Chapter 13: The Funeral Lilies

Ruggiero's captain opened the long white box on the gravel at the gate.

Inside lay a funeral spray of white lilies.

A satin ribbon ran across it, and the gold letters read: NERINA ALBERTINI, BELOVED DAUGHTER.

A card was tucked under the ribbon, in my father's square handwriting.

"The Families sit at eight," I read aloud. "Bring your husband, so they can see what you chose."

"He's burying you," Ruggiero said.

"He's telling me where to stand."

I tore the ribbon off the flowers and dropped it in the wet gravel.

Then I went inside and put on the black dress.

Costanza was waiting in the hall in her wheelchair, with a Falsetti coat around her shoulders and the doctor's hand on her wrist.

She looked at the torn ribbon in my fist.

"Papa?" she asked.

"Papa."

"Good," my sister said. "Now I'm angry enough to get through the door."

I took the handles of the chair myself.

Ruggiero walked at my right shoulder, and four of his men walked behind us.

Nobody spoke on the drive.

The Albertini house had every window lit.

I had grown up under that roof, and I had never once come through the front door with my head up.

The old doorman of the Commission met us on the steps. He was nearly eighty and walked with a cane, and he did not smile.

"A wife comes to the table with her husband," he said. "That is the law, and your father knows it."

"Thank you," I said.

"Do not thank me yet, child."

He opened the double doors himself.

The long dining room was the same room where my sister had collapsed.

The marble had been scrubbed, and the broken glass was gone.

Eleven capos sat down both sides of the table in dark suits.

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