Ambruzzo put his guns away. He got rid of his knives, his chains, his hatchets. He donated his power drills to charity, along with his chain saw and portable freezer. He flushed his collection of cyanide and barbiturates. He sent all of his black leather gloves out to the cleaners and never picked them up.

He was in Nonna’s bakery. He was thirty-four years old. The cash register rang just like when he was a boy. It was after dark. The moon was out. The shot came through the bakery window.

He had been waiting for it. To pass the time, he had read Nonna’s cookbooks. In the margins he discovered notes in her bold cursive, accented with exclamation points: Lemon, no vanilla! Two pinches baking soda! Walnuts! 350°! ¼ cup milk! Ambruzzo heard her voice, insistent, shouting these directions. He turned the pages, looking for her hand.

There is always a moment, before a person dies. Ambruzzo spent his thinking of marzipan. He looked up the ingredients: almond paste, egg whites, and confectioner’s sugar. When he was a boy, Nonna would roll the paste and slice it into coins. Ambruzzo would mark the candy with stamps—flowers, crosses, and teddy bears—his own personal currency. He would eat them, one after the next, until his taste buds were numb and he could no longer sense the sweetness.

There was flour on the counter. Ambruzzo dipped his fingers in it and rubbed them together. He could feel the hit man watching on the other side of the glass, the careful placement of the gun. He lowered the book, lifted his head, and rounded his shoulders. If the shot was clear, it would come to his heart.

Talk Turkey

talk turkey

Joey Rudolph’s mother was the only waitress at the only diner in town. When exactly she began expecting a child was a subject much debated by the neighbors. There were rumors that the father was an enlisted man killed in the war. Some said he was a traveling salesman. A few people suspected that it was someone from town, a man who already had a family.

Regardless, Joey’s mother did not go away to a home for unwed troubled girls, and she did not take a bus into the city with a smudged address clutched in her hand. She remained at home with her widowed mother, and she continued waiting tables until her belly started to grow. She did not go to the hospital. She had her baby in the bed that she had left her childhood in, and when she heard Joey cry, she asked her mother to take him away. The boy was never baptized, but his mother showed herself at every church event and planted him among the other children like a threat.

“How did you end up with him as a partner?” Danny Minton’s mother wanted to know.

“I didn’t choose him,” Danny said. “We were assigned by the teacher.”