One for the Money

ONE FOR THE MONEY – Janet Evanovich
THERE ARE SOME men who enter a woman’s life and screw
it up forever. Joseph Morelli did this to me—not forever,
but periodically.
Morelli and I were both born and raised in a blue-collar
chunk of Trenton called the Burg. Houses were attached
and narrow. Yards were small. Cars were American. The
people were mostly of Italian descent, with enough Hungarians
and Germans thrown in to offset inbreeding. It was
a good place to buy calzone or play the numbers. And, if
you had to live in Trenton anyway, it was an okay place to
raise a family.
When I was a kid I didn’t ordinarily play with Joseph
Morelli. He lived two blocks over and was two years older.
“Stay away from those Morelli boys,” my mother had
warned me. “They’re wild. I hear stories about the things
they do to girls when they get them alone.”
“What kind of things?” I’d eagerly asked.
“You don’t want to know,” my mother had answered.
“Terrible things. Things that aren’t nice.”
From that moment on, I viewed Joseph Morelli with a
combination of terror and prurient curiosity that bordered
on awe. Two weeks later, at the age of six, with quaking
knees and a squishy stomach, I followed Morelli into his
father’s garage on the promise of learning a new game.
The Morelli garage hunkered detached and snubbed at
the edge of their lot. It was a sorry affair, lit by a single
shaft of light filtering through a grime-coated window. Its
air was stagnant, smelling of corner must, discarded tires,
and jugs of used motor oil. Never destined to house the
Morelli cars, the garage served other purposes. Old Man
Morelli used the garage to take his belt to his sons, his sons
used the garage to take their hands to themselves, and
Joseph Morelli took me, Stephanie Plum, to the garage to
play train.
“What’s the name of this game?” I’d asked Joseph
Morelli.
“Choo-choo,” he’d said, down on his hands and knees,
crawling between my legs, his head trapped under my
short pink skirt. “You’re the tunnel, and I’m the train.”
I suppose this tells something about my personality. That I’m not especially good at taking advice. Or that I was
born with an overload of curiosity. Or maybe it’s about rebellion
or boredom or fate. At any rate, it was a one-shot
deal and darn disappointing, since I’d only gotten to be the
tunnel, and I’d really wanted to be the train.