Chapter 14: Double Notch

I didn't say anything in the car.

Cesare drove me back to 18th Avenue himself, with Nonna's leftovers on my lap in three foil pans.

He didn't try to talk either.

At a red light on Bay Parkway his hand moved toward mine on the console.

It stopped.

He put it back on the wheel.

The key was in my coat pocket, and I held it the whole way.

"Thank you for the bathroom lock," he said when he pulled up at the shop.

"Thank your grandmother for the braciole."

"She'll want the pans back."

"I know how Sundays work, Cesare."

I got out.

He waited at the curb until I had the shutter up and the light on.

Then he drove away, slowly.

Connie was upstairs in her pajamas with flashcards spread all over Nonno's couch.

"Well?" she said. "Did she make him wash dishes? She made Papa wash dishes once for a year."

"She made him wash dishes."

"And?"

"And nothing."

Connie looked at my face.

Then at my neck.

"Oh my God," she said. "And nothing. Sure."

I went back down to the shop without answering.

I turned on the lamp over the bench and put Nonna's key under it.

Then I unlocked Nonno's desk drawer and took out the tin of impression wax.

I laid the key next to the shape of Ricky's blade.

Four deep, two shallow, one deep at the tip.

The same cuts.

The same mistake, too.

The second shallow cut was a hair too shallow on both.

That was why it stuck. That was why Ricky had wanted a good one.

Somebody had set the depth on the wrong mark and cut two copies the same way.

I turned Nonna's key over to look at the bow.

Ricky's had worn that pink rubber cap.

This one was bare.

And there, on the shoulder of the bow, right where the blade began, were two tiny bites in the brass.

Side by side.

I sat back on the stool.

I knew those marks.

Nonno's old Ilco had a burr on the left clamp jaw since before I was born.

It bit a double notch into every blank it held.

He'd never fixed the jaw. He said the machine had earned its bad tooth.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Regrets of the Don: His Beloved Walked Away from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.