Tessa sent up a hasty prayer for forgiveness as she slipped on the dress Mama had bought her in exchange for a promise not to marry Al.

Not that Mama had to worry about that anymore: Big Al was dead. Mama was dead as well, but Tessa was trying to block that fact out. It had all happened so fast.

But as quickly as things were happening, she needed to get out of the house faster still. The gunshots would attract attention, and there had been many shots. But she never had a choice in the number: one bullet wouldn’t keep Big Al down for long. Even after four, he had still been standing there, with an ‘is that all you got’ look on his broad face.

The dress slid over Tessa’s body with only a small struggle. She had to hurry, but she spared an instant to check herself out in the two huge mirrors that served as her closet doors. Low neck, high hemline, tight fabric tailored to a T by Mama’s own expert hands. A man seeing Tessa in the dress would have many urges, but NOT wanting to marry her wouldn’t have been among them. What had Mama been thinking?

The answer came unbidden: Perhaps Mama had meant for Tessa to wear the dress at the moment that had just passed. Perhaps she had envisioned a way Tessa could kill Big Al with her clothes on, instead of completely naked, which is how it had happened. How it had to be done.

No time. Tessa gave the room a final once-over, looking for money, jewelry, any easily pocketed resources, but allowing her vision to skip the massive body laid out on the floor. When she had taken all she could take in every sense of the word, she walked into the hall, stepped over the second dead man sprawled at the top of the stairs and ran down the carpeted steps, her high heels leaving small craters in the deep shag.

How had it all started?

It had all started with Mama, back when she was Tessa's age, and men had first started to notice her.

At 16 years old, Tessa’s mother had been the most beautiful girl in the neighborhood. By 18 she was married to an up-and-coming picciotto who made capo bastone four years later. Mama knew Papa was mafia—who could have missed it? The suits he wore, his big hands that commanded respect from waiters, cab drivers, shop owners, then police and judges when things began to go bad. But Mama had always counted on her husband to keep that life separate from their home life, or if total separation were not possible, then at least to keep it away from her.

The first year was good. A year after that, there was a family war, and after that, Mama spent her 19th birthday learning about the witness protection program with eight month’s worth of pregnancy resting on her thighs. She never wanted to see her husband again.

She never did.

The FBI moved Tessa’s out of New York City and over to Delaware. She took up dressmaking; found she had a gift for it. She delivered Tessa and regained her traffic-stopping figure. The dress shop did well. Tessa’s mom hated Delaware, and by Tessa’s twelfth birthday, had drifted closer to New York, into a small cluster of Italian blocks in New Jersey. The feds didn’t like it, but they couldn’t stop her.

And for a while, they were happy there. Mama knew how Italian neighborhoods worked, and within ten months of arrival, it was like she had been born there. The other women liked her, and of course, the men noticed her, but she kept her dealings with them to a minimum. She never even spoke to any of the married ones.

The men in Mama's new neighborhood took her rejection hard, but their wives appreciated Mama’s respect and kept their husbands in check. The men were stuck and could do nothing, except complain what a shame it was, a girl like Mama going to waste, and wait for Tessa to grow up.

Tessa grew to be every bit as tall and as breathtaking as her mother. She was so beautiful that men lined up to do things for her, and sometimes she would let them. Tessa had discovered New York City by the time she was thirteen. By fifteen, she was sneaking across the river every weekend and sometimes on school nights. She met countless men, but she was always careful. Tessa was smart enough to get big returns on small investments--and she never invested more than time. She didn’t know Mama’s whole story, but she knew enough that she wasn’t going to make the same mistakes her mother had—pregnant and single at ninteen.

Tessa had bigger plans than that.

It was across the river that Tessa met Big Al.

Al was big- very big. He towered over most men, and his shoulders were wider than the hood of an import. Al was handsome and dressed famously. Tessa had already learned enough from Mama to know that the jacket Al wore was tailored to emphasize his powerful build while concealing the two shoulder holsters he wore.

Big Al had Tessa all to himself fifteen minutes after spotting her in a nightclub. The group of men she was with—she had been favoring a high-nosed, velvet-voiced clotheshorse that kept giving her money and also buying her drinks--evaporated when Big Al came to their table.

Tessa soon found herself nestling against Al’s broad chest, his strong arm holding her close. He smelled fantastic. He bought drinks but never showed any money. Big Al gave orders with just a gesture of his hands, and men obeyed. What orders, Tessa couldn’t guess, but she felt that she, the most beautiful girl in the room (she considered this a fact and not vanity) belonged here with the most important man in the room (this was more than self-evident).

She even appreciated the way Al sat so that the guns he wore didn’t poke her in the ribs.

From then on, Tessa couldn’t get near the city without running into Big Al. Other men had been this persistent, but they had also made it clear what they were after, and that was when Tessa traded them in. Tessa knew what Big Al was after, as well, but he never asked. He just took her to the best, most exclusive nightspots, gave her whatever wanted, and kept his hands away from impolite places.

For a while.

Tessa could see it coming, although Al’s manner hadn’t changed. Then one night Al took Tessa with him into his own limousine. He usually sent her home from the clubs in cabs, or in a limo, if he had a spare one, but tonight, it seemed, was going to be different.

Big Al didn’t sit next to her, but across instead. He seemed to fill the entire back of the car, while Tessa imagined that to his perspective, in her little black dress and flowing hair, she was little more than a black zigzag across the white leather upholstery.

“Alone at last,” Al said.

Tessa wasn’t a girl to stay quiet. “Al, I like you a lot,” she said. “But I’m waiting until I get married.”

This was an exaggeration, but she was at least waiting for 18. 17 at the earliest.

“I know that,” Big Al said with his usual confidence. “I know all about you, Tessa. I know because I dreamed you. You are the perfect girl for me, and I would expect nothing less from you than to speak your mind.” He spoke quietly and with sincerity.

“So why the ride tonight?” she asked, confused that she had apparently underestimated him.

“I want to meet your Mama.” Big Al said.

The limo pulled up to Tessa’s house at six in the morning. Mama was already awake and dressed. She didn’t wait up for her daughter—she trusted Tessa too much for that—but her days at the shop began early.

Big Al opened Tessa’s door himself and walked her up the sidewalk to mama’s front door. Tessa hung on Big Al’s arm, lightheaded from the strangeness of the moment. In the ride across the river, Big Al explained what he wanted. He was proving to be more of a gentleman than she ever imagined.

Mama saw them coming. From 200 feet away, through a small window and in the sun-not-quite-up-but streetlight-are-already-off haze of the early morning, she knew what Big Al was. She also saw the diamond ring shimmering on her daughter’s finger.

“Please don’t do this,” Mama begged after Al has gone.

Tessa wasn’t planning on ‘doing’ anything. She had been surprised by Al’s proposal and had said sweetly but firmly she’d need to think about it. He insisted on meeting her mother nevertheless--a sentiment Tessa found both sweet and presumptuous--and she had gone along. He said she could wear the ring while she thought it over.

Now Mama was telling her what she could and couldn’t do. That put Tessa in the wrong mood--she knew already, deep down, that she wasn’t going to marry Big Al--it was too early to marry any man, never mind one more than twice her age, no matter how charming and sophisticated he may be. But Tessa saw Al’s proposal as one last fling in a long but nearly finished, series of dangerous flings. She had no doubt she could break it off smoothly—she had found she could handle almost anyone.

Except for Mama of course.

“He’s a killer,” Mama said. Absolutely right, as she always was. “He’s Mafioso trash.”

“I don’t care,” Tessa said. “He’s good to me. He takes care of me.”

“I raised you to take care of yourself,” Mama said.

That one stung. “He’s rich,” Tessa replied. "He buys me things.”

There was a pause: both women’s minds were racing, Mama’s searching for a way to defuse the situation, Tessa’s to escalate. Tessa outstripped her Mama and found the perfect, most cutting comeback: “I’ve never even had a dress from a store,” she said sharply. “You’ve made everything. I’m tired of living my life in home-made clothes.”

Tessa was a smart, perceptive girl, but she almost never used that perception to wound—except for certain men she’d met. She had never planned to hurt Mama, but in a few words, she turned what Mama had always believed to be her greatest gift to her daughter into a punishment. Tessa saw at once the damage her words caused and was frightened at her ability to harm. The blow cut Mama down. She looked lost, deflated, defeated.

Mama nodded and left through the front door without another word. Tessa stomped upstairs to her room and slammed the door, although there was no one to hear.

Mama didn’t open the shop that day. She went across the river herself—her first visit to New York since she had fled, pregnant with Tessa.

She did not feel as if everyone were watching her, did not worry that some long-delayed revenge for all the killers she had condemned to prison might come out of nowhere and end her. What she knew--and what the feds could never understand--was that as much as the families may hate her, they feared her more. Her beauty and strength of will had cowed many of the mobsters she had known when she was a girl, and she had lost none of her looks or any of her determination in the years since.

Then there was Papa.

Papa was still in prison. He would die there, but he wasn’t dead yet. Terribly injured in the battles to bring him to justice, wounded again when thrown to the wolves of the federal penitentiary while still vulnerable, Papa had somehow survived to rebuild his empire, starting in his cellblock and expanding outwards to encompass the entire prison and points beyond. Now his cell was his throne room, and each parole, each early release, sent another of Papa’s officers into the world, fiercely loyal to him, hardened by his tutelage that made the federal prison a crucible that forged iron men.

Mama had neither seen nor spoken to Papa since she that day had slapped his face and walked out of their home, but she knew that he still loved her. She knew that he was still a terrible power in the underworld and that she still enjoyed his terrible protection.

Nevertheless, Big Al frightened her. He had recognized her last night, and she knew it. It had been the possibility of someone like Al, a man who would not be intimidated by Papa’s wrath, which had kept Mama out of the city all these years, and now that he had found her, she knew her time was up.

Mama went to Saks Fith Avenue and bought a dress for Tessa. Then she went to her childhood neighborhood, a place still ruled by Papa and his associates, and waited for one of her husband's men--they had never divorced--to find her. If the feds were watching her, they would have though it suicide.

And they would have been right.

Tessa came home from school to find Mama waiting for her at the small kitchen table, dressed all in black, her long legs tucked under her chair. Tessa knew her mother to be beautiful, but even she was taken aback by the radiance high emotion had bestowed upon her.

There was a bottle of wine on the table, two glasses. Tessa sat down, poured a glass for Mama and then for herself. Tessa sat in silence as Mama extracted her promise not to marry Big Al, gave her the dress, and told her everything.

Later, she would learn Mama had told her only almost everything.

Tessa called a cab company the next morning to take her to the Federal Prison where her father was, but she needn’t have bothered. There was a limousine waiting for her when she stepped outside.

Big Al had sent it. The driver took her to the penitentiary without Tessa telling him that’s where she wanted to go.

A lesser warden waited for her in the parking lot. He escorted Tessa through the fences and gates that led to the front door. Tessa had never been to a prison before, and it gave her the chills: the high concrete walls that reached up to bludgeon the sky, set with towers that were higher still, each crowned with spotlights, sirens, and men with rifles who watched her like lascivious saints looking down from a stone heaven.

Tessa hustled after her guide, knowing that she would feel inexplicably safer once inside.

The warden led her past the many checkpoints and rituals for visitors without pause and stopped before a door labeled ‘Conjugal Visit Room 4.’ Tessa gave the man her most ferocious look of disapproval. The man was already terrified of her, and he took a step backward. “These are the most private rooms,” he explained. “Papa asked for it.” She waited for him to unlock the door as he’d unlocked so many in their journey towards the heart of the prison, and a long, awkward minute passed, Tessa waiting and staring, the warden trying to control his fear.

At last, he realized what was going on. “It’s open,” he said. “Go ahead in.”

To be concluded 2/8/2017