Page 76 of Sweet Ruin

My mother went back into the kitchen and finished plating the fish.

By the next morning, she was in a cockroach-infested apartment on Forty-Third Street. Back where she started, back in the Before Times. Returned to sender like a mislabeled package.

She was fifty-one.

My father paid for the apartment, but nothing beyond that. As far as he was concerned, the matter was closed.

I saw her on Sundays when he let me, and then, once I was old enough to stop asking, I went whenever I wanted. She’d feed me until I couldn’t breathe and brush me off whenever I tried to talk about her life instead of mine.

She died in that shoebox shithole. I was twenty-four and too broke to save her. I couldn’t have bought her a house that year if I’d sold my organs.

I would have, though.

If it would have saved her, I would have.

I stood at her grave with dirt still soft on it and I made a promise. It was dumb—graveside promises always are.

But I swore to her that I’d buy all of it. The blocks he sneered at. The avenue with the carp tank. The whole miserable, valuable, unwanted stretch of Brooklyn he was so proud of climbing out of.

Because it was worth something.

Her before was worth something. He thought he traded up. He was dead fucking wrong.

He swapped a woman who fed forty people gratefully, for a money-grubbing gold-digger, simply because he liked the way she looked.

I’ve spent two decades proving just how wrong he was.

I know I sound like a rich idiot wasting a fortune on a fight nobody else knows is happening. Niko, if he knew the full extent of it, would tell me to go to therapy.

But I don’t give a fuck what it sounds like. There’s one white square left, one parcel off the corner of Forty-Fourth and Fourth, and until it’s green, the argument isn’t finished.

And if the argument isn’t finished, then my father is still right.

I can’t have that.

Footsteps ring out in the hallway. Niko comes back in, drying his hands on his shirt.

“You’re still standing there,” he says. “Brooding.”

“I’m thinking.”

“Is that what you call it? Looks the same from where I’m standing.” He leans against the wall to watch me. “I assume you’ve come to a decision?”

I look at him and nod. “I’m not going to wait her out.” I cap the marker and set it down on the laminate, on Forty-Fourth, right next to the white square. “I’m going to go see her.”

“And do what? You said she won’t sell.”

“She won’t.” I straighten up and roll my shoulder. “So I’m not going to ask her to. I’m going to make her a different offer.”

“What kind of offer?”

“The kind she can’t turn down.”

Niko goes still. There are some phrases in our world, as corny as they may be, that still carry a very clear message. “Are you sure that’s the route you want to take, brother?” he asks in a soft voice. “Kane, that’s pretty damn ugly. Even by our standards.”

I nod again, grim-faced and certain. “One little baker won’t stop me. I’m going to do what I have to do to fill in that fucking square. Whether she likes it or not.”

15