I Bought His Love, Then He Became the Don novel · Chapter 16 of 76
Chapter 16: The Door
"There isn't one," Damiano said.
"There's always one. You told me so in your kitchen. Everything has a number."
"Not this."
"You just told the whole street you paid six hundred thousand dollars."
"Vito's number. I paid it. It's done."
"So now I owe you."
"You owe me nothing." He opened the car door. "Eat dinner tonight. That's all I want."
That night I told Dad and Pasquale at the long table.
"We're moving into the apartment over the shop," I said. "If that's all right. I'll pay rent."
"Rent," Pasquale said, like I'd sworn in church.
He put down his spoon and walked out the back door into the yard.
Dad looked at me.
"Go on," he said. "It's cold, and he cheats at crying too."
Pasquale was by the fig tree, picking the last figs the birds had missed.
"That apartment is where I lived with my wife," he said. "Our first two years. The floor goes downhill. You put a marble by the window, it rolls to the bathroom."
"I'll put a rug down."
"She said a woman needs her own door." He dropped a fig into his cardigan pocket. "She was always right. I hated it."
His eyes were wet, and he was annoyed about it.
"Go," he said. "Go have a door."
He put three figs in my coat pocket and told me not to sit on them.
We moved that Wednesday.
Two suitcases. My sewing machine. The box of my mother's things, still taped up the way it had been for five years.
Damiano was on the sidewalk when we pulled up in Pasquale's old Buick, in a gray sweatshirt, not a coat.
"I didn't ask you to come," I said.
"Nonno did."
He carried everything up the narrow stairs.
When Dad reached for my mother's box, Damiano got there first.
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