous voice rocked the downstairs. “Vincenzo Roman!”
Vincent’s feet immediately rooted to the floor as he cringed at the sound of his full name. Glancing in the direction of his father’s voice, he saw him standing in the doorway to his office. His heart beat wildly. Not good, not good. “Yes, Dad?”
“We need to talk.”
Antonio disappeared inside his office. Vincent stood there for a second, intentionally delaying, before forcing his feet to move that way. He took a seat in front of his father’s desk.
“So what did you do today?” Antonio asked, leaning back in his chair, his hands clasped across his bulky chest.
“Went to the park.”
“The park, huh?”
“Yes.”
“And how was the park, son?”
“Fine.”
“And you were there all afternoon?”