I Vanished with the Don's True Heir novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: The Dock

Livio walked up the terrace steps with thirty people watching.

He stopped one step below his mother, so their eyes were level.

"Mama," he said.

It was the first time I'd heard him call her that.

Orsola's chin came up.

"I'd like to marry my wife again," he said. "She says I have to ask you."

"She's right."

"So I'm asking."

Orsola looked at him over her glasses for a long, long time.

"She works six days a week," she said. "She's on my payroll. Fourteen dollars an hour, minus the room."

"I know."

"You'll wash dishes until you die."

"I know."

"And if you ever make her cry at a table again, I still have the shotgun."

"The shotgun's in the office," I said from the garden. "The office isn't the house."

"Exactly," said Orsola.

She held out her hand to her son, palm down.

He kissed it.

"Yes," she said. "Take her. God help you."

The terrace laughed and clapped, and the oldest wife said she'd bring the cannoli.

We married again on the last Saturday in August, on the dock at Lubec, at high tide.

The church women had taken in an old white sundress of Orsola's at the waist and let it out at the chest, and argued about it for a week.

The lobstermen wore clean orange bibs.

"These are our good ones," the tall one told me.

Nine wives came up from Philadelphia in three cars, with cannoli in boxes on their laps for eleven hours.

The oldest one got out at the bottom of the hill and looked at the water, and at Canada, and at the motel sign.

"So this is where you went," she said.

"This is where I went."

"I'd have come too."

The plow driver held Lina, in the hat with the ears, and she scowled at the ocean.

Livio stood at the end of the dock in a white shirt with no tie and the sleeves rolled up.

He'd built that end of the dock himself.

Orsola walked me down it.

She held my arm tight the whole way. Halfway, she stopped.

"You don't have to," she said, low. "You know that. You can turn around right now, and I'll walk you back, and nobody here would say a word."

"I know."

"I just want you to know you can."

"That's why I can do it," I said.

She nodded, and we kept walking.

At the end she put my hand in her son's and stepped back beside the lobstermen.

There was no priest. The postmistress was a notary, and that was close enough for Lubec.

Livio took something out of his shirt pocket.

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