Trapped by the Mafia

Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!

—Charlotte Brontë

2 hours 53 minutes before the funeral of the mob boss Rosario Tangorello.

A SWF, 24, and a florist, I hate weddings, because I’m always the bridesmaid or hired help. It’s not like I can handle being married, with everything in my life being so up in the air right now. I’m too untethered. Too different. Too weird. And no, Mom, I don’t just need to go out and meet more good guys. Mr. Right won’t magically fix me and my life. Even so, FOMO is such a crappy mood.

Weddings make me think about all this, while funerals... funerals are better. They make me feel lucky to be alive, so I’m humming while decking out a pretty church in white blossoms, until my Boss-from-hell, Sheila, throws open the church door.

“Bryn!” Her voice matches the screeching of the hinges. “Those carnations are not in the van!”

“Not in the...what?” I chew my lip, flash-backing to earlier this morning in my head.

There I was, loading Floribunda’s van.

Okay, so far, so good.

Fast forward a bit more.

There I was again, in my overalls and no-skid shoes, loading the damn van.

Loading, loading, loading—it’s an epic order, the biggest we’ve ever handled. So, I took a tiny break to check my cell phone. Just long enough to read the comments on my secret Instagram account and—

“Oops.”

“Bryn, I’ve told you!” Sheila laments. “I’ve asked you three times! Did zombies eat your brain or what?”

“Gosh, Sheila, you act like we’ve misplaced an assassination squad in Baghdad, not five dozen buds.”

“We? Not we! I forgot nothing! It was all on you! I told you—”

Before she re-rants her rant word for word, I suck my stomach in, because sweating the small stuff is so tiring. “The carns are in the cold storage. They’ll keep, and nobody would ever miss them. Stuff happens. Right, Boss?”

Sheila advances down the aisle with a glare I can easily picture on a stood-up bride.

“That’s what’s wrong with you, millennials. You refuse to get it! The funeral party will arrive in two hours, Bryn. Two hours!”

I glance at my phone. More accurately. It’s 2 hours and 49 minutes, but I don’t feel like correcting her will be a productive move.

“Do you have any idea who our client is?” Sheila’s voice drops to a dramatic whisper. The acoustics in St. Luke’s church is great and all, but the occupant of the gold-fringed, lacquered sarcophagus wouldn’t hear her if he were alive. His coffin is lovingly padded with silky stuff.

“Yup, I know. His name is Tangorello. Rosario Tangorello. He was this...” I snap my fingers, searching for the word on the tip of my tongue. “Aha. A godfather. Like in the old movies about the mafia.”

I wave my phone at Sheila to prove that I’ve done my research. The dead guy in the picture has tufts of silver hair making the last stand around the ears, hooked nose, thin smile on bloodless lips, starched tuxedo collar squeezing his wrinkled neck.

“Hmm. He’s more of a mafiosi god-grandfather, if you ask me. The dude’s not even trending, he’s so ancient.”

Sheila’s not amused. “Bryn! Bryn! Are you a complete idiot? You don’t lose a petal with these people. A petal! We’re missing an entire arrangement! And it’s from the family.”

“Technically, it’s their own fault. Everything about this delivery is topsy-turvy,” I tell her. “This waiting in the church for the funeral party? And cleaning flowers after the Mass, instead of Tangorellos taking them home like all normal people—”

“Bryn! These are not ordinary people.”

“Fine, fine. They’re our clients. The client is always right.” I’m done with this Saturday, so done, that my shoulders slump. “My bad, Sheila. Sorry?”

Sheila doesn’t give a shit about my apologies.

Sniffling, glasses askew on her fake-blonde hair, she dials two other Floribunda staff.

The first doesn’t pick her call.

The second says in a drugged, nasal voice, “I can’t crawl to the elevator let alone drive to Malibu fucking Beach on the account of being sick, Sheila. Fucking sick. That’s why I’ve called in sick earlier. Duh!”

Sheila stares at the phone, breathing like she’s just finished a half-marathon. She’s just a control freak, but my heart thumps sensing something bad thickening over us. Something more ominous than losing my florist gig, but I push the anxiety to the back of my head.

Okay, okay...a deep breath in. I’ve messed up. Screwed up. Blew it. Again. So, I suppose it’s up to me to fix it. Maybe if I do, I’ll keep this job, make the rent and everything will turn out fine this time. I can do that, right?

With shaking fingers, I pop in a scorching-cinnamon gum and decimate it with my teeth. It hits me like cocaine. Or I imagine it would hit me like cocaine. Espresso is my street drug of choice, please and thank you.

“I’ll go get the carnations in a jiffy, Sheila. The old boy Tangorello won’t even get bored waiting for it.”

“It’s more than an hour drive to L.A. without traffic!” Sheila whimpers, pressing a hand to her chest. “It’s impossible! Oh-God-oh-God-oh-God!”

That’s a good call, actually, because if not the Providence, who’d help us now? But this is the year 2017, in the world without miracles or succor. The white carnations don’t rain from the ceiling in response to Sheila’s prayer. In this unresponsive world, a gal can’t stand there, watching someone else wring their hands.

So, yes, I have to cruise every florist in Malibu Beach to scavenge as many carnations as I can. My paltry credit is going to hate me, but Sheila’s hysterical state is my fault. I have to manage somehow, have to fix this and as soon as possible.

I dash down the aisle, and...

A vision stops me dead in my tracks. No, this rapture isn’t a spiritual kind, despite the location, it’s super-earthly.

Nonetheless, it’s rather incredible.

There’s a clear line at the threshold of St. Luke’s where the Californian sunlight meets the gloom of the church’s interior.

On this precise divide between light and darkness, Fate plants a man who’s my opposing number in every way.

He’s walking into the church, when I’m leaving it. I wear faded navy overalls embroidered with Bryn to personalize me to the clients. He wears Armani, and he wears it well, despite the raw vibe in the snap of his jaw that doesn’t pair with Italian suits.

I’m poor, pathetic and obscure, and he is... He is the opposite of all that.

Because he wants to enter the church as much as I want to exit it, neither I nor the mysterious stranger cross the line dividing the light from the darkness.

We freeze in the doorway, eyeing one another, as if dumbstruck. Well, at least I am.

Gosh, I’m too young to meet men at funerals. Okay, maybe I’m on the tail end of being too young for anything. Not a wizened crone yet, I have all my teeth and my thighs are cellulite-free. I’m your every-woman of suburban extraction. Now, I don’t know how other young women live, but personally, on an average day, I meet exactly zero rich guys.

That number plunges even lower if you only count rich guys who have wavy black hair, tamed into a haircut that screams money. Add amber eyes to the check-list, and it’s minus infinity times-per-day that I run into guys like this man in the church.

Don’t blame me, blame his eyes. They stand out against his tanned skin and make the fake baroque gold on the altar worthless. No way, no-how I call this color light-brown. That’s too plebeian for him.

“You forgot my carnations,” the stranger says instead of hello.

I gape. “We had lots of orders, Sir, so I can’t tell if this one was yours off the top of my head.” Holy crap! How did it all come out so smoothly, when my stomach is tied into knots?

“I ordered five dozen white carnations.” His clarification rings of cold finality. He knows what’s his. He’ll die arguing the missing flowers are his.

“If you say so. Of course.”

“I ordered them from you.” He points a finger at me.

“Maybe? We have multiple staff taking orders.”

The same digit waves away my weak attempt at objections. “You’ll deliver them. Father loved white carnations.”

Instead of snapping to attention, I nearly swallow my gum. The guy before me can’t be over thirty. And the mafiosi in the coffin is ninety if he’s a day. Was. I peeked. “Rosario Tangorello is your father? No way!”

Sheila makes a choking sound behind my back.

Ouch! That came out heartless. And I’m not heartless, I swear. Just... hairbrained, really hairbrained. “I’m...I’m very sorry for your loss, Sir.”

Naturally, the gum lodged into my cheek shifts. It makes a smooching sound at the end of my condolences. I don’t need a mirror to know that I flush to the roots of my hair. Maybe as far as the tips of my ears.

“Mr. Tangorello!” I’m desperate to get away from this church and from him now, truly desperate. “If you just let me squeeze by you, Sir, I’ll leave... to deliver your floral arrangement.”

Is it too much to ask for this perfectly legit request not to come out sleazy? Apparently, it is.

“The name’s Scali, not Tangorello,” he says, leaning back out of the church’s doors to read the Floribunda sign on the side of my minivan. The one that also says L.A. on it.

“Huh?”

“My mother’s never married the old bastard,” Scali explains patiently. “Something about him being a bastard, or so she said.”

It seems like a bad time to bring up how much he’s his father’s son in my humble opinion. But even with me keeping my opinion quiet, the crease between his luxurious brows deepens.

He checks his watch. So do I. It’s a beautiful watch, and the funeral of the mob boss Rosario Tangorello is scheduled to begin in 2 hours 47 minutes.

The watch’s bracelet glitters against the unrelieved black shirt, forcing my eyes to glue to it. Despite my magpie-like reaction, I know what he’s thinking: his carnations can’t make it to St. Luke’s in time for the funeral.

Even if Mr. Scali-not-Tangorello is blissfully unaware that a floral arrangement must be set up and fluffed up upon delivery; he must know how far L.A. is from St. Luke’s exclusive location along the Malibu Beach. He also knows, just like everyone else in the L.A. are that the Pacific Coast Highway is always crawling with tourists, and that the south-central L.A. is grid-locked this time of day.

Unexpectedly, Scali’s frown melts away after he factors all these variables in.

He takes me by the shoulder and points my nose toward a bright orange car parked in front of the church.

My jaw hangs, allowing the gum to roll out and hit the stone floor. The bells toll in my ears two hours too early for Rosario Tangorello’s funeral.

This Scali fellow, he can’t mean to do what I think he means to do.

He isn’t some madman, right?