The Famous Mafioso Hired Me to Hear Him, and the Man in the Cell Is Not Who They Convicted novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: Open Palm
The deposition begins, everything he signs for the camera is flat and everything under the table is for her, and he spells her father's name back to her in a way only her father's old friends use.
The first session lasted two hours, and the man across from me said nothing true in any of it.
The lawyer read the questions from a typed sheet, and I put them into sign.
The prisoner answered with his hands raised just far enough for the camera.
His answers were flat and careful.
He had been treated well, he signed.
His health was a matter for his doctors.
He regretted nothing the court had found, and he said nothing about what the court had found.
I voiced each answer aloud in the plain, even tone I used in county court.
Under the table, his hand stayed where it was, against the outside of my knee, with the chain pooled over his wrist.
He did not move it once.
At minute twenty I made myself a rule, and I made it silently because there was nobody I could say it to.
He could not touch me again unless I opened my palm to him first.
I had been trained since childhood to keep my hands in my lap when I wasn't signing.
I laid my left hand on my thigh, palm down, six inches from his.
He looked at it, and then at my face.
He did not touch it.
At minute forty the lawyer asked about his medical care, and I rendered the answer.
The guard on the left turned to take a call at the door.
My palm opened.
I did not decide to open it.
It turned over on my thigh as if it belonged to someone else, and lay open in the air under the table.
His fingertip came down in the center of it.
It was a rough fingertip, calloused at the edge, and warm.
It drew a line across my skin, slowly, one stroke at a time.
W-H-O
A pause.
T-A-U-G-H-T
Y-O-U
I kept my face smooth.
I kept my voice flat as I read the next question to him in sign, and he answered for the camera with his other hand.
My palm shook very slightly.
I closed my fingers around his fingertip once, and let go.
That was my answer.
Then I turned his hand over under the table, and I spelled one word on his palm.
P-A-R-E-N-T-S
He looked at the camera and signed a long, careful sentence about the quality of his meals.
I translated it aloud.
His fingertip moved again, slower this time.
W-H-A-T I-S Y-O-U-R F-A-T-H-E-R C-A-L-L-E-D
Nobody had asked me that in years.
People asked what my parents did, or whether I had learned sign first, or if I was the hearing one.
They never asked for the name.
I could not sign my father's name sign against a palm, because it takes a whole arm and a tap on the shoulder.
So I spelled the plain letters.
W-A-L-T
P-R-U-I-T-T
His fingers closed over mine.
He held my hand under the steel table for the length of a breath.
Then he turned my hand over and spelled it back to me.
He did not spell it the way I had.
He spelled it the way the old men at the Buffalo club spelled it, with a lift on the second T and a hook on the P that nobody under sixty used.
I had not seen my father's name made that way in fifteen years.
The last man who made it so was a friend of my father's who died when I was thirteen.
My throat closed.
"Miss Dunphy," the lawyer said.
"Yes."
"He has stopped signing."
I turned to the table.
The man across from me sat with his hands on the steel, still, looking at the camera.
He hadn't stopped signing.
He had stopped signing the lie.
"Mr. Brancato is waiting for the next question," I said.
She read it, and I put it into sign, and my hand did not shake at all.
When the session ended the guards unlocked his chain from the ring and stood him up.
He went out between them with his eyes on the floor.
At the door he turned his head an inch and looked back at me.
He did not sign anything.
I sat in the empty glass room with my palm still open on my thigh.
His file said he was a hearing man with no known disability.
I had read every page of it in the car.
Nowhere in it did anyone say that Salvatore Brancato could sign, much less sign like an old man from the Buffalo club.
I took out my phone in the parking lot and looked up the one thing I could find.
His mother's obituary gave her name and the date, and a line about the bakery.
It did not say whether she could hear.
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