Chapter 4: No Place Set

Nobody had invited Francesca to dinner.

Nino told her about it anyway.

"Wednesday, seven o'clock," he said. "The week of a burial, the captains eat at the house. Your father started it."

So at seven o'clock on Wednesday, Nino's old Buick pulled up the gravel drive in Milton.

The stone house was lit in every window.

Eight black cars were parked along the lawn.

"I'll wait," Nino said.

"You don't have to."

"I drove your father to this door four thousand times. I'll wait."

The front door was unlocked, the way it always was on dinner nights.

Francesca walked in.

The hall smelled of rosemary and cigar smoke and her mother's gardenia perfume.

She followed the voices to the dining room.

The long table was set for twenty.

White cloth, her grandmother's silver, two rows of candles.

Ottavio Abate sat at the head, in her father's chair.

Michael sat at his right hand.

Claudia sat beside Michael, in pale blue, in the chair that used to be Francesca's.

Her mother sat at the foot.

The five captains and their wives filled the rest.

Every chair had a person in it.

There was no empty place.

The talk died one voice at a time, until the only sound was a fork set down on a plate.

"Francesca," her mother said. "We didn't expect you."

"I know."

Francesca turned around and walked back into the hall.

There was a carved wooden chair by the coat closet that nobody had ever sat in.

She picked it up and carried it back into the dining room.

She set it down at the corner of the table, between the port captain and his wife.

Then she sat.

The port captain was seventy-four now, white-haired and stooped.

He'd taught her to play gin rummy on the back porch when she was eight.

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