My Father Sold Me at Eighteen, but the Mafia Lord Was the One in Debt to Me novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Nonna

At the Sunday table Luca's grandmother repeats Vincenzo's last words; Ottavio asks to hold the folder 'for safekeeping' and Graciela refuses in front of everyone; the housekeeper says the safe was opened overnight.

Sunday dinner at the Riccis' was at one o'clock, in a bungalow in Seminole Heights where eighty-one-year-old Concetta Ricci had lived since 1962.

I wore my own navy dress and my mother's pearl earrings, and I held the folder under my arm.

I had slept with it under my pillow, in a locked room, with a key on a ribbon on my wrist.

Luca had not slept at all.

The driver had told me so, in a whisper, at breakfast.

The long table in the dining room seated twenty.

Every seat had a man in it or a woman behind one.

At the head sat a very small woman in black, with a gold crucifix, a carved cane hooked on her chair and eyes like polished jet.

"Sit," she said to me.

Not in English.

Then, in English, "Here.

"By me."

I sat on her right, and Luca took the chair across from me.

Ottavio Lindner sat three seats down, with his glasses hanging on their cord, and smiled at me as if I were his own niece.

The food came in dishes passed hand to hand: braised greens, fried plantains beside the Sicilian caponata, black beans on the rice.

Tampa cooking was always a marriage of two kitchens.

Nonna Concetta did not eat.

She looked at my hands.

"Show me," she said.

I put the folder on the tablecloth between the bread and the olive oil.

She opened it with fingers like dry twigs.

She turned past the note and the notary's seal, and stopped on my mother's codicil.

Her thumb came down on the name Rosalia and rested there.

Nobody at the long table said a word.

"I was in the room," Nonna said.

She spoke quietly, in a voice that cracked on the English.

"When your mother signed it.

"I was in the room, and I held my son's pen."

She looked up at me.

"Vincenzo was ashamed of this paper.

"He took your family's factory in a bad year and he knew it was not right.

"He wrote it down so that his own sons would have to pay it back."

"Vincenzo," I said.

"Luca's father."

"My son," she said.

"My Vincenzo.

"Six years ago he lay in the hospital on Dale Mabry, and the last thing he told me was, 'Mamma, tell Rosalia's girl the house owes her.'"

A chair scraped at the far end.

It was Ottavio, rising a little and sitting again.

"Concetta," he said gently.

"You never told us."

"Nobody asked an old woman," said Nonna.

I could feel Luca's eyes on me from across the table.

When I looked at him, he was holding his water glass with white knuckles.

"I think," Ottavio said, in his warm and reasonable voice, "that this paper is too important to carry around in a young woman's handbag."

Heads turned.

"The Quarter House safe is the right place," he went on.

"I'd be glad to hold it for her.

"Only for safekeeping."

He held out his hand across the table.

It was a beautiful hand, long and clean, with a gold wedding band.

I knew exactly what had been in my father's hand the day before.

I knew how that hand had come out in the sacristy.

I closed the folder and put my palm flat on top of it.

"No, thank you," I said.

The table went still.

"Graciela," Ottavio said softly.

"I only want to help."

"I know," I said.

"That is why I'm keeping it."

I did not raise my voice.

I did not need to.

Somebody at the far end coughed into a napkin, and I saw one of the Ricci cousins look down at his plate to hide his mouth.

Nonna Concetta made a small, dry noise that might have been a laugh.

Ottavio let his hand fall.

He kept smiling.

"Of course," he said.

"It's yours."

He picked up his wine glass and drank to me.

"Eat, girl," said Nonna.

"You are too thin."

I ate.

Afterward, in the front hall, while the women cleared the plates, Luca came up beside me and took my coat from the hook.

He held it open without touching my shoulders.

"That was well done," he said, very quietly.

"I'm not doing it for you," I said.

"I know," he said.

"I'm doing it for my mother."

"I know that too," he said.

I slid my arms into the sleeves, and he let go of the coat as soon as it was on.

The driver drove us home along the river.

Luca sat on his side and I sat on mine, and neither of us said a word until the Lincoln pulled through the iron gate.

The housekeeper met us at the door.

She was a gray-haired woman who had run the Quarter House for twenty years and had been told, at some point, that I was to be treated like the lady of the house.

She looked frightened.

"Padrino," she said.

"The study safe.

"I came in at six this morning and the door was standing open."

Luca's hand went out and closed on the door frame.

"Anything gone?" he said.

"The ledgers from Señor Vincenzo's time.

"The whole shelf."

I thought of the folder, still under my arm, and what a thief had come for in the night.

"Who has the key to that room?" I said.

The housekeeper looked at Luca.

Luca looked at the floor.

"Two people," he said.

"Me, and the man who set the lock."

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