Chapter 11: Rat

Nobody said anything.

The young wife pulled her babies closer.

The wife from the docks put her phone face down and stood up and walked out of the kitchen without a word.

Delfina was standing in the hall doorway with a twin on each hip.

She looked at me for a long time.

"Go home, Mirella," she said.

Not loud. That was the worst part.

I went.

I didn't sleep, and Aaron didn't either.

I heard him on the phone in the hall until three, low and angry.

At eight in the morning I called a car to Bay Ridge.

"Let me drive you," Aaron said at the door.

"To a capo's house the morning after his arrest? They'd bury you in the yard with the tomato plants."

"Then don't go."

"She fed me," I said. "I'm not going to let her hear it from Todt Hill."

There were two black cars outside Delfina's house when I got there.

Four soldiers leaned on them, smoking. Not ones I knew well.

When I got out of the car service, one of them dropped his cigarette and stepped on it slowly.

"Look who's here," he said. "Little bird."

The others laughed.

"You know what they find in the bay, little bird? Every spring when it warms up?"

I walked past him up the front steps.

Somebody spat on the sidewalk behind me. I heard it land.

The front door was open.

Half the family had come with food, the way they do when a man goes in.

The living room was full of aunts and trays of ziti and a priest eating a cannoli.

They all stopped talking at once.

Delfina was on the couch in yesterday's clothes, a cold cup of coffee in her lap. Her mascara had run and dried.

"I told you to go home," she said.

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