His: Tony: The Sabatini Family by Fiona Murphy (mystery books to read .TXT) 📗

mother slapped me across the face over and over, then began beating me with a closed fist on my chest, throat, and face. Screaming at me this was all my fault.

Nothing made sense. Not the pain from her beating, the words she screamed as she beat me, or the copper smell of the blood all around me. When she grabbed my hair and began slamming my head onto the hardwood floor, the pain was brief before I slipped with relief into darkness.

At the funeral, all around me, the name I heard over and over was Tony Sabatini. It was Sabatini who had driven Danny to commit suicide. It was his fault for killing Michael. He was the cause of all the pain.

As night fell and we packed long past the time I was tired and wanting to go to bed, I dropped a box of my mom’s things. Another beating began. Curling into a ball, trying to escape the pain of my mother’s fists, I hated Tony Sabatini with a passion.

Over the next few weeks my mother cursed Tony Sabatini as often as she struck my brothers and me. It was his fault Danny was gone, if she were a man, she’d kill him herself she would mutter when she was drunk. The minute he was out of jail, she was going to find him and kill him herself.

Her hate became my hate. Once he was dead, she would be happy again. She would stop hitting us. I could sleep through the night without her shaking me awake to hear her cry about how everything had gone wrong with her life.

My father finally came to see us nine long months after Danny’s death. When he saw us, he started crying. He put us in his car and started driving and didn’t stop until we arrived at his mother’s house in St. Louis. I had never met her. She was a nice woman who spoke more Spanish than English.

At first, I was afraid of her because she always looked like she was angry. Then I realized she was trying to think and remember what words to use in English. She never yelled, she gave us hugs, and she never once hit us.

For a while, I forgot about Tony Sabatini. Until I started feeling guilty about how happy I was away from my mom. Once again, he became the star of my late-night fantasies. If he hadn’t done what he did, my mom wouldn’t have gotten so violent, and we could have stayed with her. But gradually, the guilt faded, and with it, all thought of Tony Sabatini.

We stayed with my grandmother for six years until she died. My dad came to St. Louis to bring my younger brother and me back to live with him, his new wife, and her daughter in La Grange, a suburb of Chicago. My older brother, Jason, had already joined the Army, so it was just Ricky and me.

Reuniting with my father wasn’t a movie of the week moment. My stepmom resented us. Which I kind of understood as we never met her until the day my father brought us to live with her. Neither Ricky nor I ever felt welcome. As soon as I graduated high school, I moved in with a school friend and got into the University of Illinois on an almost full-ride scholarship. I didn’t see my dad again for almost three years, until Jason’s funeral.

It was also there I saw my mother for the first time since my father took us away from her. I hadn’t been sure what to expect when I saw her. There was a little guilt at the satisfaction I felt of how pathetic she was as she begged for forgiveness for all the pain she put us through as kids. Ricky refused to acknowledge her, told me to ignore her, yet I hadn’t been able to.

Until I found out the only reason she was there was for money. She knew there were large benefits paid to families of survivors of soldiers killed while on active duty the way Jason had. Jason had his benefits split between Ricky and me fifty-fifty. Ricky hugged me and told me he couldn’t take staying in Chicago anymore. He was moving to California and hoped I would go with him. I couldn’t. I was one year away from graduating and had just started dating Eddie. My life was still in Chicago.

I left the funeral not expecting to see or hear from either of my parents again. It was a surprise when I got the call my mother was dying and begging to see me. Her liver was failing from alcoholism.

Even now, I’m not sure why I went. I was finally pregnant again after a fifth attempt at in vitro and losing my only previous pregnancy. At ten weeks, I was optimistic this pregnancy would last. I wanted to show her that my life was good. Instead, she ranted about Tony Sabatini and how different her life would have been if it hadn’t been for him. I couldn’t believe it. When we could have talked about so many other things, she was still harping on Tony Sabatini. And something that happened almost twenty years ago.

Yet gradually, I realized how right she was. How one thing had changed and affected her so deeply. At first, I still hadn’t believed it was all Tony Sabatini’s fault; he was just a man. Until I listened closer and it became clear that Tony Sabatini was a major player in the Outfit. His father and grandfather before him were key members, it was rumored one day he would have become Don.

Five years, he got five years on manslaughter charges. Manslaughter means he killed a man without malice and forethought. Tony Sabatini beat Michael to death, breaking more than fifteen bones in his body with his bare hands. Then when Michael was at the edge of death, he put a bullet in his stomach to make sure there