We’re gonna be like Jiffy Lube,” Vinny says. “A household name!”

Vinny smiles wide, puffs out his chest, and struts across the garage. “You hear that, boys? Jiffy Lube.”

One of the younger mechanics, Adrian, rolls his eyes. “Yeah, Vinny, I always wanted to be Jiffy Lube. Growing up, my brother wanted to be an astronaut, and my sister wanted to be a princess. Me? I wanted to be fucking Jiffy Lube.”

Sometimes I miss the more innocent ball busting from the garage. Ever since I started working directly for my father, it all got a lot more serious. Then, after I took over for him, the ball busting became more or less literal at times.

“Jiffy Lube makes boatloads of cash, Adrian,” I say. “How much you think it costs to do an oil change?”

Adrian shrugs. “I dunno, Luca, $19.99?”

Vinny smacks his head. “You dumbass, that’s what we charge.”

“Right,” I say. “We charge $19.99, but then what do we do?”

“We upsell,” Vinny says, jumping up and down with excitement. “Yes, ma’am, your air filter is bad, you need a new one of those, only nine bucks. And three of the bulbs on your tail light are out, only four bucks a pop and we fix ‘em.”

“Those bulbs cost like a dime,” Adrian says.

“Exactly,” I say. “Now you do that forty or fifty times a day, forty or fifty times in each state, and suddenly you’re making way more than a damn astronaut, or even a princess.”

Both men suddenly check out of the conversation and look away, in the same direction. Vinny looks up past me, over my shoulder. His eyes widen and his mouth hangs open. Adrian raises his eyebrows up and down like he’s ready to pounce.

I turn around.

Bella Riela.

“Speaking of princesses,” I say.

I’d almost forgotten about it. Alright, not really, I couldn’t forget about the damn broad. I couldn’t even fuck anyone else ‘cause I thought just maybe she’d get around to calling me back.

But I’m not desperate, just patient. I’m never desperate.

Then I actually look at Bella. I can tell something’s wrong, like really wrong. But Adrian is whistling, and Vinny is trying to hiss at him to shut up. He remembers what I said about Bella and doesn’t want me going off on him.

“Break time,” I shout back at Adrian. “Vinny, you and Adrian get lost for a while.”

Vinny drags him off.

“Can we go to your office?” she asks, her voice low and solemn.

“Yeah,” I say. “Sure. Everything okay?”

She doesn’t smile, or nod, or shake her head–or do anything to give me a hint of an answer. She just shuffles her feet toward my office. I put my hand on her lower back without even thinking about it, but she doesn’t flinch or push me away, she just walks as if I never even touched her.

I let her in and offer her my own chair, then I pull up one of the shitty ones I make Vinny sit in and straddle it.

“What’s wrong?” I ask. “Anything I can help with?”

I shouldn’t really be jumping to help her, not when she ignored me the way she did, but hell, maybe something is going wrong in her life, and that’s why she didn’t return my call. Maybe she’s only now realizing I’m the only one who can help her, I am the kind of man who tends to be the last resort of a good little princess like Bella Riela.

She reaches into her purse, and I hear the rustling of a plastic bag. She pulls the bag out, slams it onto my desk, and reaches into it with a kind of frantic intensity. She pulls out what I recognize immediately as a pregnancy test, and I hear myself mouthing an “Oh, shit,” before I even see it’s positive.

No woman is ever going to slam a negative pregnancy test onto a guy’s desk like that.

She flips it over. “I’m pregnant, Luca.”

I bite my lip. “You...sure it’s–”

“Yes,” she says, her cheeks red with anger. “It’s yours.”

A lot of shit races through my head in that moment. Most of it’s bad, to be honest. For one, big Anthony Riela is gonna fucking kill me if he finds out. If anything could bring our feud back like a forest fire, it’s Anthony finding out I fucked his daughter.

Then I feel myself suppressing a bit of a smile, and some good stuff goes through my mind. Bella can’t exactly ignore me anymore, can she? She’ll at least have to have dinner with me again.

“Why are you smiling, Luca,” she asks.

Fuck. I bite my lip and try to go all solemn again, like I’m at a funeral or whatever.

“Uh,” I say. “I mean…”

Then I realize I’m being a fucking pussy. A coward. I pull the chair away and stand up. “Listen here, Princess, I’m not some deadbeat. I’m not some piece of shit like you might think I am. This is my kid, and if you have it–”

“Of course I’m going to have it,” she whispers. “I’m still Catholic even though I stopped going to mass.”

“Right,” I say. “Me too.” I only stopped going to mass because she did. “And so you’re gonna have it. And do you want this kid to grow up without a father?”

“But we just…” she says, her lip trembling. “It was one time.”

“You fall asleep during sex ed?” I ask. “It only takes–”

“That’s not what I mean, Luca,” she says, tears forming in her eyes. “I mean we just lost ourselves in a moment, and that was it, and–”

“It didn’t have to be,” I say.

I pull out my phone, flip to the text messages, and hold it out to her.

“It’s not like…” she whispers. “Like you were–”

“Bella,” I say. “It was something else, that night with you. And not just the part that lead to this.”

I eye the pregnancy test, then her belly.

She shakes her head and starts looking panicked. “No, no, no, you’re not supposed to do this.”

I realize I’m pacing back and forth now. I throw my hands up in the air. “What? You want me to do what then?”

She stands up now too. “Accuse it of being someone else’s. Call me a whore. Flip out and throw a chair.”

I grab hold of the chair, gripping it so tight all the veins on my forearm pop out. “You want me to throw this? That gonna help somehow?”

She lets out a pained laugh and shakes her head. “No, Luca, God. Sit down. Just sit down.”

I don’t want to sit down anymore, i’m too worked up. My heart is pounding. I’m gonna have a fucking kid. With Bella Riela. All the bad shit that comes with that starts shrinking down in my mind, becoming irrelevant little obstacles that I know I can overcome.

She sits down and looks at me expectantly, so I do finally sit down.

“Luca,” she says, “It’s not just you. I mean, you as a man.”

I cock my head at her, not really sure what that is supposed to mean.

“We have our families…” she says.

“So now you have a family,” I say.

She glares at me, and I turn my palms up at her, knowing this isn’t the time to pick that fight.

“You’re the kingpin, Luca. I wasn’t planning to have a kid for like–a decade–and certainly not with you, of all people.”

I laugh at that, but an even more icy glare from her shuts me right up.

“I cut myself off from my family so that whatever family I did have wouldn’t have to be connected to all of this shit. These feuds, the violence.”

She looks at me when she says “violence.” I consider trying to deny it, but then I remember the way I fucked those muggers up on our date. I remember how close I was to stabbing that guy to death. I think better of denying anything to her.

“So,” I say. “You’d rather our kid just didn’t have a father?”

Not that I’d ever let that happen. I will be a father to this kid, whether Princess wants me to be or not. He–or she–is half mine, that’s the way sperm works, it has half the genetic material.

She looks at me, tears staining her face. “There’s a good guy somewhere in you, Luca, and when you were with me for that night, I felt like I really got to know that guy...but that’s not all of who you are, and that other guy that you are, he can’t be a father to this child.”

Bella stands and touches her belly as she says the last part. She grabs her purse like she’s getting ready to go. If I can make a really good argument right now, really fast, I might be able to get her to stay. To hear me out, and listen to reason.

She starts to walk away though, and I can’t keep this conversation going in front of the boys in the garage–too much risk that Anthony would hear from one of his guys before he heard from Bella or me.

“Bella,” I say, grabbing her wrist. It’s now or never. Win her over with a brilliant argument.

She glares up at me through tears, and I know I have to speak quickly, and make it count.

“We’re...” I say. “We’re gonna be like Jiffy Lube. Just ask Vinny.”

She shakes her head, breaks away from my hand, and walks out of my office. The door slams behind her.

Well shit, I probably could have come up with something better than that.