Chapter One

Colleen

 

I can never think of her as Mom. It is always ‘Mother,’ or mostly just ‘Alma.’ She seems too glamorous to be a simple mom, as though all her necklaces and diamond earrings and her glittering, glorious smile are in defiance of the label. She never liked it, I know; I intuited that when I was very young and she used to scowl at me when I screamed out, “Mommy!” One day I stopped saying it and she started smiling at me more often. To my young and inexperienced mind, that seemed like a victory. But I regret it now, standing in the backroom of the nail salon, the immigrant workers talking in Mandarin and others in Korean, Alma tapping her pointed heel against the sleek wooden floor.

 

“You will go to dinner,” she says, “if your father commands it.”

 

“Commands it,” I repeat sourly. My back is pressed against the wall, crates of nail supplies filling the air with pungent odors all around me. Outside, just about audibly, one of Father’s men talks loudly with one of the workers.

 

“Me? Forget about it, doll. I’m the real fuckin’ deal.”

 

“I don’t even know the man!”

 

Alma could have stepped out of an advertisement from the 1950s. She wears a wide-hipped, flowing dress with her red hair tied up in buns, her earrings sparkling, and her lipstick just enough to hint at sexuality. Her lips are pursed, too, which accentuates the effect. She wears a bracelet on each wrist and a large engagement ring snugly above her smaller, more modest wedding ring; the wedding ring is the only item bought before Father was the Shane O’Rourke. She slices her hand through the air, her painted fingernails catching the lowlight of the naked bulb.

 

“Since when does that matter?” she scowls heavily. Somehow each of her facial expressions is heavier than the last. “Please explain it to me. Your father has given you an order. It seems simple enough to me!”

 

“Does he want me to go to bed with this man as well?” I snap. My hands are shaking; my lips are trembling; my heart is both trembling and shaking. “Does he want me to fuck him?”

 

She darts forward and backhands me across the mouth swiftly, the same efficient way she did when I was a girl. There is never any anger in her movements. There is hardly any emotion at all, except for a mild discontent. The movement is like a reflex, as though I pressed the wrong button and this is the result. She even looks annoyed with herself as she steps back, smoothing her hitting hand down her dress.

 

I rub my face, working my jaw. Twenty-one years old and she still thinks she can hit me, and the worst part about it is that she’s right.

 

“Do you live to cause me stress?” she cries, dramatic in the extreme. She even lays the back of her non-hitting hand across her forehead like a fainting actress from a black and white movie. “Listen to me,” she goes on, dropping the hand. “Your father is trying to bridge the gap between us and the Italians, which means certain concessions have to be made, certain moves have to be played. You’re just a girl. I don’t expect you to grasp the full scope of this, but you have a part to play, as do I, and as does your father.”

 

“I’m not a girl, Mom.” I sneer out the word. “I can buy my own alcohol!”

 

“What?” She leaps forward. “You’re not drinking, are you? What have I told you about drinking? It ruins a lady’s complexion. See every worn-out, used, abused forty-something in any dingy club in New York, Colleen, and you’ll see a fool who’s spent the glowing years of her life in the bottle. That’s what makes them look like used dog chew-toys, you know. Are you drinking? Are you?”

 

“No.” I sigh, feeling caged in. It’s not even like I can just march out of here; one of Father’s men would simply pick me up. Or even if Alma commanded them to let me go for a while, in an hour or so they would pick me up. The cage might expand and contract, but it never goes away. I turn away from her, stare at a curling piece of wallpaper near the floor. “I don’t want to go to dinner with this man. Isn’t it about time I started choosing something for myself? I don’t understand why—”

 

“This is family,” Alma interrupts. “No, not just family. This is Family. Do you understand? Everything we do is for the good of the Family. Do you think your father enjoyed everything he had to do on his way up, girl? Do you think he relished in it? Surely he would rather be on a beach somewhere, sunning himself!” Her Irish accent is far thicker than mine, closer to Father’s. It didn’t have years of American TV and school to half-form it. “We all have to do things we don’t want to do, so you will go on this date with this Italian, and you will smile when he compliments you, and laugh when he makes a joke, and flutter your eyelashes when he asks if you’ve ever been with a man before. You will be enticing, modest, and seductive all at once. You will not kiss him. You will only make him believe that if you were to go on another date, you might kiss him.”

 

“You should write that down,” I mutter darkly. “I could turn it into an instruction manual.”

 

She grits her teeth for a moment, looks as if she might slap me again, and then spins on her heels. “Follow me, please. Ha-yoon will work wonders on those talons you call nails. Ha-yoon!”

 

I follow her onto the main floor and allow Ha-yoon to paint my nails. “The same color as your beautiful eyes,” she says, smiling at me. She paints them a light green as I sit there, staring at myself in the mirror. Everything else blurs, though, except for my eyes. I gaze into my green eyes and wonder if this is who I really am, some girl without a single point of control in her life. Twenty-one years old, and I’ve never even bought my own clothes!

 

Once the nails are done, Alma takes me outside and basically shoves me into the back of the car: tinted windows, driven by one of Father’s men. Mom glances across at me a few times, but I pretend not to see her, even though her reflection in the glass is bright against the setting sun. Winter in New Jersey: the streetlamps coated in ice, a light snow falling that turns to slush on the road, pedestrians huddled like tortoises made out of jackets and hoodies and boots and thick jeans. I watch the passing ice-tinged scenery and suppress a sigh. Date night tonight, how fun!

 

Other girls—I know from TV and school—would relish this opportunity. They’d get to go to a fancy restaurant and have a fancy dinner with a man who will probably be wearing a nice suit. But I can’t find any enjoyment in the idea because I know it’s just another move by Father. It’s not I who’s going on the date, not really; I’m just a pawn for Father to move around. I think, madly, about disobeying. But then what? Alma turns on me; Father turns on me; the whole Family turns on me. The scaffolding my life is built around collapses, and I’m left alone and afraid. I grind my teeth until Alma reaches across and prods me in the cheek, hard, with her pointed fingernail.

 

“Stop that,” she mutters. “You’ll ruin your smile.”

 

“God forbid I don’t look as pretty as a picture.” With an effort, I loosen my jaw.

 

“Yes, God should forbid it.” She makes the sign of the cross and deepens her scowl, which is a common occurrence when she looks at me. I wonder if she scowled this much before I was born. “Can’t you just be nice for once?”

 

We climb out of the car and shiver our way up the driveway and into the large entrance door, which is normal to me but which must seem impressive to the driver. Whichever man is driving us, he always pauses to look at the O’Rourke residence: a nine-bedroom mansion with two gates, and a large porch with white pillars, plus two separate balconies.

 

Alma hurries me into the house, her hand on my elbow, and straight up the stairs to one of the guest bedrooms which serves as her dress-up room. Here she has her walk-in closet and her gold-edged full-length mirror. The whole room smells like vanilla because of the candles she’s constantly burning. She nudges me onto the cream, circular chair, the kind you find in clothes stores, and then goes around the room lighting the vanilla sticks. When the room is sufficiently stifling, she spins on me.

 

“We want you to look beautiful,” she says, “but reserved. We want there to be some sexuality in your appearance, of course—you can’t look like a spinster—but we don’t want to present you as a slut, either. Perhaps we’ll show some leg, yes, hmm, some leg, but keep it high-cut up top. Right up to the neck. Perhaps a dark dress with a pearl necklace to offset it … with some pearl earrings too?” Only now does she look at me, raising her eyebrow. “What do you think?”

 

I can tell by the way she glares at me that anymore insolence—as she often brands it—will see her go into a real fury, the kind which lasts for days. It’s a familiar look because I’ve seen it all through my childhood. She won’t accept anything less than full compliance now, and, despite myself, I find that I am giving into her glare. No matter how often I tell myself that today is different, that today I am going to stand up to her, I never do.

 

“Whatever you think is best.” I drop my gaze, staring down at my feet.

 

“I think I have a nice green dress that perfectly fits my description,” Alma says, clapping her fingers together; somehow she avoids her palms. Her hands look like hummingbirds, fluttering about. “You’re going to shine tonight, princess.” I know that her softening technique is just that: a technique. But even so, I can’t deny that when she moves close to me with that smile—that smile that is almost like a real mom’s—I find myself smiling in return. “You are going to be the most beautiful woman in the whole of New York, I promise.”

 

Alma spends some time molding me, twisting me and contorting me, brushing me and painting me, and then she leaves me standing there in front of three full-length mirrors. I look like exactly what I am: an expertly made-up woman, confused by how suddenly pretty she has become. Then Father walks in behind me, his face poking over my shoulder in the reflection. He stands with his hands crossed over his belly.

 

Shane O’Rourke, the leader of the Family, and my father, is a broad man with a heavy belly and a heavy chest to match. He wears simple clothes, a shirt from a supermarket and faded jeans; his only concession to wealth is the gold watch on his wrist. His hair is gray, balding except for the sides, and his chest makes a wheezing noise when he breathes heavily.

 

I’m about to say hello when he quickly advances on me, taking a small silver tin from his pocket. He presses it into my hand. “I have a task for you,” he says. “I need it done well, girl. There can’t be any mistakes, y’hear? It’s gotta go down smoother’n a thirty-year-old whisky.”