From Scapegoat to Donna novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: The Name on the Chair

The family chapel held two hundred people, and all of them were standing.

I came in by the side door at five to twelve, behind a wheelchair.

Tancredi pushed it, and the man in it wore a black suit, a cardigan under the jacket and a tight white mouth.

I had pushed his own seal back onto his left hand that morning, and it hung loose on his finger.

The Don had told us he would not be carried into his own church.

"Walk if you can," I had said in the car. "Sit if you can't."

"I'll do both," he had said.

At the altar Ignazio stood with his back to us in a camel coat, his arms raised.

"My brother is dead," he was saying. "God rest him."

He lowered his arms.

"In the night our family lost its head. Before the sun goes down, it must have another."

He turned, ready to say the next line, and saw the wheelchair.

His mouth stayed open.

The chapel went silent from the front pew to the doors.

Somebody in the third row crossed himself.

"Brother," the Don said. His voice was thin, but it carried. "You've started without me."

The Don put both hands on the arms of his chair and pushed.

I put my hand under his elbow, and Tancredi took the other side.

He stood up in front of two hundred people, and he swayed, and he did not fall.

"I am sorry to disappoint you," he said to Ignazio. "A surgeon of this house refused the blood that was meant to kill me."

He looked down the aisle.

"She is the reason I stand here. I'll say it once, in front of God and every family in this state."

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