My Father's Test Turns Lovers Into Killers novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Sunday Dinner
Her father announces that Teo goes into the dark room on Friday; Allegra takes the key and opens the cellar, and finds seven cards in her own handwriting that she never wrote.
My father tapped his wine glass with a fork and told thirty people that Teo would go into the dark room on Friday.
The whole table went quiet at once.
Forks stopped halfway to mouths.
The wives looked at their plates, and the men looked at my father, and nobody looked at me.
I knew that quiet.
I had heard it six times before.
"Friday night, nine o'clock, at the club," said Ignazio Rusconi, Don of Bridgeport and my father. "Teodoro asked for my daughter's hand like a gentleman, and in this family a gentleman gets the test."
He smiled down the table at Teo.
Teo smiled back and said, "Friday works."
He didn't ask what the test was.
He didn't ask what happened to the other six.
I put my hand on his knee under the tablecloth. "You don't have to do this," I whispered.
"I want to," he said, and covered my hand with his.
His palm was warm and steady, and it should have made me feel better.
My uncle Corrado slid into the empty chair on my other side with a plate of my own cake.
He had cut it the way I like, with the crust trimmed off.
"Piccola, look at your face," he said. "You look like you're at a funeral."
"Six men have gone through that door, Zio."
"And six men sat in a room and told your father the truth about themselves. That's all it is. A man talks in the dark. Your father listens." He pressed his shoulder against mine. "Nobody gets hurt. I've never let anybody get hurt."
He took out his wallet and showed Teo a folded scrap of paper held together with tape.
"My niece made me this when she was fifteen. A birthday card. I've carried it in every wallet since."
Teo laughed, and so did I.
Corrado always made me laugh.
Behind my father's chair, Paolo stood with his hands folded in front of his black suit.
Paolo was the sixth man.
Two years ago he had walked into the dark room as my boyfriend, and he had walked out a stranger.
Now he drove my father's car and stood behind my father's chair, and in two years he had not said a word to me.
Teo stood and crossed the room to him.
"Teo Lanza," he said, and held out his hand.
Paolo took it.
Teo didn't let go.
He held on for one second longer than anybody does, with his eyes on Paolo's face, and Paolo's jaw went tight.
Then Teo smiled and let go.
He was just being polite, I thought.
Teo walked me to my car after dinner, under the streetlight at the end of my father's driveway.
He kissed my forehead and then my mouth, slowly.
"Stop looking at me like I'm already gone," he said.
"The last six went in and didn't come back to me."
"I'm not them."
"They all said that."
He kissed me again, and I drove home with my lips still warm.
I sat on my bed with my shoes on and watched the clock.
Six men.
The first one had come out of that room and refused to say my name.
The second moved to another state.
The fourth cried in my bakery doorway for an hour and then asked me never to speak to him again.
Paolo drove a car.
Not one of them had ever told me what he saw.
I had never once asked to see it myself.
At two in the morning I got up and took the spare key off the hook inside my father's study.
So I decided to look.
The Rusconi Social Club was dark when I let myself in the back.
The card tables were stacked against the wall, and the whole place smelled of old coffee and floor wax.
The cellar door was behind the bar, steel painted to look like wood.
My key turned.
The stairs went down into a cold that I felt on my arms, and I switched on the hanging work light at the bottom.
It was a small, bare room with no windows.
One wooden chair stood in the middle, bolted to the concrete floor.
A drain sat under it.
Against the wall was a small table with one drawer, and I opened it.
Inside was a bundle of white cards held with a rubber band.
I pulled the band off and turned the first card over.
It was written in blue ink, in my own handwriting.
My loops, my slanted capital A, the little hook I put on my Y's.
*He hurt me. Please make it stop. Allegra.*
I had never written it.
There was a second card with the same words and a third.
There were six, and each one had a different initial penciled small in the corner.
The sixth one said P.
My hands were shaking so hard that the bundle slid, and a seventh card dropped onto the concrete.
It had no pencil mark in the corner.
It had two letters in ink, T.L., and Friday's date under them.
The same words were written on it, in my handwriting.
I had never written one card in this room, and somebody had already made one for Teo.
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