Married to My Ex-Father-in-Law novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Her Terms

Dani says no, her lawyer drops her and a funeral wreath with her name arrives at the clinic, so she walks into the Don's warehouse and names her terms in front of his men; he takes them all, then names his: the wedding is Saturday, and Nicky is his best man.

I picked up the ring and put it back in his hand.

"No."

Dom looked at the ring in his palm.

"No," he repeated.

"I'm not trading one Scarpa for another. Get out of my chair."

He got out of my chair.

He put his jacket on, slowly, and stopped at the door of the operatory.

"The table sits Sunday, Daniela. You have until Saturday night to change your mind."

"And if I don't?"

"Then I'll send flowers."

The bell rang over the front door, and he was gone.

On Monday I saw eleven patients.

My wrist ached every time I gripped the forceps.

I kept my hands steady anyway.

At lunch I checked my phone and found a voicemail from my divorce lawyer.

She had a nice voice. She'd used it to promise me she wasn't afraid of anybody.

"Dani, I'm so sorry. Something's come up with my caseload. I'm going to have to withdraw. I'll mail your file back to you."

She'd never once called me Dani.

I called her office. The front desk hung up on me.

On Tuesday nobody came in for their three o'clock.

Or their four.

On Wednesday morning the funeral wreath came.

A delivery van double-parked on 5th Street.

A kid in a florist's polo carried it through my waiting room, past a mother and two little boys.

White lilies. White roses. A wire stand taller than me.

The ribbon across the middle said DANIELA in gold letters.

The mother picked up her boys and left without her appointment.

Carmela came out of operatory two in her pink scrubs, took one look and spat her cinnamon gum into the lilies.

"Oh, hell no."

She grabbed the wire stand with both hands and hauled the whole thing out the back door.

I heard the dumpster lid bang.

"Who signs a card on a funeral wreath? Nobody. That's who. Cowards."

"There wasn't a card."

"Exactly my point."

Then she looked at me properly, and her eyes went wet under all that eyeliner.

"Dani. What the hell is going on?"

So I told her about the river.

At six I walked to Nonna's house on Holmes Street.

I hadn't told her anything yet, and she would kill me before the table could.

She was at the stove in her black cardigan, stirring something with a wooden spoon older than my father.

She didn't turn around.

"Carmela told me."

"Carmela's got a big mouth."

"Carmela has a mouth like a sewer and a heart like a saint. Sit."

I sat.

She put a bowl of lentils in front of me and sat down with both hands folded on her handbag.

"The woman in the river," she said. "She danced at my wedding. She was my friend."

I put the spoon down.

"They said she jumped from the bridge. She was afraid of water. She wouldn't take her grandchildren to the pool."

She reached across and took my bruised wrist in her floury fingers and looked at the marks.

"Which one did this? The son?"

"The son."

She said something in Sicilian that I'd only ever heard her say about the Kansas City Royals.

"And the father came to you."

I stared at her. "How do you know that?"

"Because I've known Dominic Scarpa since he was eight years old and stealing cannoli out of my case. He doesn't send flowers. He comes himself."

"He asked me to marry him."

Nonna didn't gasp.

She didn't cross herself.

She buttered a heel of bread and put it in my hand.

"Then you don't go to him crying," she said. "You go to him with a list."

I didn't sleep that night either. I wrote the list.

At five in the morning I drove to the City Market.

Scarpa Produce had the biggest stall and the warehouse behind it, the roll-up doors open, the forklifts already beeping.

Six of them stopped when I walked in.

Two of them weren't produce men.

They stood by the office door with their hands folded in front of them, the way men stand at a wake.

Dom was at a steel table in his shirtsleeves, cutting open a crate of tomatoes with a box knife.

He looked up.

He didn't look surprised.

"Daniela."

"I have terms," I said, loud enough for every man in that warehouse.

He set the knife down. "Go ahead."

"I get my own room. With a lock. The clinic stays mine, my name, my patients, my rules. I don't take a dollar from you, ever. Your men never set foot in my waiting room. They scare my old ladies."

One of the men by the door shifted his weight.

"And you get in my chair," I said. "For a cleaning. You haven't had one in years. I can tell from here."

The whole warehouse went quiet.

Dom ran his tongue along the inside of his right cheek.

It looked like something back there he'd been chewing around for a long time.

"All of it," he said.

"All of it?"

"Your room. Your clinic. Your money. My men stay on the sidewalk." His jaw went tight. "And the chair."

I'd expected him to fight me on one of them.

"Fine," I said. "Then we have a deal."

"Not yet." He wiped tomato off his fingers with a rag. "I have one term."

"Which is?"

"Saturday. Holy Rosary. Eleven o'clock." He looked at me across the crates. "The whole table watches. And my son stands up beside me as my best man."

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