My Don Married My Pregnant Sister So I Choose His Mafia Rival novel · Chapter 11 of 32

Chapter 11: The Widows

Ornella's smile didn't move.

But her pearls did, a little, as she breathed in.

"Signora Cardone," she said. "Grief confuses old women."

"I'm seventy-nine, not confused." Assunta sipped her own coffee. "And I paid for my son's casket. With my own checkbook. I have the receipt in my kitchen drawer, under the takeout menus."

The dockworkers were very quiet.

"The fund helps the families in its own way," Ornella said.

"Which way is that? Through your hairdresser?"

One of the old longshoremen laughed out loud and turned it into a cough.

Ornella looked at him until he stopped.

Then she turned and walked back down my pier with her head high.

She got into her sedan, and the sedan backed up so the van could leave.

Assunta watched it go.

"I've wanted to say that for ten years," she said. "Now I need to sit down."

By noon her kitchen was full.

I didn't call anybody.

Assunta did.

She sat at her telephone table in the hall with her address book open.

She called every widow from every family she'd sat beside at a funeral in thirty years.

They came by bus and by cab and by grandson.

Black dresses, church shoes, purses held in both hands.

A widow from Bay Ridge whose husband went off a pier in 2009.

Two from the Sarno side, who sat together and eyed the Cardone side and then forgot to.

One from Howard Beach, sixty, tall and stern, whose husband had been the first of the four men killed after Papa.

She was the old man from Howard Beach's daughter.

Assunta gave her the good chair.

They went around the table one at a time.

Every one of them had applied to the fund.

Every one of them had been told it was a hard year.

"Nine hard years," said the widow from Bay Ridge, "in a row."

"My grandson needed braces," said one of the Sarno widows. "Ornella sent me a holy card."

"I got a fruit basket," said another. "Half the pears were rotten."

The kitchen laughed, the sharp kind of laugh women do when it's that or cry.

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