(2012) Blood on Blood by Frank Zafiro

Heat radiated from her fingers when I curled my hand around hers. “I’m Mick,” I told her.
    “I know.” She made no move to withdraw her hand. My heart quickened just a little. For a second, I felt like some seventh grader about to ask a girl to dance for the first time ever.
    “You know, huh? Jerzy must’ve told you about me, then.” I shook my head. “Don’t believe everything he says.”
    She smiled then, and pulled her hand back slowly. “I never believe everything anyone says,” she said. “Keeps me from being disappointed.”
    Smart, I thought. Beautiful and smart. What the hell was she doing with Jerzy?
    It didn’t matter, though. He’d tire of her after a while, just like all the others. Women were disposable to him, just like empty beer cans. I doubt he ever saw anything special in a woman beyond a nice rack. He was just blind to it. Couldn’t see beyond the physical. That was his weakness.
    He sure as hell didn’t know what he had here with this one. Ania. Jesus, even her name was beautiful.
    “I’m sorry about your father,” she said, and looking at her, I believed her. She motioned to the chair next to her.
    I sat down. “Thanks. We weren’t that close, though.”
    “Still, losing a parent is hard. I know. I lost my mother when I was ten.”
    “I lost mine when I was young, too.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah. That’s where we put Gar’s ashes in the columbarium there at St. Anthony’s. Right next to hers.”
    She raised an eyebrow. “Jerzy didn’t tell me that.”
    I shrugged. “Figures. He always resented her.”
    She nodded like that made sense, and I suppose in the law of the jungle, it did. “You two weren’t close?”
    “Me and my mother?”
    “No. You and Jerzy.”
    “Oh.” I shrugged. “Not really. Maybe sometimes. You know how it is with brothers, right?”
    “I had three,” she said. “They beat the shit out of each other all week long but if someone out in the neighborhood so much as looked cross-eyed at any one of them, the other two would throw that guy off a rooftop.”
    “Tough neighborhood.”
    She shrugged. “Same as anywhere.”
    “Yeah, well, Jerzy and I weren’t that tight. After my mother died, I ended up living with the old man, Jerzy and his ma. We didn’t actually fight much. It was more of a cold war, you know?”
    “Frosty times at the kitchen table?”
    “Yeah, mostly. The old man had left my mother for Jerzy’s ma, though he always claimed it was the other way around and that she threw him out. Either way, there was some resentment both ways because of that.”
    “I bet.”
    “Plus I was older, so Jerzy was always trying to prove he was tougher.”
    “Was he?” Her eyes had a playful spark to them.
    I smiled a little. “He thought so.”
    “And you two never really found out, huh?”
    “Nope.”
    “Not yet, anyway.”
    “Not yet,” I agreed.
    We sat and stared at each other for a long moment. I didn’t know for sure what this woman was up to, but when she looked at me with those pale blue eyes, I didn’t care.
    After a few moments, she broke the trance. “Jerzy said you were a cop.”
    My stomach burned a little. “Yeah. For a little while. It didn’t work out.”
    “Did you throw someone off a rooftop or something?”
    “Nothing so grand.”
    “Not like my brothers, then.”
    “No.” I paused. “There was one time that was kind of like that, though.”
    “On the force?”
    “No, I mean with Jerzy and me. The brothers thing.”
    She nodded but said nothing.
    “We were both teenagers at the time,” I told her. “I must’ve been maybe fifteen or sixteen, so Jerzy was closer to twelve or thirteen. We went to different schools at the time. I was coming home late one day after school and came across him surrounded by four kids in an alley.”
    “Robbing him?”
    I shrugged. “To this day, I don’t know. But they were in a circle around him and were shoving him back and forth. Of course, he was going to take on all four