My Father Sold Me at Eighteen, but the Mafia Lord Was the One in Debt to Me novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: The Reading Hall

On Tuesday I went to my father's factory alone.

I walked out the back gate of the Quarter House at seven in the morning.

The driver was in the kitchen eating a pastry.

I caught the streetcar to Ybor City.

Luca had said I went nowhere without a driver.

I had not agreed to that.

I had only said nothing, which he had taken for yes.

The Montalvo Cigar Company was a three-story red brick building on 8th Avenue with a faded sign over the door and a lector's chair on the third floor.

The rollers were already at their benches when I came up the stairs.

Two hundred hands moved in the long morning light, cutting leaf and twisting it tight.

The lector's chair was empty.

It was a high carved wooden seat on a platform at the end of the room.

For a hundred years someone had sat there and read aloud to the floor, so the rollers would not go mad with the work.

The rollers paid for the readings out of their own wages.

I had held that chair for exactly one week.

I walked up the steps and sat down.

Nobody told me to.

"Graciela?" said an old roller by the window.

He'd known me since I was six years old.

"Where's your father?"

"Not here," I said.

"I'm going to read something."

I had the factory's ledger in my bag.

I had taken it from my father's office the night before the wedding.

I had been reading it a page at a time for a month, and nothing in it added up.

It was a heavy green book with gold lettering stamped in the corner of the cover.

R. ESTEVEZ.

My mother's maiden name, on the corner of a ledger that was supposed to belong to my father.

I opened it on my knee.

"Wages," I said, and began.

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