For me.

So, if I feel that, you gotta get what she feels and how she’s been drownin’ that in booze for decades.

But I gotta give it to her because she’s my sister, yeah?

So, I do. I sit next to her and it happens.

She says, “He’s in his thirties now. He could be married. I could have grandbabies. I wonder if he knows. I wonder if they told him he wasn’t theirs. I wonder if he’ll ever find out his uncle is famous.”

That was a good one.

There were good ones. “I wonder if they sent him to college.” Or, “I hope they weren’t too hard on him during potty training.”

And there were bad ones. “You think he’s okay? I hope he didn’t get sick. Dad got sick. Nick might have something in his family. You think he got sick?” Or, “What if he’s like Nick? What if he does some girl like Nick did me or worse?” Or, “What if he turns out like Ricky? What if he’s dealing drugs to kids? They should know about that. They should know to look out for that and help him around it.”

Got a million of ’em, sister.

A million what ifs.

Torture.

Pileggi opened his mouth and I lost track of how many people came forward, sayin’ their kid was Nick Pileggi and Penny Simms’s kid. Paid for so many fuckin’ DNA tests, ’bout bankrupted me.

Every one of ’em, she’d have hope. Every one of ’em, she’d get crushed. She can’t go lookin’ for him, signed that right away.

She has to wait for him to come to her.

If he does.

I could probably pull some strings. Hell, I’ve got the money.

She won’t let me.

“It’s gotta be him,” she says. “If he doesn’t know, I don’t wanna mess up his life.”

It’s taboo, talkin’ about it. No one can take a stand without gettin’ piled under shit.

And most of the people with the loudest mouths about it have no connection to it. They’ve made up their minds and decided how it’s gonna be for everybody, on both sides.

I’ll tell you what, you gotta have no heart in your chest, you sit a night with my drunk-ass sister who used to be beautiful, used to laugh a lot, now looks like she spent her life at the bottom of a bottle, looks twenty years older than she is, twenty years older than me, and I spent over thirty years in a fuckin’ rock band.

Sit next to her and hear her talkin’ about the kid her mother forced her to give up, and not get it. At least a little of it.

Just a little.