The Don's Widow Carries His Heir novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: The Gun on the Table

I didn't pick up the envelope.

"Will your son be there?" I said.

The old man smiled.

He had the same white, even teeth as Paolo. On him they looked older and more honest.

"My son is always there," he said. "He likes to sit at the head and pretend I've died already."

"And my sister?"

"Your sister," he said, "is not my business. Yet."

He touched his hat to me again and walked back down Atwells in the snow, carefully.

Nobody on the street moved until he'd turned the corner.

Then the florist crossed herself.

"Old Carbone," she said. "On Atwells. On foot."

"Is that bad?"

"I've been here forty years," she said. "I've never seen it."

The table met that Sunday in the back room of the club.

Five capos. Antonia at my right. The lawyer at the end with his folder.

Me in the middle chair.

It was the first time I'd sat in it.

It was too big. My feet didn't reach the floor flat, and the arms were worn shiny from other men's hands.

I put the cream envelope in the middle of the green cloth.

"He wants me at his Christmas Eve table," I said. "In front of sixty people."

"It's a trap," said the capo on the left.

"It's an offer," said the one beside him.

"It's both," said the oldest, leaning on his cane. "It's always both, with that family."

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