She leaned forward again and this time touched him softer, forcing his face to her. “I just want to look at you.”
Tino let her, even though his stomach was churning, because he did not want to end up in that basement again. He closed his eyes when she ran a thumb over his lips and asked, “You don’t look like them. Who do you look like?”
Tino really wished he knew more of his family. That he could just look at this woman and say he looked like some second uncle, but he didn’t know his mother’s family very well. They’d disowned her when she had Romeo as a teenager. She had kept in touch with her brother somewhat before he died, and Romeo was friends with their cousin Angelo, but that was about it. Their little family had been alone in Harlem, and they’d been fine with it.
“You look like her, don’t you?” she pressed when Tino didn’t answer. “You look like the whore who gave birth to you? The whore who fucked my husband?”
Tino closed his eyes again and just prayed for this woman to go away.
To leave him alone with his no cable and his lists and his cereal bars.
“I want you to answer me, Valentino,” she snapped at him. “Right now.”
“Yes,” he said, even if he didn’t want to. For all he knew, it was a fucking test, and she already knew the answer. “I look like my mother.”
“Well, you’re very attractive,” she decided as she released his face and sat back against the couch. “No one ever accused Frankie of having bad taste. You’re much better looking than your brother. If he was all I had to work with, we’d be in trouble.”
Tino’s stomach was churning worse than ever.
He still had that crazy feeling to just run far away, but he sat there instead.
She set her purse down on the couch and searched in it. She pulled out a videotape and handed it to him. “I brought this for you.”
He took it and looked at it, seeing that it was labeled with numbers and a date. It was technical looking, and he got the impression it wasn’t that she took pity on him with the no-cable issue and rented him something worth watching.
“Put it on.” She gestured to the television.
“I, um—” He looked to the television. “Nova didn’t hook up the player yet.”
“Well, do it. I’ll wait. Frankie’s at his father’s. We got all night, Valentino.” She fished in her purse again and pulled out a crossword puzzle.
Tino got the message.
The longer it took him to hook up the player, the longer he had to deal with her. So he worked on setting the fucker up, even if it was something firmly in Nova’s area of expertise.
He screwed up the sound somehow, which he figured out by testing it with the DVD they had left in the player when they brought it over from East Harlem, but Mary told him they didn’t need sound.
So he put the VHS tape into the slot and then fucked with the controls to switch from DVD. He was so focused on just getting the technical stuff right he actually shouted when he saw the grainy black-and-white footage of a jail cell on the television.
That by itself wasn’t shocking.
But seeing Romeo was.
Tino had just been crying over wanting to see him, but he didn’t want it to be like this. Through cell bars, sleeping on a tiny bed that was too small for his big frame.
Tino turned back to Mary in confusion. “Wha—”
“Watch.” She gestured to the screen. “You’ll miss the good part.”
Tino watched, even if he didn’t want to. When the guards came in and pulled out the clubs at their sides, Romeo sat up in bed.
Tino didn’t think he was ever going find out what Nova felt like that night in the basement, when he watched their father take a belt to Tino. Not until Carina’s mother forced Tino to put in a video that showed Romeo getting the shit beat out of him by two jail guards.
They didn’t hit his face, but they got him just about everywhere else.
And Romeo didn’t fight back.
He couldn’t.
Not when he was up for attempted murder on a police officer.
The footage was so grainy.
It was hard to tell how badly he was hurt.
All Tino could do was squint at the screen through his tears.
Then the guards left, and Tino found himself on his knees, holding on to the television as he watched Romeo pull himself off the floor and sit there with his head in his hands for a long time.
“He’ll be fine. Bruises heal,” Mary said dismissively. “They were just making an example.”
“Why?” Tino asked as he turned back to her, because he couldn’t understand why on earth they would do this to Romeo.
Romeo was a rule follower.
It was Tino and Nova who broke them.
“I can have him killed, Valentino,” she said simply, like she was talking about the weather. “I can have him tortured every day that he’s in there. I can sell him inside the prison system. As a matter of fact, I may anyway. It’s the least your whore of a mother owes me. Maybe I’ll use both of you.”