Don't Tell the Don He Married My Sister

Three months after my mother died, a woman drove down to the back bay with three cars and came into our kitchen without knocking.

Her coat was worth more than the house. She looked at the water stain on the ceiling for a second, then at us.

"I'm Camilla Castellano," she said. "I knew your mother. I'm taking you both to New York."

Genevieve asked what that meant.

"It means one of you becomes my daughter. Papers, my name, a trust. Nobody in that house will be able to touch you." She set her purse down on the table like she'd been in that kitchen a hundred times. "The other one marries my son."

Genevieve asked if we could think about it. Camilla said we had until morning.

My sister made up her mind before the cars were off our street.

"The wife's the one they come for," she said, folding her good sweater into a trash bag because we didn't own a suitcase. "The daughter's the one they keep out of it."

Then she laughed at me. "And think about it, Nor. A woman like that, driving to a place like this to buy her son a wife? Whatever's wrong with him is bad."

She was wrong about both.

Rafe Castellano was in the front hall when we got to Long Island. Twenty-four then, half a head taller than his mother, and he looked at the two of us the way you look at furniture somebody else ordered.

Genevieve didn't say much the rest of that night. In the morning she asked Camilla if we could trade.

Camilla said no. "You chose. In my house a choice holds."

So my sister got the name and I got the ring.

It didn't go any better for me. For a while I thought the two of us might get somewhere. Then he found out whose idea the engagement had been, and after that nothing I did came out clean. If I was quiet I was scheming. If I smiled at him I was working him.

Three years of trying. Three years of being looked straight through.

Two weeks before the wedding I went up to Camilla's study and asked her to give the wedding to Genevieve.

She didn't answer for a long time. Long enough that I started working out what I'd do if she said no.

"The wedding's in two weeks," she said. "We'll change the bride."

I got down on the rug and kissed the back of her hand.

She pulled it away fast, then caught my arm and hauled me up off the floor. Her eyes had gone red at the rims. "Nobody's done that to me since I was fifteen years old."

"Thank you," I said.

"Don't." She kept hold of my arm. "Good girl. I've cost you three years."

I shook my head. She hadn't cost me anything.

Three years in that house, fed and warm and nobody putting a hand on me. I'd take it again tomorrow. What came before it was worse.

My father gambled and my mother cried about it. Those were the two jobs in our house.

He never worked. He came to her with his hand out and she filled it. She kept some back, though, and she hid it well. When he asked she said it was for us, that we were still small, that it had to last until we were grown.

He came home one night at the end of a bad week and put a knife against Genevieve's neck, then mine. He said if we weren't around she wouldn't need the money. He said the two of them were young enough to try again and maybe they'd get a boy out of it.

She gave him the tin from behind the drawer. He lost it in nine days.

After that there was nothing left in the house to lose, so he started talking about us.

There were men working girls out of a motel off the boardwalk. They'd take both of us. Twelve thousand for the pair.

My mother got down on the linoleum and begged him. She was still begging when he went to bed.

Genevieve cried until she made herself sick.

I didn't. I sat on the bottom stair and looked at the basement door.

There were two bottles left in our storage cage down there. He drank every few days, all the way down, and when he got to the bottom he used his hands on whoever was closest. Both of us knew the sound of the first cap coming off.

It snowed that night. He had no money, so there was nowhere for him to go, and he stayed in with the bottle.

The bulb in the basement stairwell had been out about two weeks. The handrail had come off the wall in the spring and nobody ever put it back. The heater leaked, so there was always water at the bottom of the steps.

He went down for the second bottle a little after eleven. He caught the edge of a step with the side of his head.

He was gone before the ambulance made the turn onto our street.

I thought that was the end of the bad part.

My mother got sick in January and never got up again. Near the end she talked with her eyes shut. She kept saying she'd been wrong, that she should have done it years ago, that she was sorry.

I thought she meant marrying him.

Camilla came three months after the funeral. Before she said one word about New York she had us take her out to the cemetery.

She stood at the foot of the grave for a while. Then she told us who my mother was.

"Colette Marsh. Her father worked for mine. We grew up in the same house, four years apart, same schools, same church." She said it flat, like she was reading a list off a card. "When she was nineteen she ran off with a card dealer she met at a wedding in Atlantic City. Her father buried her. Real priest, real flowers, empty casket. I was twenty-three. I stood in the second row and sang."

Genevieve made a sound. Camilla didn't look over.

"He said if she wanted that life she could have every bit of it. I was told to leave her alone." She pulled her glove back on, one finger at a time. "So I left her alone. Thirty-one years."

"She never wrote you?" I said.

"Once. February." Camilla finally looked at me. "She asked me to take her girls. I should have come down the same day I opened it."

She kept the promise. That's the whole of it. For three years I had my own bed and clean clothes and a woman who checked whether I'd eaten. If Rafe wanted to look past me at dinner, I could live with that.

I told her so. I said she owed me nothing and I meant it.

Camilla was quiet. She still had hold of my arm.

"You love him, though," she said. "Don't you."