That I’m not especially good at taking advice. I suppose this tells something about my personality. “Choo-choo,” he’d said, down on his hands and knees, crawling between my legs, his head trapped under my short pink skirt. “What’s the name of this game?” I’d asked Joseph Morelli. 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. Never destined to house the Morelli cars, the garage served other purposes. Its air was stagnant, smelling of corner must, discarded tires, and jugs of used motor oil. It was a sorry affair, lit by a single shaft of light filtering through a grime-coated window. The Morelli garage hunkered detached and snubbed at the edge of their lot. 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. Things that aren’t nice.”įrom that moment on, I viewed Joseph Morelli with a combination of terror and prurient curiosity that bordered on awe. “You don’t want to know,” my mother had answered. “What kind of things?” I’d eagerly asked. I hear stories about the things they do to girls when they get them alone.” “Stay away from those Morelli boys,” my mother had warned me. He lived two blocks over and was two years older. When I was a kid I didn’t ordinarily play with Joseph Morelli. And, if you had to live in Trenton anyway, it was an okay place to raise a family. It was a good place to buy calzone or play the numbers. The people were mostly of Italian descent, with enough Hungarians and Germans thrown in to offset inbreeding.

Morelli and I were both born and raised in a blue-collar chunk of Trenton called the Burg. Joseph Morelli did this to me-not forever, but periodically. There are some men who enter a woman’s life and screw it up forever.

One for the money by janet evanovich