The Don's Secret Twins novel · Chapter 13 of 32
Chapter 13: All Saints
I didn't take my hand off the keys.
She didn't let go of my wrist.
"Wet hair," I said.
"Wet like a man out of the shower." Her voice was flat and quiet. "It wasn't raining. Not here. Not in Baton Rouge. I looked, the next week."
"What did he say?"
"He said, 'Sit down. It's my brother.' He held my hands and cried. He smelled like the hotel soap."
Her thumb pressed hard into the bones of my wrist.
"I knew that soap. My husband brought it home in his pockets for thirty years."
The front door banged open.
Coco's voice came down the hall first, the way it always did.
"Nonna! A lady gave us full-size candy bars!"
Ezio came in behind her with the red nails, a ghost on one side and a lawyer on the other.
He saw his mother's hand on my wrist and stopped in the doorway.
"Mamma?"
She stood up from the bench.
She didn't wait for the children to go upstairs.
She didn't soften it.
She told her son everything she had just told me, and she said the last part twice.
Ezio listened without moving.
When she finished, he looked at his left hand, at the red polish.
"Eight years," he said.
"Eight years I told myself I was confused." His mother lifted her chin. "Tomorrow I am not confused."
Ozzie looked from one grown-up face to the next.
Then he took out his notebook and wrote something down, and nobody asked him what.
On Sunday morning the whole city went to the dead.
St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 was white rows of little houses with iron crosses on top, crowded so close the paths between them were barely wide enough for two.
Families came with buckets, brushes and folding chairs.
Somebody had a radio playing a brass band.
The Severino tomb stood in the third row from the Basin Street wall.
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