Peril

DELLA

She knew exactly what was on her mind, but the words were a problem. How do you tell a man that his father is a crazy old bastard, completely out of control and dangerous and who, at that very moment, was scaring the living hell out of her?

“Have you heard from Sara?” Tony asked.

She’d not expected the sudden change in his voice, the way the tone went from a question to a plea. But it was the question itself that caught her off guard. She’d come to tell him that his father had confronted her, and later her mother, and that these confrontations had really frightened her and so she’d decided that he needed to know about them. That was as far as she’d intended to go. Certainly, she’d had no expectation of admitting that Sara had called her, even hinted at where she was and what she was doing. But Tony had asked her outright, and so she knew that the moment had come-the moment of truth, they called it in the movies-when you had to confront the full and awesome nature of your peril or live a coward all your life.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I have, Tony.”

His eyes caught fire, and she saw in that instant the depth of his love and the torment of its loss. “Is she okay?” he asked softly.

“Yeah,” Della answered. “She’s fine.”

She expected a volley of questions to follow, hard and blunt, raining down upon her like a hail of bullets. But instead, Tony shrank back against the car, folded his arms, and let his head droop forward for a moment. “Good,” he said.

“I don’t know where she is,” Della said. “Just that she’s okay.”

Tony drew himself up and settled his gaze on the empty street. “That’s all that matters.”

She had never heard a man say a more wholly selfless thing. She’d thought he was like his father, filled with the Old Man’s seething violence, but now he seemed merely broken, and in his brokenness curiously baffled, like a man who’d been badly beaten in some bar brawl and was struggling to understand how the argument began.

“You and Mike,” he said. “You’re happy?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s good.” He started to speak, then stopped, and in that awkward gesture Della saw the young man Sara had first met, so vulnerable and uncertain, seeking love, infinitely kind.

“The thing is,” he began, then stopped, glanced once again into the night, then back to Della. “Before you know it, things get out of hand.”

“They do, Tony.”

“And the years go by, you know?”

“They do, yeah.”

He gazed at his shoes, kicked lightly at the cement pavement. “So, that’s how it goes.” He studied the deserted yard. His face grew somber. “You think she might come back, Della? On her own, I mean.”

She shook her head.

“No, I don’t either,” Tony said. “So, what now? You got any ideas?”

“Just one thing, Tony,” Della said. “You gotta be careful about your father.”

“My father?”

“He’s scary, you know?” The rest burst from her in a torrent. “The thing is, I told my mother about him coming over. I know that before I told you he didn’t come, but he did. And, Tony, he was really scary, and so I told my mother about it and she went to see him ’cause it turns out they knew each other in high school, and so she figured she could put in a word for me.”

“A word about what?” Tony asked.

“Like, leave me alone. That kind of word. Because, the thing is, he grabbed me. When he came over that time. And so my mother went over to tell him to, you know, leave me alone, but she didn’t get anywhere with that because he was the same way to her. You know, like real threatening.”

“He threatened your mother?”

“He scared her,” Della said. “And she came back and she told me to just stay out of it because he-your father-he was… dangerous.”

“Dangerous,” Tony repeated softly.

“Yeah, Tony. So that’s why she said I should stay out of it.”

Tony’s gaze was oddly admiring. “Why didn’t you?”

“I couldn’t do it,” Della answered. “Because… if he’d hurt me, and then my mother, well, I had to think what he might do to Sara, you know?”

Tony looked like a man who’d long expected terrible news but was only now getting the full report of just how terrible it was. “Thank you,” he said quietly, then reached out and touched her arm. “Thank you, Della.”