The Spia Family Presses On Read Online Free PDF Page A

sign.
    The friends and family who worked on the land considered it their personal small town. We even had our very own mayor, Uncle Ray, my mother’s honorary brother. In my naïveté, I used to refer to him as Godfather, until he put me straight one day and told me in no uncertain terms should the word Godfather ever be uttered in the same sentence with his name. Uncle Ray had done his time in a Federal pen for racketeering — he ran a highly profitable plumbing business in New York City with no real plumbers — but rumor had it racketeering was the least of his undertakings.
    Mom had built a sort of one-street town on the land when she first took it over, hoping the charm and ambiance would attract more tourists to our olive products. Little did she know some of our more notorious relatives would want to take up residency and call it home.
    Mom owned two rows of attached two-story buildings, which consisted of small storefronts on the first floor, and a few one bedroom apartments on the second floor. She collected rent for both, but the revenue from the businesses stayed with the shopkeepers. Each business boasted an Italian motif, and was run by various relatives, honorary relatives, adopted relatives, divorced relatives and a sprinkling of friends. It had been difficult to get all the permits to create an independent small town of sorts, but with Uncle Benny’s help she was able to eventually pull it off.
    The orchard or farm, as we sometimes referred to it, served as a means for everyone to pursue more legitimate goals, not that anyone’s past was ever mentioned. It was a way to stay connected with each other and avoid having to find a new identity in the outside world.
    I made sure there was no skimming, money laundering or racketeering. Once a month I went over their books, and if I found anything that didn’t quite add up or if somebody began pulling money out of their freezer, the family would band together and kick him or her out, which we’ve had to do on one or two occasions.
    There was a time when the Feds would tap our phones and hide in parked vans and watch the place, but that stopped years ago when Mom walked right out to a parked van and began pitching the benefits of olive oil. The pitch that put it over the top for us was the day she mixed a cup of olive oil with four tablespoons of baking soda and taught them how to polish their guns with the concoction. Not long after that the vans disappeared, along with those pesky clicking sounds on our business phones.
    As I pulled into the main driveway with the arching metal “Spia’s Olive Press” sign, I saw that we were closed for the day. A heavy chain hung across the entrance. I backed up and made a U-turn and headed for the private service road that led to the back of my mother’s Victorian, and would eventually end at the old stone barn.
    The last time my family had closed the shops and olive oil tasting room early, my great-grandfather, Bisnonno Luigiano, who was ninety-six at the time and barely able to sit up in a chair, had drifted off to heaven during a Fourth of July celebration. And even then we only closed for a few hours while the paramedics were there. My family did not like to lose revenue, no matter what went on. So for them to close their shops in the afternoon meant that Dickey’s freedom party was bigger than death.
 

THREE
My Cousin Dickey
    Making my way up the service road, I knew no one could see my entrance. The road was blocked by trees and a four-foot-high lava stone wall — the same lava stone that had been used to build Jack London’s “Wolf House” back in nineteen-eleven.
    As I pulled the truck into the private parking lot between Mom’s backyard and the stone barn, the usual set of late model cars were lined up along the fence, along with my mom’s new white Mercedes C350. There were also several current model cars lined up in a row that I didn’t recognize: a black Mercedes E class, a black Tundra, two black