Page 59 of Alfie: Part One
My eyes burned as I threw away the trash, and then I went to return the tray to the food truck. Maybe I’d missed a garbage station. Surely the trays weren’t meant to be thrown out.
When I came back to the table, I sat down again, and Alfie had a pensive look on his face.
“It’s ironic, innit? Your dad was right,” he said.
I lifted my brows. “Pardon?”
He smiled faintly, without any trace of actual mirth. “I am what your family feared I was. I just stopped denying it.”
Was that… Was he confessing to being in the mob?
“Are you a Son?” I had to know.
He glanced around us, subtle-like, before shaking his head. “Not yet.”
But he would be one day?
“Kellan branched out when he gave me that job,” he said. “He went outside the syndicate to get someone who’d remain on the outside.”
I had no idea what that meant. “I’m not going to pretend I understand.”
“In short, I stayed outta sight,” he replied with a shrug. “I carried around his work phone all day and scheduled sit-downs and deciphered code. I knew countless names but not the faces they belonged to. I responded to messages from members without ever meeting with them.”
Oh.
All right.
I…
Fuck. I didn’t know how to process any of this. My knowledge of the mafia came from documentaries and Wikipedia. I’d had four investigative reporters put together specials for the show, specifically about the Sons of Munster, and they’d had high ratings. People always wanted to see behind the curtains of organizations that ran parallel infrastructure with normal society.
It disgusted me to know Alfie’s affiliation. Sickened me. Made me feel like the man next to me was a complete stranger. But what sickened me more was this natural curiosity and intrigue to know more, to pull me back in.
“But things have changed now…?” I half asked. “You’re suddenly showing up at O’Shea’s for a barbecue. Our son and daughter call the head of the Sonsuncle.”
He offered another shrug. “Family is everything to him.”
“And it isn’t to me?”
“I didn’t say that.” He scowled. “I don’t gotta hide shit no more, though. You don’t know how fucking liberating that is.”
Was hekiddingme?
“If you’re implying I pushed you toward them?—”
“No! Jesus Christ.” He upgraded his scowl to a swift glare. “I made some dumb moves all on my own, and then there they were.” He lost some of the heat, and he eyed our kids briefly. Trip was making friends with the two baby goats. “But I’m not sorry,” Alfie went on quietly. “I’m gonna find the balls to be upfront with Mom too. Not about…whatever. Not about what I do, but—family. I’m not gonna hide anymore. I don’t have the energy for it.”
I unclenched my jaw, and his evident exhaustion rubbed off on me.
No matter the actions that’d led him to knock on Finnegan O’Shea’s door and ask to be part of their family, this was his reality now, and it created a distance between us that had never seemed so vast.
Fuck moving on with a new partner. He’d joined a whole new family that survived on secrecy and crimes.
One of the last sentences in his texts came back to haunt me.
Consider me cut out of your life.
Had he not already been cut out the past two years?