Don, Your Regret Can't Keep Me novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: My Robe

Giada goes back for her mother's sewing machine and finds Gabriella in her robe; Mauro tells her she'll come home when she's done sulking, then tells her the building is his and the shop stays shut.

I did the math three times in the car with the engine off.

Dom was born in March.

His father went into the guardrail on Oregon Avenue the October before.

A dead man doesn't have a baby girl in Atlantic City afterward.

I started the car.

I didn't drive home to Packer Park.

I drove to Passyunk and parked across from my mother's shop.

The window was soaped over, the way it had been for six years.

Above it, on the top floor, the yellow curtains were dark.

Gabriella was still at my table.

I slept in the front seat with my coat over my knees.

At seven the bakery on the corner rolled its gate up, and the smell of bread came through the vents.

My neck was stiff and my mascara was on my hand.

I had one thing up in that apartment I wasn't leaving behind.

My mother's Singer.

She'd sewn every gown in that window on it, and I'd carried it up three flights the week I hung the curtains.

I got out and rang the bell for the top floor.

Nobody had ever rung that bell for me.

The buzzer went, and I climbed.

The door at the top opened before I knocked.

Gabriella stood there in my robe.

It was green silk, and I'd sewn it myself, with a G on the pocket in white thread.

I'd hung it in the cedar closet a year ago, for the first morning.

The G sat right over her heart.

"Oh," she said. "It's you."

"You're wearing my robe."

She looked down at it and smiled.

"It's got my initial on it. I figured it was a welcome gift."

Behind her, the sun came through my curtains and lit up my floors.

Her red dress was on the arm of my couch.

Her heels were kicked off in the middle of the rug.

She'd moved in before the dishes were cleared.

"I'm here for my mother's sewing machine," I said.

"Mauro said everything in here comes with the place."

"Mauro's never been in here."

She stopped smiling.

I walked past her into the corner by the window.

The Singer sat on the little table I'd built for it, under its black case.

I clipped the case shut.

It weighed about as much as a toddler.

"You can't just take things," Gabriella said.

"Watch me."

I got it against my hip and started down the stairs.

She followed me to the landing in my robe with her phone at her ear.

"Baby, she's here," she said into it. "She's taking stuff. No, I didn't let her in, she just pushed past me."

I hadn't pushed anybody.

I didn't stop to say so.

By the second floor my arms were burning.

I stopped on the landing outside the storage room to breathe.

Through the open door I could see my mother's dress form under its sheet, and the long garment boxes stacked against the wall.

The gown I'd married in was in one of them, with a square cut out of the lace.

I went down the last flight one step at a time.

The street door was heavy, and I held it open with my hip.

A black Escalade was already at the curb.

Mauro got out of the back in last night's shirt.

He hadn't shaved.

He'd come from Packer Park in ten minutes because she called.

Six years, and I'd never once gotten him across the city that fast.

"Put it down, Giada."

"It's my mother's."

"Then I'll have somebody bring it to the house."

He reached for the case.

I stepped back with it.

He stopped.

He didn't grab, he never had, but he stood close enough that I could smell the wine still on him.

"I slept in my car," I said.

"Whose fault is that?"

"Yours."

Upstairs a window went up.

Gabriella leaned out in my robe and called down, "Mauro, she's got a key, she could come back anytime."

I didn't have that key anymore.

I'd put it in front of her with the red ribbon on it.

The other key was on my own ring, the one for the kitchen door onto the fire escape.

Nobody else knew it existed.

I didn't look up.

"Go home," Mauro said, low. "Take a bath. Sleep in your own bed. You'll be back when you're done sulking."

"I'm not sulking. I'm leaving you."

"You've got nowhere to leave to."

I looked past him at the soaped window with the gold letters still showing through.

Pisano Bridal.

My mother had painted those letters herself, on a ladder, eight months pregnant with me.

"I've got this," I said. "I'm opening the shop."

The bakery guy had come out onto the corner to watch.

So had two old ladies with their carts.

Mauro saw them and lowered his voice even more.

"No, you're not."

"It's my mother's shop."

"It's my building." He said it like he was reading me the time. "Your father signed it over the day he ran out of other things to sign. The deed's in my safe."

I held the Singer tighter.

"Then I'll pay you rent."

"With what? My card?"

He looked up at the dark window, at the gold letters.

"The shop stays shut, Giada. It's been shut six years. It stays shut."

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