Page 20

“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” he asked as Kat ran down the steps with her little legs.

When he had picked her up on her second day of first grade, she had acted much differently than she had the first day.

“No!” Kat huffed after slamming herself down on her pink bed.

Sitting down on the edge of it next to her, he pretended to beg. “Come on, please.”

Kat huffed, shaking her head, her pigtails that Dom had put up for her this morning swung adorably.

“I’ll tell you what …” He leaned over to whisper, as if what he was about to tell her was top secret and the most important thing in the world. “If you tell me what happened at school today, I’ll go get your baby brother to come play with you.”

“All night?” She emphasized the only deal she was willing to take.

Dom smiled at the lawyer in the making. “All night.”

“Well, I don’t really know what happened,” Little Katarina began. “Yesterday was fun, just like kindergarten, but today, none of my friends would talk to me. And when Katy passed out her birthday invitations, I didn’t get one. I asked her why, but she said her mommy said she couldn’t ’cause of my name.” Looking up at Dominic, she looked confused. “I don’t get what my name has to do with not being my friend anymore.”

Dom took a deep breath. He knew this day would come, but he’d hoped that Kat being a girl might have somehow made the Luciano name less threatening to the gender-stereotyping parents. Hell, he even understood why a parent would tell their kids to stay away from Luciano men, even if they were only boys. The whole city knew where their footsteps were bound to follow.

But Katarina was different. She was everything him and his brothers weren’t. She was smart, kind, loving, and funny. If they spent just five minutes with her, they’d want their child to be around her in hopes that she’d rub off on them. No one on this side of the city were upstanding citizens by any means. They all were poor pieces of shits, who either had a drug problem, a drinking one, or were suppliers to those problems. No one here was better than the other, except Kat.

“Kat, our father isn’t only the scary man upstairs to us … he’s the scary man to everyone else too.”

“He is?”

“Yes, he is a bad man out there too.” Dom nodded. “And because your last name is Luciano, people are scared of that last name because of our father. But that doesn’t mean they are scared of you, okay?”

She thought for a moment. “Did this happen to you?”

“Yes, exactly like you. Kindergarten was fine, because kids don’t really listen to their parents at that age, and they don’t care about stupid stuff like what you look like or how much money you have. They just want to have fun, no matter who they are playing with. But when they get older and get a better understanding of right and wrong, good and evil, they start listening to their parents, even if their parents are wrong.”

“That’s stupid.”

Shocked at the simple response from a smart six-year-old, he couldn’t agree more. “You’re right; it is pretty stupid.”

“Katy was my friend, even though her daddy smells like DeeDee, and I still wanted to go to her party. So she should still want to be my friend, even though the scary man upstairs is mine.”

Dominic gave a chuckle. “She should. But you’re smart enough to make your own decisions about who you want to be friends with.”

“Well, then I don’t want to be friends with Katy, or anyone else who doesn’t like us because of a stupid name we didn’t even get to pick, anyway.”

Staring down at her, he didn’t know whether he should be worried about the things that came out of her mouth or proud. However, he decided the latter was easier to handle. “Okay, then I guess that’s settled. We didn’t want you to go to Katy’s party, anyway.”

“Nope,” she sassily agreed. “Now, can you go get my baby brother already?”

“I’ll be back.”

Seven

The Last Luciano

Dominic, Age 17

Going to the door of the littlest bedroom in the house, he reached up above the doorframe, grabbing the tiny gold key to unlock the door. Opening it, he saw what he always did—DeeDee passed out on the old rug. This was about her naptime every day, and she continued to do what she had done since he’d been a young child—locking them in a safe room and calling it babysitting. Sure it was babysitting, but whether it was actual childcare was up for debate. He figured it was effective, and none of them had gotten seriously injured … yet.

Stepping over DeeDee, he went to the small child who hadn’t looked up at him or cared that he had entered. The youngest Luciano was … different. Not in the gifted way that Kat was. No, in a strange way that Dominic hadn’t quite yet understood.