Regrets of the Don: His Beloved Walked Away novel · Chapter 30 of 32

Chapter 30: The Ring

I looked down at him on Nonno's floor.

The most feared man in Brooklyn, on one knee in brass shavings.

"Get up," I said.

His face went careful.

"That's not a no," I said. "Get up. Your knee's in the shavings and you'll be picking brass out of that suit for a week."

He got up.

I went to the back of the shop and opened the bottom drawer of Nonno's cabinet.

There was a box in it I'd never opened.

Brown cardboard, soft at the corners, with a label from a supplier in New Jersey that went out of business before I was born.

Nonno had ordered it in 1971, the year he opened the shop.

He'd never cut a single one.

I opened the lid.

Fifty heavy brass blanks for church doors, the old thick kind, wrapped in waxed paper.

"He said he was saving them for something worth it," I said.

Cesare looked at the box and then at me.

"Hold the light," I said.

It took eleven nights.

I sawed the bows off two blanks on the bench and drilled them out.

I warmed the brass with Nonno's soldering iron and bent each one slowly around a steel mandrel, a little more every night, so it wouldn't crack.

Cesare held the light every night.

He sat on a stool beside me in his shirtsleeves after the shop closed and held the lamp exactly where I needed it.

He never once asked how much longer.

Connie came down at midnight on the fourth night and found us like that.

"This is the most romantic thing I've ever seen," she said, "and it smells like a car repair."

I soldered the seams on the ninth night.

On the tenth I filed them.

On the eleventh I polished them with jeweler's rouge until they shone.

They weren't perfect.

His was a little thick on one side. Mine had a tiny ridge where the seam was.

I didn't file the ridge away.

On the third Sunday in May, Nonna made a dinner for Connie.

Connie had passed her boards.

She'd found out on Friday at the shop counter, refreshing her phone with one hand and holding Nonno's practice padlock in the other.

She'd screamed so loud the barber came running with his scissors.

At Nonna's table she wore a paper crown from the bakery that Valentina had decorated with icing.

Cesare's mother brought the gravy.

My mother brought a tray of cannoli and sat at the end of the table, and Cesare's mother passed her the bread without being asked.

"To the nurse," Nonna said, and lifted her glass. "Finally somebody in this family who knows how to fix people instead of breaking them."

"Nonna," Cesare said.

"What? I'm eighty-six. I say what I like."

Connie cried into her macaroni.

After the plates, I took a small velvet box out of my bag.

The same box the key to nothing had come in, in October.

Cesare saw it and went still.

Nonna put down her fork.

I opened it and set it in front of him on the tablecloth.

Two brass rings, a little uneven, shining.

"I made them on Nonno's machine," I said to the table. "From his blanks. He was saving them."

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