I Bought His Love, Then He Became the Don novel · Chapter 48 of 76
Chapter 48: The Stroller
I held it out flat on my palm, away from my body.
"Unload it," I said.
Nobody moved.
"Not you, Mr. Bellanca."
I turned to the man from the waiting room by the door.
"You."
He came down the table and took it from me.
He did it the way Damiano had at Vito's table, without hurrying. The magazine dropped into his hand. He worked the slide, and one round jumped out and rolled across the wood toward the pinky ring.
The captain with the pinky ring stopped it with one finger.
"Keep that," I said to him. "A souvenir."
Augusto laughed.
It was a real laugh, from the belly, and after a second the whole table laughed with him.
"A Don who doesn't carry," he said. "Vito would die."
"Vito's in Phoenix."
"That's what I said."
I took the empty pistol home in my handbag.
I put it in my sewing basket in the front bedroom, under my good shears, where the passbook used to sit.
It fit there.
Monday morning Damiano took Maddie for a walk.
I watched from the shop window with pins in my mouth.
He came down Taylor Street pushing the stroller, in a gray sweatshirt with my stitches still in the shoulder seam, a coffee in his free hand.
The old men were out in front of the restaurant with their espresso.
For three years they'd stood up when he passed.
They didn't stand up.
One of them lifted his cup. Another nodded.
Damiano nodded back and kept walking.
Maddie screamed at a pigeon.
"He's fine," the bride said by me, without looking up from her hem.
"I know he's fine."
"You've been pinning that same seam for ten minutes."
He walked her every day that week.
Every day the old men stayed in their chairs, and every day he nodded and kept going.
He went to the yard after lunch in a hard hat that said MORELLI AND SANTANGELO in my father's stencil.
He came home with concrete on his jeans and talked about rebar at dinner until Pasquale threw a roll at him.
On Thursday he stopped outside the bakery to buy Dad's anise cookies.
I saw it all through the front window.
A man was leaning on the bakery's newspaper box. Heavy, in a track suit, with sunglasses pushed up on his head.
I knew him.
He'd sat in a clinic gym once and pointed his phone at my father on the parallel bars.
He was one of Vito's. I'd thought they were all in Arizona.
He looked at the stroller.
He looked at Damiano.
He smiled.
"Well, look at this," he said, loud enough for the barber to hear. "The Don of Chicago. Pushing a buggy."
Damiano didn't stop.
"Hey. Santangelo. How's it feel to be the Don's wife?"
The barber stopped with his scissors open.
Damiano stopped.
I watched his shoulders.
I'd seen those shoulders go still in a ballroom and in a hospital corridor and at Vito's table.
His right hand came off the stroller handle.
Then he put it back.
He didn't turn around.
He'd been the most dangerous man in the city four days ago. Now he was a man with a stroller, and my rule was on him.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–32 of I Bought His Love, Then He Became the Don are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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