The Don's Dying Wish novel · Chapter 11 of 32
Chapter 11: My Father's Hand
I didn't sleep.
I sat at the kitchen table until the windows went gray, turning the statements over one by one.
Every month for eight months, money had walked out of the fund.
Two hundred thousand.
Six hundred thousand.
A million and a half.
Then the four point two that emptied it.
Every slip was signed by the Don and the fund's undertaker.
The Don's signatures were shaky and real.
The undertaker's were neat and firm and dead.
At nine the front bell rang, and I put the box back in the cabinet and went to work.
The woman in the foyer was about forty.
She had a black coat buttoned wrong and a little girl holding each hand.
"My husband," she said. "Saturday night. On the dock at the port. His heart."
I knew him.
He'd carried caskets for us at half the Families' funerals, a big quiet man who always took his hat off in the chapel.
"The fund always pays," she said fast, like she'd rehearsed it in the car. "For the men. It always paid. My mother-in-law, my uncle. But I called, and they said the fund is closed. Closed. How is it closed?"
"I have eleven hundred dollars," she said. "That's all. I'm sorry. I know it's nothing."
I thought about the statements on my kitchen table.
Four point two million dollars.
"The fund will pay," I said.
"I'm the fund's undertaker," I said. "My father was before me. The fund will pay. You don't owe this house anything."
She stared at me.
Then she sat down on our foyer bench very suddenly and pulled both girls against her and cried.
Amalia came out of the back in her apron.
She took one look and sat down on the other side of the widow and put an arm around her.
"We'll make him handsome," my grandmother said. "Does he have a good suit?"
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