Seven Days to Disappear from My Mafia Stepbrother novel · Chapter 26 of 32

Chapter 26: Rhonda

Nobody moved.

Leni stood behind the counter with the phone halfway to her ear.

Lucio sat on my bench with a paper carton of rigatoni on his knee.

He set it down very slowly.

Then he picked it up again and kept eating, and looked at the wall, and let it be mine.

"Hello, Ma," I said.

My mother came three steps into the shop.

She looked at Leni.

"Could we have a minute?"

"No," Leni said.

"Leni, sweetheart."

"I'm working. This is my counter. Buy something or stand there."

My mother's mouth went thin.

She turned back to me.

Up close her face was older than it had been in June.

There were lines by her mouth I'd never seen, because I'd never seen her without her makeup done.

"He makes me pour," she said.

"Who?"

"Ugo. At his table. Every night. Eight men from the linen supply, and he makes me pour their wine and calls me the hostess in front of them."

She laughed, short and ugly.

"Ten years I sat at the old Don's right hand. Now I'm in his guest room on a single bed, and he opens my mail."

"You chose his car," I said.

"I had nowhere else to go."

"Lucio sent a car for you. You walked past it."

She didn't look at Lucio.

She hadn't looked at him once since she walked in.

"Every account I had was the family's," she said. "Every card. Lucio closed them all the day after the party. I have four hundred dollars and a coat."

"You have Dad's house money."

"I spent it the year I married."

Of course she had.

I'd watched her spend it.

I'd been sixteen and thought it was her grief.

"How much?" I said.

She heard the question and her whole face changed.

Her shoulders came down.

She thought she'd won.

"Fifty thousand," she said. "Just to get started somewhere. That's nothing to you. You've got two million in the bank doing nothing."

Fifty thousand.

Leni heard it too.

I watched her hear it, behind the counter, the exact same number.

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