I shook my head no.
“I haven’t even turned on my phone,” I said.
“Well you should, where is it?” Jess asked.
I went to the kitchen. My phone had been on the counter, sitting there for ages. I didn’t even know if it had any power. I was too depressed to turn it on, so I just gave it to Jess. She powered it up and handed it to me.
In my hand it kept buzzing as one after another voice message kept showing up. Lots of random phone numbers and texts, lots from Jess, even a few from Jake and lots and lots of calls from Isak.
And in my hands, at that very moment, it started to ring.
Isak was calling.
69
“You better hurry or you’ll be late,” Jess called as I slipped on a floral top and Designer X’s first pair of jeans—still in prototype actually. Her coated skinny jeans felt so wonderful, they made you want to dance.
A light evening breeze was flowing through the open window in the guest room. As I snapped the window latch shut, I noticed the yellowed front page of The New York Post tucked in a shelf in the corner. I couldn’t believe Jess still had a copy.
Throwing a few things in one of Jess’s monster bags, I dashed out of her West Village apartment to catch the PATH train at Christopher Street for my nightly reverse commute.
Truthfully, all the notoriety didn’t hurt my blogger following. After a while the fan mail came back. You can’t win an argument with a troll, so I never tried, and slowly they faded to the bottom of the comments list.
“I have more than a grudging admiration for you,” one commenter wrote. “Fabulously brazen,” another said. Flo stood by me, thankfully. She didn’t mind how my fraudulent behavior exploded our “brand.” Honestly, my brand was very much in keeping with who I was. Even if I wasn’t who I said I was. As you can guess my clicks and visits skyrocketed—everyone had to check it out.
I gunned the Purple Beast and drove out of the parking lot by the Grove Street PATH station and made my way down the parkway, just as I had done every night for the last few weeks. One more time and I could take a break.
The New York district attorney’s office examined my case and determined that I hadn’t gained any money or valuables from the hoax. In fact, I had even managed to lose a valuable bracelet. So I hadn’t actually committed a prosecutable crime. I fell back on Nan’s advice and apologized like mad, promising to never, ever do it again.
The investigation was much harder on Nan. She’s forgiven me over and over, but I couldn’t stop feeling terrible about it. If Dahlia hadn’t hired the private detective to investigate me, I don’t think Nan would have ever told us her secret.
Everybody was astounded that the little ole lady in apartment 5A of Montclair Manor had been a major fugitive all that time. Only Betty claimed that she had been suspicious. She told channel 2 news that she knew Nan was hiding something. One or two of the other blue-haired ladies complained that she was a card shark and cheated at bingo.
Turns out, Grandpa was a well-known member of Cosa Nostra from the fifties who mysteriously dropped out of sight. Frank Wachowicz, aka Sammy Graziano, was known as the Gentleman Gangster, famous for dressing well and carrying his gun in a paper bag so that when he walked down the street, it looked like he was bringing you a sandwich.
The feds were so embarrassed that he had been living across the river in plain sight they claimed he was a secret witness under protection who sang like a canary.
“Grandpa was too honorable for that,” Nan told me. It was the only time I had ever seen her angry. “My Sammy quit the mob for me, so we could have a normal life. Sure, there was a rule, the omertà, but, like a lot of rules, it was made to be broken. Your grandpa just knew how to make it work.”
The New York Post reporter dug up some astonishing black-and-white pictures I had never seen of Nan and Grandpa at the Stork Club and the El Morroco, out on the town in the late fifties. Jess and I would sit around with the photos and pick out the actual dresses we had redone.
In those pictures you could see what Nan was really like in her younger days. Sitting with Ida Lupino, Josephine Baker, Diana Vreeland, and an occasional Kennedy, she was one of those exquisite creatures whose intelligence was as impressive as her surpassing elegance. She wasn’t just hanging passively on Grandpa’s arm. You could see her active engagement with everyone around her.
Judge Ruston gave Nan a mere slap on the wrist, despite Dahlia’s district attorney friend and the efforts of the DOJ’s finest prosecutors. It was nearly impossible to prosecute her with Grandpa gone.
I overshot the parking space as usual, screeching on the brakes. I still couldn’t control the Purple Beast. One tire was up on the parking block, but it was only one. I had to hurry; the band was already near the end of their set.
“I’m impressed with how you’ve utterly messed everything up,” Isak said when we finally got together. I was so happy to see him that all I could do was agree.
“Seems like you have some fabulous shoes to fill,” quipped Isak, referring to Nan’s glamorous past. Even so, I apologized to Isak for being such a phony. He was utterly dismissive.
“Sure you’re a phony,” he said. “But you’re a real phony. Not like all the phonies these days. I find it absolutely exciting that there are still people in the world who manage to have these thrilling, preposterous adventures. Besides, you know, we’re all fakes.”
The outrage and publicity hadn’t affected Jess at all. Her Designer X line began to thrive immediately. It certainly helped that she had Isak Guerrere as her partner.
Mom is still a worry. She was the most emotional one about the whole Mafia thing, finally coming to grips with how terrified she had been as a child. They had to keep moving from house to house in the middle of the night, and she had to change schools all the time. She knew something was wrong, but no one would talk about it.
There was a waterfall of tears the night at the hospital when Mom and Nan had the heart-to-heart they should have had decades ago. Nan hugged Mom to tell her how sorry she was that she put her through so much and never told her why. That night, it felt like some big thing in the world had changed. A missing connection had been restored that made us a family again. Now she just had to get through the operation.
I slipped by the guys at the door, who didn’t even bother to ask—they were used to me showing up late.
Courtney was the first one to tell me about Monica and Jake. Turns out Monica frequented Harris’s Riverside Bar and Grill. That’s where Courtney bartends. Monica would come in there on weekends with her two kids and her computer-nerd husband for brunch. She was married and lived in Weehawken. Courtney and Monica had struck up a friendship. Monica talked about this hot band she represented and what a hunk the lead singer was. It took a while for Courtney to put two and two together. The cowboy thing was an act for her music-management business, which she was devoted to almost as much as she was to her husband and two kids. She was actually a typical Jersey soccer mom wearing black-framed glasses and sweatpants.
The band had already finished the set by the time I made my way inside. The packed crowd was asking for another encore.
The truth is that I never felt like myself until I put on the Givenchy. It seems crazy that I had to go to such lengths to find out who I really was. But I guess something had to change. Something had to lift me up to get me out of where I had been.
“Sometimes good things aren’t always so great,” as Nan used to say, “and bad things often turn out to be good for you.” I never understood that when I was a kid, but I certainly do after all that has happened.
As I wormed my way through the crowd to the corner of the stage by the soundboard, Jake came out by himself, plugged into his amp, and gave me a wink as he started to sing.
One night the look in your eyes was like a light.