Bobby smiled painfully. “Yeah, well, maybe. Yeah, probably. But here’s what you gotta understand, Vicki. I thought the best thing I could do to pay Tony back for all he did for me was look out for you. I never could understand the way Tony and Gabriella brought you up, not making you mind the way my own girls did. And you just didn’t seem like a real girl to me, the things you wanted and wanted to do. I’m not even sure I like you all that well. I just thought I owed it to Tony to look after you,”
I thought he’d finished, but he only stopped to crack his knuckles, get himself over the hump. “So you’re not like other girls, Eileen—Eileen never minded a minute, she always loved you like you were her own daughter. But I just couldn’t deal with it. And then when you exposed Mickey—he was like my son and you were like an alien monster. But if he’d had your guts and your honesty, he’d never of gone along with those buddies of his to begin with. Never dug himself that kind of hole.
“So I’ve had to think about it. Think about you, I mean. Start from the beginning. I love my girls. I don’t want them any different from how they are. But you’re the daughter of the two people I loved best, next to Eileen, and you can’t do things different than you do, shouldn’t do them different, not with Gabriella and Tony bringing you up. Do you understand?”
The door at the top of the stairs opened and Bobby’s daughter Marianna called down. “Daddy! People are waiting for you!”
“Be up in a jiffy, sugar!” he yelled back. “Don’t let them start without me.”
He got up. “Okay? Is that enough?”
I stood up too. “Yeah, I think that’s enough.” I fished in my pocket and handed him a small parcel. “I brought that along for you. Just in case, you know—just in case I felt like giving you a present.”
He undid the paper and opened the little box. When he looked inside and saw Tony’s shield lying in the cotton, he didn’t say anything, but for the second time that week I saw him cry.