Mafia's Good Girl novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Open Heart

They wheeled my mother into surgery at six in the morning.

She held my hand until the doors, and then she let go.

"Don't look so scared," she said. "I've had worse than a plumber."

"Mom."

"Go eat something, Janelle."

The doors shut.

I sat down in the waiting room and stared at a painting of a sailboat.

Luciano sat down beside me.

He didn't speak, and he didn't touch me.

He just stayed, a black-suited shape on my left.

A nurse came by with a clipboard and looked at him.

She looked at me, and she went away without asking him to leave.

Benny came back with two cups of tea and a paper bag.

"Rosa packed it," he said. "It's a sandwich. She says you're eating it."

I ate half the sandwich.

I watched the clock over the door, and the minute hand didn't move.

I thought about the gun in my coat, hanging in the hall closet at the house.

I had told it Thursday.

It was Thursday, and I could not make myself care about anything but the double doors.

At ten past ten the surgeon came out, pulling off her cap.

"The valve replacement went very well," she said. "She's in recovery. She'll be groggy, but she's stable."

My knees went.

Luciano's hand closed around my elbow and held me upright.

"Thank you," I said to the surgeon. "Thank you, thank you."

I made it as far as the stairwell.

I pushed through the fire door, sat down on a concrete step, put my face in my hands and cried so hard I couldn't breathe.

It was the first time I'd cried in six years.

The door opened and shut behind me.

I felt the step creak.

I didn't lift my head.

"Janelle," Luciano said.

I grabbed the front of his jacket and pulled him down to me.

He folded around me, big and warm, one hand cupping the back of my head.

"She's alive," I said into his shirt.

"She's alive."

"You did that."

"A surgeon did that," he said. "I wrote a check."

I laughed, wetly, and it turned into another sob.

He held me until it was finished.

He never once said it was all right, because it wasn't, and I loved him a little for not saying it.

That night I stood in the hall outside his bathroom.

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