All I Believe (Firsts and Forever, #10)(40)
I closed and locked the door to my room and carefully positioned my painting on a side table, propped up against the wall. Then I noticed my suitcase, sitting beside the bed with several long strips of airline barcodes attached to the handle. I’d given up on ever seeing it again. I unzipped it and grabbed my toiletry bag, but left my clothes in the suitcase. Instead, I reached for a pair of the sexy briefs Nana had bought me, along with a nice new outfit I’d bought myself, and headed to the shower.
When I returned to the living room sometime later, dressed in sandals, blue shorts and a short-sleeved white button-down, I found that all the little old ladies were mobilizing. Most of them were tying scarves over their hair. I knew what that meant.
Jessie came up to me and said somberly, “We’re going to church. Everyone wants to light a candle for Nana’s son Paulie and his wife and daughter. It would have been baby Sophie’s birthday today. Do you think it’s okay if I come along? I’m not Catholic, and I don’t really know what to do.”
“You should definitely come. I’ll walk you through it.”
Nana was uncharacteristically quiet as our group left the hotel and walked the two blocks to the huge, ornate Catholic cathedral. She and her sister linked arms as they walked, their recent conflict water under the bridge. Jessie and I stayed at the back of the crowd, and he said softly, “It breaks my heart that Nana lost her son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter to such a senseless act of violence.”
I didn’t really remember my Uncle Paulie, but I knew his face from the numerous photographs on Nana’s shelves. I was four when a monster named Sal Natori broke into my uncle’s home with a bunch of men and tried to kill the entire family. They murdered my uncle and aunt and their baby daughter in their sleep, then went after their four sons. Somehow my cousin Dante, who was just seven at the time, managed to kill one of the men with a shotgun and hold the rest at bay while his younger brothers, Vincent, Gianni and Mikey, escaped out a window and ran to a neighbor’s house. The shotgun blast woke a couple of Paulie’s men who were staying at the house, and they rescued Dante right before he would have been killed, too.
I’d heard that story a hundred times over the years, and I still couldn’t come to grips with it. The Natori and Dombruso families were bitter rivals, the feud spanning generations. I had no idea what started the conflict, and maybe no one else remembered, either. Lives had been lost on both sides over the decades, but when Sal Natori decided to break into my uncle’s home and murder innocent children, it crossed a line. A couple years ago, Dante finally managed to track down and kill Sal Natori, which gave my cousin and our family a bit of closure. But of course, he still bore the scars from that night. To varying degrees, we all did.
When we reached the cathedral, I guided Jessie through the rituals and linked my arm with his as I lit a candle for my baby cousin and her parents. A flood of emotions made my throat close up and I swallowed hard. I put my other arm around Nana’s shoulders as she lit another candle. One by one, all her relatives did the same. A tear rolled down her cheek and we stood there for a long moment, watching all those little flames flickering in their red glass votives.
After that, Nana and her family joined a mass that was just getting under way, and Jessie and I sat in a polished, dark wood pew at the back of the huge building. Soft light filtered in through the massive stained glass windows, and melted wax and incense delicately perfumed the air. I looked up at the high, gilded ceiling and sent a prayer out into the universe for my uncle and his family. I thought about their smiling faces in a photograph on Nana’s mantel. It was the only picture taken of the entire family of seven, my uncle and aunt and baby Sophie, along with Dante, Gianni, Vincent, and Mikey. Three of the seven were killed less than a month after the photo was taken.
I took a deep breath and looked around me, trying to get my emotions under control. The cathedral was beautiful, and being there was bittersweet. I’d grown up going to church, but when my parents decided to get a divorce, they both distanced themselves from our religion. By that point, I already knew I was gay, and had begun distancing myself as well, since I knew where the church stood on homosexuality. My religion was a part of me, but at the same time, they told me I was wrong for being what God made me, and there was just no reconciling that.
I got up after a few minutes and slipped out the back, with Jessie right beside me. “It’s amazing in there, and so different than what I’m used to,” he said once we were outside. He hadn’t said a word while we were in the cathedral. “The church I grew up in was a plain wooden building with a steeple.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Yeah, I do, which surprises me. I think I told you my father’s a minister, and I spent so much of my childhood in that place. Back then, it felt pretty oppressive. I always had to watch what I said and I tried so hard to fit in, even though I never really did. That was pretty miserable. So I don’t really get why I miss it now.”
“Come on,” I said, “let’s go back to the hotel. Nana and the ladies are going to be a while. We can sit by the pool and relax a bit before we get caught up in all the preparations for tonight.” He nodded in agreement.
When we reached the town square, Jessie pointed and said, “Hey, isn’t that Luca?” I spotted him arguing with a tall, muscular guy in his early thirties. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it was definitely an argument, judging by their body language and emphatic hand gestures. “Who’s he talking to?” Jessie asked.