My Don Married My Pregnant Sister So I Choose His Mafia Rival novel · Chapter 23 of 32

Chapter 23: Home

Ettore felt me go still.

He turned his head and followed my eyes across the street.

His hand slid down from my hair to the small of my back and stayed there.

"Get in the car," he said quietly.

"No."

I stepped off the curb.

A delivery van braked and leaned on its horn.

I didn't look at it.

I walked across four lanes of traffic in Papa's coat and stopped at the silver car's back window.

Ornella didn't roll it up.

She looked at me through the gap, perfectly made up, black silk to the throat.

The pearls were back.

"Enjoy him, boat girl," she said. "Men come out of that building. Then they go back in."

"Your son's agent put his badge on a desk this afternoon," I said. "His gun too. In front of the whole ninth floor."

Something moved at the corner of her mouth.

She already knew.

That was why she'd come.

I looked at her hands, folded on her black purse.

Small hands, with rings on them.

I thought of those hands holding a light steady on my father.

I made my face stay where it was.

"Tell Cosimo I'll see him at the table," I said.

"There's no chair at that table for a woman who smells of diesel."

"Then I'll bring my own."

She tapped the glass partition with one ring.

The window went up on my reflection, and the car pulled out into traffic.

When I came back across the street, Ettore had picked his paper bag up off the sidewalk.

He looked at me for a long moment.

"What was that?" he said.

"I'll tell you at home."

The warehouse was lit on every floor.

The deckhand had the loading door open before the car stopped.

Behind him stood my two dock hands, the underboss and half the Sarno men in Red Hook.

They were all trying to look like they'd just happened to be passing.

Somebody had hung a bedsheet over the stairwell rail.

WELCOME HOME BOSS, it said, in black marker.

The O in HOME was a pigeon.

"The deckhand drew the bird," the underboss said. "I want that understood."

Ettore stood in the doorway in his wrinkled suit and looked at the sheet for a while.

"It's a good bird," he said.

The deckhand went red to his hair and fled to the espresso machine.

My grandmother had sent a lasagna.

A second one.

There was a note taped to the foil in her tall hand: This one is for him, not the guards.

Ettore went up to the roof before he ate a bite.

I went with him.

The sun was nearly gone behind the Jersey cranes.

He opened the coop and stood in the doorway and counted without moving his lips.

"Forty-two," he said.

"I told you."

"The checkered hen."

She was on the top perch, fat and furious, glaring at both of us.

"She ate every day," I said. "I hid behind the door every day. I've never felt so stupid in my life."

He laughed.

It was a real laugh, the first since the glass.

Down in the kitchen, he emptied his paper bag on the table.

Keys. A belt. His reading glasses, one arm bent.

His wallet.

He opened the wallet and took out a square of paper, folded many times, soft as cloth at the creases.

He unfolded it on the table between us.

The cathedral wedding program.

My handwriting on the back, his one line under it, our two signatures.

"You carried it," I said.

"Every day since June."

"In jail?"

"They took it off me at intake. Photographed everything in my pockets, one item at a time, on a white sheet." He smoothed the creases flat with his palm. "A marshal read it out loud to another marshal. They thought it was very funny."

I looked at the four clauses.

The chair. The piers. A year.

Separate rooms, already crossed out in my own pen, the night of the party.

I picked it up.

I tore it in half.

Then in half again.

The deckhand, at the espresso machine, stopped breathing.

Ettore didn't move.

I went to the loading door and opened it on the dark water, and I let the pieces go.

The wind took them out over the harbor.

They went white for a second under the dock light, and then they were gone.

I came back and stood in front of him.

"No contract," I said.

"Not even clause five?"

"Clause five I keep in my head."

He stood up slowly.

He was taller than me by a hand.

He looked down at me.

"Now tell me what Ornella said."

So I told him.

Not in the kitchen.

On the third floor, with the door shut, sitting on the end of his bed.

All of it, in order, with nothing softened.

He didn't say anything until I'd finished.

Then he got up and went to the window and stood with his back to me.

I watched his shoulders.

"I'm going to Dyker Heights," he said.

"No, you're not."

"She held the light for him." His voice was very low and very flat. "I knelt in his blood on that pier. I heard the engine. That was her car."

"I know."

"Then you know what I want to do."

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