Chapter 31: His Real Name

Sandro didn't open the envelope in the hospital.

He carried it around in his shirt pocket for two weeks.

He put it on the workbench while he planed.

He put it under his coffee mug in the morning.

One night I woke at three and found him at the harbor window with it.

He was turning it over and over in his fingers.

"You can open it," I said from the bed.

"I know what's in it."

"Then what are you waiting for?"

He looked out at the moorings for a long time.

"Ten years, this town's called me by a name a man in a government office picked out of a list," he said.

He turned the envelope again.

"They gave me a bucket line. They put out my fire. They never asked me one question."

"So tell them."

"Tell them what? That I've been lying to them since the day I drove in?"

"Tell them your name," I said. "Let them decide what else."

He came back to bed.

He didn't sleep.

In the morning he went down to the shop before light, and I heard the bandsaw running for three hours.

He did it on the first Saturday in June.

He didn't tell anybody.

He didn't have to. In Stonington, when a man carries a ladder out to his front gate, people come and see why.

By ten there were twenty of them standing in the lane.

The co-op president. The firemen. The boy from the bucket line with his broom.

The woman from the bar in her apron.

Gia, with the baby in a sling on her chest, six weeks old and asleep with his mouth open.

The old man sat on an upturned lobster crate with his arms folded and his wool cap pulled low.

Sandro climbed the ladder and took down the old sign.

It had hung there since he bought the yard. Somebody else's name, painted by somebody else's hand.

He handed it down to me.

Then he reached down for the new one.

It was a long board of white oak, left over from the keel.

He'd cut the letters with a chisel and filled them with the same green as the stripe on his boat.

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Mafia Husband Chose My Sister, So I Chose My Lost Love from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.