Chapter 14: Two Daughters

She walked across the empty lot without looking back.

His headlights didn't come on.

At the Arboretum gate she called a taxi and stood under a streetlight with her hands in her pockets.

The key was still in her fist.

She didn't sleep that night either.

At six she was outside the flower market in the South End with the delivery trucks.

She bought two dozen white roses, wrapped in brown paper, with her French card.

By eleven the slope at the cemetery was black with coats.

The hearse stood at the top of the path, its back door open.

Six men from the funeral home waited beside it in gray gloves.

The captains stood in a line by the crypt, each with his wife on his arm.

The elders sat on folding chairs in front of them, old men with canes across their knees.

Ottavio sat in the middle chair.

The bronze door still lay under its tarp against the side wall.

Inside the crypt, behind the open iron gate, two masons in gray coveralls were laying out tools on a canvas sheet.

Francesca came up the path alone with the roses in her arms.

Heads turned.

The port captain saw her and stepped out of the line.

"The portrait," he said quietly. "Is it ready?"

"Someone put a knife through it on Thursday night," Francesca said. "Corner to corner, through Papa's face."

His eyebrows came down.

Two of the other captains had heard.

"I can close it," she said. "It'll take a week."

The port captain looked over at the elders' chairs.

Ottavio was watching them with his hands folded on his cane.

The old man said nothing more.

He went back to his place in the line, but his jaw was working.

The family stood at the front, beside the hearse.

Her mother in a black hat and veil, with pearls at her collar.

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