Honey by Victor Lodato

Author:Victor Lodato
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

26

Say Nothing

She has a dinner party to return to, but she’s paralyzed in the hallway of her father’s house. She’s standing at the bottom of the stairs, where at age eleven she witnessed something terrible. Her mother, her brother, had seen it too. A secret the three of them had kept all their lives. Again, this sense that she shouldn’t even think of it, as if the memory itself is a crime.

But there’s no forgetting that awful night.

She’d woken from a sound inside a dream—a dream in which she’d been stamping out a fire. But then this sound bled through to the waking world; it seemed to be coming from downstairs. Honey got up to investigate.

In the corridor outside her bedroom, the windows were iced with moonlight. She moved toward the sound, and from the top of the stairs she saw two men down below, dancing. They were in an odd position, though—one man’s back to the other’s chest. The one facing out, facing toward her, was a stranger. Her father was embracing this man, a slim fellow frantically stamping his feet. In Honey’s mind, still powdered by sleep, the scene suggested a continuation of her dream. That is, until her mother appeared, turned on a light, and began to scream.

Then Enzo was there, too—the three of them on the landing, watching as the scene condensed into reality, which was her father with his hands around the stranger’s neck.

What Honey remembers most clearly is the thing that, above all, she wishes to forget—the way the man had looked at her. She knew exactly what he wanted. He wanted to live. But neither Honey nor her mother or brother did anything to help him.

How could they? They knew the Great Pietro’s rages, knew the best thing was to stay away. Honey was screaming now too, but the sound exhausted itself before the man was dead. Finally he fell to the floor with a sound that was as brutal as it was trivial—a stack of newspapers tossed from a truck.

Her father, sweating, wiped his face and told Enzo to come downstairs. He spoke calmly, but when Enzo hesitated her father shouted, Vieni qui!

Later, from her bedroom, Honey saw the two of them in the yard, standing at the edge of the property line where the woods began. She saw the shovels and the tarp. She saw her uncle Vinch appear, as the sky turned a lovely shade of pink. Only then did she remember it was a school day, and she had a test in mathematics.

But what was she going to wear? The question disturbed her, and as she sorted though her dresses, she kept forgetting how to breathe.

* * *

“You okay? Aunt Honey?”

When she turned, her nephew was there, standing in the hallway. She could tell he was drunk; his eyes were at sea, his cheeks splotched with crimson.

“Just thinking,” she told him.

“What about?”

Honey shrugged and changed the subject. “So, you’re going to be a grandfather.”

Corrado nodded, unabashedly proud. When he asked if she was ready to have some champagne, Honey only stared at him; she could summon no words.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.