My Mother Sold Me to Pay Her Dealer, and the Man Who Took Me From Him Has a Use for Me novel · Chapter 21 of 24
Chapter 21: What the Old Woman Saw
The priest finished the blessing, and the table said amen, and I did not.
The old men had begun to reach for the greens.
Ignazio lifted his head last.
His eyes went down the cloth, along the plates and the pan of tomato pie, and stopped on the photograph in front of my place.
He smiled at it, puzzled and kind.
"What have you brought us, cara?" he said.
"A man's hand," I said.
My voice carried, though I had not raised it.
It was the voice I used on the ward at four in the morning, and the whole table went quiet to hear it.
"It belonged to the man who drove Salvatore Corvino for thirty-one years," I said. "He died on a Sunday morning in December, at ten past four, in room six at St. Elizabeth, with that hand around my wrist."
A fork touched a plate and was set down.
The priest looked at his napkin.
"He asked me to carry what he said to Valentine," I said. "I carried it. Valentine said I should say it here, in front of Carmela and all of you, with the bread on the cloth."
"What is this?" Ignazio said gently. "Valentine?"
Valentine sat in his father's chair and said nothing.
He did not move his hands.
I had told him he was not to speak, and I watched him obey it with his whole body.
It looked like holding a door shut against a fire.
"The old driver said that on the night Salvatore was shot, he sat in the car at the curb," I said. "He saw two brothers come out of this club with their mother behind them. He saw them stop on the top step."
I looked up at Ignazio.
"He said you had a hand on Salvatore's arm," I said. "He said you stepped back one pace and put both hands in your pockets. And a car came down the street."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Mother Sold Me to Pay Her Dealer, and the Man Who Took Me From Him Has a Use for Me are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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