As Jules pulled onto the long, dark back road, Romeo found himself saying, “My ma was beautiful. You can see a lot of her in Tino. She was Sicilian, second generation.
She actually spoke Italian, which isn’t as common anymore, but that was her parents’
first language, and it was all they spoke at home.”
“You didn’t know your grandparents?”
“No, they disowned her when she had me at seventeen. I never cared to know them.”
“Oh,” Jules said softly. “I’m sorry.”
“When I was six, my ma met a guy named Frankie Moretti. He was handsome and rich and charming. He bought her nice things and made life a little less hard for us.”
“I can see why that’d be appealing to a young, single mother.”
“Frankie’s the only son of Aldo Moretti, head of the largest crime family in New York,” Romeo admitted, feeling like he was spilling out poison. “I think my ma was compelling to him—old-school, a throwback to days gone past. She was his goomah for a while before—”
“Goomah?”
“Girlfriend…on the side,” Romeo clarified, wincing as he added, “Frankie’s married.”
“Okay.” Jules sounded surprisingly nonjudgmental.
“He was pissed when Nova came along.” Romeo closed his eyes. Just saying Nova’s name made him hurt. “Goomahs aren’t supposed to get knocked up. He had no interest in him, but he still wanted my mother. He stopped coming over to our house.
He didn’t want to see the baby, but my ma still met him places.”
“She kept seeing him after he rejected his son?” Jules turned to give him a look.
280
“Yeah.” Romeo couldn’t blame Jules’s judgment for that when he agreed, but despite the bitterness a nostalgic smile tugged at his lips. “But it’s a good thing she did.
We got Tino two years later, and he was the cutest baby. He was a lot of fun. They both were.”
“What’d Frankie do when your mother got pregnant a second time?” Romeo shrugged. “He was sort of ambivalent at that point. My ma wasn’t one to force the kids on him, and she didn’t ask him for extra to support them. They were hers, and I guess he figured if she wanted a houseful of little mafioso brats, what the fuck did he care? He didn’t buy things like he did when they first met. We were poor, and Frankie was fine with that too. He didn’t give a shit if my ma was working two jobs to feed his sons.”
“I get the impression there’s no love lost between you and Frankie.”
“He’s the one we’re running from.” Romeo raised his eyebrows when Jules turned to look at him in surprise. “I’ve always hated him, and I was very vocal about it.”
“Can’t say I blame ya for that.”
“By the time Tino was born, we knew there was something special about Nova.”
“Special how?”
“He talked really young. He started reading before he was two.”
“Reading?” Jules repeated in surprise.
“Yeah, and he understood the stuff he read. It was the weirdest shit you’ve ever seen,” Romeo said with a laugh and then gripped his ribs again. “And he has a memory that’s insane. You couldn’t say something in front of him without being prepared for him to just repeat the whole conversation at a later date like a little recorder, usually when it was really inconvenient. My ma would say something bad about the butcher, and two months later Nova’d remind her she thought he was crazy as bat shit right in front of him.”
Jules laughed. “That is inconvenient.”
281
Romeo smiled, thinking of the strange envy he’d always had for Nova. It was all so crystal clear in his mind, nothing faded. It was like the past lived on forever with him.
“He remembers everything, Juliet. Everything he hears, everything he sees. It’s all right there, like a hard drive that he can access whenever he wants. He can tell you what we ate for dinner January third, ninety-eight. He could tell you what his homework was. He could recite every problem he did, and then he could tell you what Tino’s homework was because he’d looked over his shoulder while he was working on it. He could tell you what our ma was wearing.”
“That’s amazing. How rare is that? You just don’t hear ’bout people like that.” Jules turned to look at Romeo with wide eyes. “And he doesn’t come across like a genius. No offense, but he just seems like a regular ol’ bully with a chip on his shoulder.”
“It was by design. My ma was afraid Frankie’d take him away from her if he found out. We started teaching him to hide it, and we had Tino to help him, ’cause Tino was the most stereotypical little Italian kid you ever met. It gave Nova a guidepost: this is how normal kids act. I was too old, but Tino was perfect and Nova was a fast learner.