Banished at Dad's Wake, So I Came Back to Run the Boardwalk novel · Chapter 20 of 24
Chapter 20: The Assumption
On the fifteenth of August the old women of Ducktown put my mother's statue in my arms.
It was the Feast of the Assumption, and Mississippi Avenue had been hung from end to end with strings of colored bulbs.
The statue was Our Lady in a blue plaster robe, two feet high, on a litter of poles.
My mother had paid for her out of her wedding money, the year before I was born.
The Madonna society had kept her in a closet for ten years because nobody had been allowed to carry her.
The oldest of them was a woman in a black dress with a gray mustache and enormous hands.
"Take the front pole, Nicoletta," she said. "It's your turn."
I took the front pole.
Three other women took the others, and we lifted her onto our shoulders.
The brass band struck up, and the whole avenue moved.
I had walked this street at six in a white dress with a candle.
The same women stood in the same windows, with the same smell of frying dough.
I kept my eyes on the plaster hem in front of me.
The crowd lined the curbs, six deep, and they were quiet.
Then someone near the front began to sing, a thin old voice, and the street took it up.
Asher stood on the sidewalk outside the pharmacy in a dark suit, with the Irish chair beside him in his tweed cap.
He did not cross himself.
He took off his glasses and held them in his hand, and he watched me go by.
The ring was on his left hand where I could see it.
I looked at him over the blue plaster robe, and his mouth made a shape I knew.
Mine.
I turned my face forward before I could smile in front of the Madonna.
At the corner of Mississippi and Arctic, the Taddeo club sat with its steel shutters down.
Nobody stood in the doorway.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of Banished at Dad's Wake, So I Came Back to Run the Boardwalk are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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