Phantom

Belly-up: Bankrupt

Big earner: Someone who makes a lot of money for the family

Bird: A pretty woman

Blabbermouth: Someone who talks too much

Broad: A woman

Bum rap: A false accusation; being blamed for something you didn’t do

Bust your chops: To scold or chastise someone

Cafone: An embarrassment to himself and others; a phony

Capo: Short for capodecina, the family member who leads a crew

Capo di tutti i capi: Boss of bosses

Clock: To keep track of someone’s movements and activities

Come heavy: To arrive carrying a loaded gun

Consigliere: A member of the family who serves as an adviser to the don and resolves disputes within the family

Contract: A murder assignment

Crew: A group of soldiers that takes orders from a capo

Cugine: A young criminal looking to be inducted into the Mafia

Dip: An idiot

Don: Head of the family

Enforcer: A person who threatens, maims, or kills someone

Empty suit: Someone with nothing to offer who tries to hang around with mobsters

Floozy: A common name for a sexually active and oftentimes promiscuous woman

Fuzz, the: A cop

Gobbledygook: Talking nonsense

Godfather: A powerful crime boss in the Mafia

Hoosegow: Jail

Jalopy: An old car

Large: A thousand, a grand, a G

Made man: An indoctrinated member of the family

Mafioso: A member of the family; a mobster

Magazine: An ammunition storage and feeding device for a firearm

Make one’s bones: To gain credibility by killing someone

Numbskull: A dull, stupid or dimwitted person

Omertà: The code of silence and the vow taken when being sworn into the family

Pinched: To get caught by law enforcement

Problem: A liability, likely to be murdered

Rat: A member who violates omertà and snitches on the family

Sauced: The state of being drunk or intoxicated

Section hand: A railroad worker

Singing like a canary: To give someone, usually the authorities, a lot of secret and often illegal information

Sound, the: Puget Sound, the body of water surrounding Seattle

Take a powder: To leave

Tribute: Giving the boss a cut of the deal—violation is often punishable by death

Underboss: The second-in-command to the boss

War-tax stamps: A postage stamp used to raise war revenue

Whack/ice/burn/pop/clip: To murder

May 26, 1944

My mother always told me I was different. She would spit the word at me like it was rotten fruit on her tongue.

I thought it was because of my deep love for gothic literature. She had trouble getting my nose out of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or my favorite Edgar Allan Poe stories.

As a child, I told her I wanted to live in a house that was built to look like the inside of their brains. Gothic. Dark. Spooky, I’d even say. My mother recoiled at that and called me crazy. She called me many other despicable names, but I won’t give her the satisfaction of repeating them, even in ink.

But what would she think now?

She passed away when I was twenty-three, but even from the grave, I can feel her judgment.

Letting a man into my home, and kissing him. A man who isn’t my husband.

A man who stood outside my window for weeks, watching me from afar.

There is something wrong with him.

Clearly there is something wrong with me, too.