I Bought His Love, Then He Became the Don novel · Chapter 43 of 76

Chapter 43: Your Door

The crib was gone.

He'd cut the page out with his knife, clean against the spine.

On the page after it he'd drawn my room again.

The quilt. The radiator. The window over the fig tree.

My bed back where my bed went.

The door was closed, and he'd drawn the brass lock larger than the rest, slowly, every screw.

Under it, in his square hand, he'd written three lines.

Your door.

You say when.

Or never.

I sat in the iron bed and held the sketchbook against my chest for a long time.

Then I got dressed and went to find him.

He wasn't in the courtyard.

The old woman was shelling beans under the fig vine.

She pointed down the hill with a bean, without looking up.

"The harbor," she said. "He went at five. He looked like his grandfather the night before the boat."

"What did Nonno look like?"

"Like a donkey who lost his cart." She shelled another bean. "Go. Take him coffee. Men are stupider before coffee."

The path down to the harbor was four hundred steps.

I counted them so I wouldn't think.

The fishing boats were in, painted blue and yellow, with eyes on their bows.

He was sitting on the harbor wall with his legs hanging over the water, drawing them.

He didn't look up when I sat down beside him.

His pencil kept moving.

I held out the coffee. He took it.

"I read it," I said.

"Good."

"Or never?"

"Or never." He was still drawing. "I meant it. I'd rather have you and a quiet house than be paid in a baby."

A boat engine coughed somewhere behind us.

"Why did you draw it?" I said. "Four days before the wedding."

He stopped drawing.

He looked at the water for a while.

"My parents went out to dinner on a Friday," he said. "I was nine. Nonno babysat. They never came back."

I knew that. I'd known it for seven years.

I'd never heard him tell it.

"After that it was him and me in that big house. Him and me and a pot of soup for eight people, because he didn't know how to cook for two."

"Every Sunday he set the table for a family that wasn't there. I used to put the extra plates back in the cupboard so he wouldn't see them."

He turned the pencil over in his gray fingers.

"I want the kitchen loud. Like his is now, with your father cheating and you laughing at both of them. I want somebody at that table who'll remember him."

"He's eighty-four, Lucia. You heard him. Saturday's a promise, not a date."

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