“How Can I Get Muscles Like Yours?” — The Mafia Boss Froze When the Maid’s Little Girl Walked Into His Private Gym

The snow came early that year. By November, the garden behind the mansion was a desert of blue-white drifts, with the boxwood hedges looking like rows of frosted buns.

The house grew colder. Not because the furnace was small—it was a coal-burning monster converted to oil that lived in a pit beneath the wine cellar—but because the walls were three feet of Indiana limestone, and limestone never forgets the winter.

Dominic’s routines changed. He spent less time in the study and more time in the long hall on the second floor, looking out the leaded-glass windows toward the drive.

There were more cars now. Long, black sedans that stayed for ten minutes with their engines running, their exhaust plumes hanging in the cold air like horse tails. Men with gray hats went up the back stairs. Men with leather coats stood in the kitchen and drank my mother’s chicory coffee without saying thank you.

Alina was nervous. She dropped a Spode saucer on a Thursday morning; it broke into five clean pieces on the pantry tile.

She didn't cry. She just knelt there, looking at the china as if she were waiting for Dominic to come out of the floor and take her fingers off with a pair of poultry shears.

"It was three dollars," I said, trying to be helpful.

"It was eighty dollars," she said, her voice dry as salt. "It came from England. His grandmother brought them over."

"He doesn't use the little plates," I said. "He eats his bread off the table."

"Lucy, shut up. Just... sit there and don't touch the white pieces."

A shadow fell across the pantry door.

It wasn't Dominic. It was Silvio Russo.

Silvio was Dominic’s cousin on his mother’s side. He was forty, but he looked fifty-five because he spent his summers in Miami and his winters in steam rooms, trying to sweat out thirty years of bad gin and worse decisions. He had teeth that were too white and hair that was too black, and he smelled of lilac water and stale cigars.

"Delgado," he said, leaning against the jamb. He had an unlit toothpick between his molars.

My mother stayed on her knees, the five pieces of the English plate gathered in her skirt like eggs.

"Mr. Russo," she said.

"Dominic wants the blue shirts from the dry cleaner. The ones with the French cuffs. Not the ones Jimmy brought back—the ones from the place on Taylor Street."

"I... I have them, Mr. Russo. They are in the cedar closet."

"Good," Silvio said. He didn't look at her; his eyes were on me. He took the toothpick out of his mouth and examined the wet end. "What’s this still doing here?"

"She is helping me," Alina said quickly. Her fingers tightened on her skirt.

"She’s four," Silvio said. "She’s a rat underfoot. Dominic’s got three guys from Detroit coming in forty minutes. We don't need kids dropping dolls in the front hall."

He reached down with his polished shoe—a brown wingtip with small decorative holes in the leather—and nudged Benny, who was sitting on the second shelf of the baker's rack.

He didn't kick the rabbit. He just pushed it with his toe until Benny fell into the dust bin beneath the vegetable bins.

"Keep her in the back," Silvio said. "Or I'll tell the gate to stop letting her on the bus."

My mother didn't move. She couldn't. To challenge Silvio was to challenge the family, and the family had nine different ways of making a woman from Jalisco find out what the bottom of Lake Michigan felt like in November.

I didn't know about Lake Michigan.

I knew that Benny was in the potato peelings.

I stood up from my stool. I was small, even for four, but I had Dominic’s voice in my head—*dis-ci-pline*—and I had four months of watching him pull two hundred pounds toward the ceiling without making a face.

I walked over to Silvio’s shoe.

I didn't yell. I didn't cry.

I lifted my right foot—the one with the strawberries properly on the bottom now—and I brought my heel down on the shiny brown leather of his toe as hard as my forty-two pounds would allow.

The leather was stiff. It didn't hurt him much, but it left a round, gray mark of dried garden dirt right between the little holes.

Silvio froze.

He looked down at his shoe. Then he looked down at me.

His face didn't look like Dominic’s when Dominic was mad. When Dominic was mad, his eyes got very wide and very still, like a pond before it freezes over. Silvio’s face got hot and red, the skin around his nose turning the color of an overripe plum.

"You little bitch," he whispered.

He raised his hand. It wasn't a warning; it was a backhand—the flat, heavy strike men like Silvio used on cocktail waitresses and dogs that barked during the news.

My mother made a sound like a dog that had been run over.

The hand didn't land.

A wrist was caught.

It didn't look like an interception; it looked like Silvio’s arm had simply arrived at an iron bracket that had been installed in the wall three hundred years ago.

Dominic stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the pantry.

He was wearing his shirtsleeves, the cuffs rolled back two turns over his forearms. He held a cold bottle of mineral water in his left hand. His right hand was wrapped around Silvio’s wrist, just above the gold watch with the little diamonds in the bezel.

The pantry was very small. With the three of them in it, there was no air left for anyone else.

"Dominic," Silvio gasped. His fingers were already turning purple; Dominic was not just holding him, he was compressing the two bones in the forearm until they ground together.

"You're loud, Silvio," Dominic said.

His voice was conversational. It was the tone he used when he told the butcher the veal was too gray.

"She kicked me, Dom! The little spic kicked my shoe!"

Dominic looked down. He saw the gray smudge on the brown wingtip.

Then he looked at me.

I was standing there with my fists clenched, my chin up, the way I had seen him stand when the men from the Teamsters were shouting on the terrace.

"Why did you kick his shoe, Lucy?" Dominic asked.

"He put Benny in the potatoes," I said.

Dominic’s gray eyes moved to the dust bin. He saw the single blue ear sticking up from between two bags of Idaho russets.

He looked back at Silvio.

"She gave you a reason," Dominic said.

"Dom, are you crazy? It’s a maid's kid! She’s four years old!"

"She lives here," Dominic said.

The silence that followed was different from the silence in the gym. This was the silence that comes when someone smells gas in a cellar.

"She doesn't live here," Silvio hissed, though his voice had dropped an octave because the pressure on his wrist was now forcing his shoulder down toward his knee. "Alina lives in the carriage house. The kid is... she’s an extra."

"Nothing is extra," Dominic said. "Everything in this house belongs to someone. The chairs belong to me. The silver belongs to me. The potatoes belong to the kitchen."

He stepped closer. He was six inches taller than Silvio, and three times as broad through the chest. His scarred shoulder pressed against the white doorjamb, leaving a small crease in the pine.

"And Delgado belongs to the house," Dominic said, his voice dropping into that register that made the windowpanes vibrate in their lead came. "Which means the kid belongs to the house. If you have an issue with the furniture, Silvio, you talk to me. If you have an issue with the dog, you talk to me. You don't raise a hand in my kitchen. Not to the cook. Not to the girl. Not to the goddamned rabbit."

He let go of Silvio’s wrist.

He didn't shove him. He just released the tension.

Silvio fell back two steps, his left hand immediately flying to his right wrist to feel the pulse. There were already four deep, red indentations in the skin where Dominic’s fingers had been.

"The Detroit people are here," Silvio said, his eyes wet with the humiliation of an animal that has been beaten in front of a mirror. "They're at the gate."

"Tell them to wait," Dominic said. "I haven't finished my water."

Silvio looked at Alina. He looked at me. Then he turned on his heel and walked out through the scullery, the door swinging back and forth three times before settling into its latch.

My mother was still on the floor. She had dropped the pieces of the Spode plate. She looked at Dominic as if he had just grown three heads, all of them breathing fire.

Dominic didn't look at her.

He reached down into the dust bin. His hand, huge and scarred, came up holding Benny by the nape of the neck. He shook the rabbit twice to clear the gray potato dust from its fur.

He held it out to me.

"Next time," he said, "use the toe."

"The toe?" I asked, taking Benny back.

"The heel has no reach," he said. "If you use the heel, you have to be too close. If you're that close, they can reach down and take your hair. Use the toe. Step through it. Like you're kicking a football."

"I don't have a football."

"I'll buy you one," Dominic Moretti said. He looked at my mother then—just a quick, flat glance that lasted less than a second. "Clean up the porcelain, Alina. You'll cut your knees."