The Don's Wife Was Never Weak novel · Chapter 8 of 32
Chapter 8: After Mass
"Then you'd better start being a better man," I said, "before you have to stand in front of a judge and pretend you already are."
Renzo smiled at that.
"I don't pretend in front of judges," he said. "I golf with them."
He got back into the Escalade.
The forklift started up again before his tires were off my gravel.
I made it into the burned-out shell of the trailer before my knees went.
I sat down on a cinder block with the soot on my jeans and both hands on my stomach.
Gianni came in and crouched in front of me.
He didn't say it would be all right.
He knew better.
"He golfs with two of them," he said instead. "I've driven him."
"That's not helping."
"It's information." He pulled a clean handkerchief out of his coat and gave it to me. "Information always helps."
I wiped my face.
The handkerchief smelled like cedar and engine oil.
That night my father's lawyer came to the bakery after closing.
He was seventy, with a cane and a bow tie, and my mother gave him a cannoli before he'd taken his coat off.
He sat at the kitchen table and ate it in four bites while I told him what Renzo had said.
Then he wiped his fingers.
"Can he take the baby?" I asked.
"Take? No. Make you miserable for five years trying? Yes." He looked at me over his glasses. "He'll say you left him. He'll say you live over a bakery with a man who isn't your husband."
Gianni, at the window, turned around.
"I sleep on the couch."
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