The Don's Dying Wish novel · Chapter 12 of 32

Chapter 12: On His Feet

The next morning I closed every blind on the front of the building.

Then I opened the main chapel and folded up all the chairs.

"What are you doing?" Marcello asked from the doorway.

He was sitting on the floor of the foyer, because that was as far as he'd gotten.

"Building you a track."

The center aisle of our chapel is sixty feet from the doors to the altar rail.

I'd walked it behind a few hundred caskets and never once thought of it as a distance.

"Sixty feet," I said. "By the time the debt's due, you walk it. Doors to the rail, no hands."

He looked down the aisle.

"And if I fall?"

"The carpet's very forgiving. Families cry on it all the time."

The first day, he made it four steps between the backs of two pews and sat down hard.

The second day, six.

On the third, the driver started taking bets.

"Five bucks says he hits the halfway pew by Friday," he announced at lunch.

"Ten says he doesn't," said Amalia.

"You're betting against me?" Marcello asked her.

"I'm betting against you so you'll be angry," my grandmother said. "Angry men walk faster."

He hit the halfway pew on Thursday and pointed at her the whole way.

She paid the driver her ten dollars and looked pleased with herself.

The embalmer ran him like a Navy drill.

Heel, toe.

Hands off the pew.

Look at the rail, not your feet.

In the evenings, it was the back stairs, one hand on the rail and one on my shoulder.

"You're enjoying this," Marcello said on the fifth night, halfway up, with sweat running down his temple.

"I'm enjoying the view."

"Of what?"

"A Brancato asking a Guarino for help."

He stopped on the step and looked down at me.

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