Chapter 9: Sisters

I did not sleep.

At seven I was sitting on the fitting stool with the rose in one hand and the card in the other.

Your mother signed too, in the end.

My mother had died in a charity ward when I was nineteen.

She had signed nothing that I knew of except the lease on this shop.

At eight, the bell rang.

Bianca stood in the doorway without a driver, in a gray coat, with her hair tucked under a knit cap.

She had come on the bus.

"Papa's at Mass," she said. "I have until ten."

"Then you'd better start talking."

I pulled the brass key out of the pocket of my apron and set it on the cutting table between us.

"Eleven," I said. "What does it open?"

"A box at the Corsetti family's bank on Roosevelt Road." She took a breath.

"I took it from his desk in August. His men go through everything I carry, but nobody looks inside a wedding dress."

"Why give it to me?"

"Because I don't think I should be the one who decides what to do with it."

"With what?"

Bianca reached into her bag and drew out a thin black notebook with a rubber band around it.

She slid it across the table.

I snapped off the band.

Inside, in neat columns, in Aldo's handwriting, were dates and amounts and the name of a florist.

Every October for five years.

Three dozen white roses, delivered to Serra Alterations, Harlem Avenue.

Beside every line was the same initial.

"That's the order book," Bianca said. "Every flower he's ever sent you. I found it when I was sixteen, and I didn't understand it."

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