Chapter 4: The Boy

Pop was the one who spoke first.

"How old are you, son?"

Archie took a bite of the cannoli and thought about it with his mouth full.

"Five and a quarter," he said. "How old are you?"

"Seventy-four."

"That's old," Archie said. "But not that old. Turtles get to a hundred and fifty."

One of the capos snorted.

Pop didn't smile.

He was doing the math.

They all were.

I watched it go around the table.

Six years since I walked out of that dining room.

Five and a quarter years old.

A boy with Corsaro eyes and the old man's chin.

Carmine had gone white.

Not angry red, the color he went when a waiter brought the wrong wine.

White.

He stared at Archie for a long time.

Then the color came back into his face all at once, and he smiled.

It was the smile he used on judges.

"My son," he said.

He said it to the room, not to me.

"That's my son."

"He's my son," I said.

"You were my wife."

"I was your dry well."

Archie looked from Carmine to me and back, chewing.

"Is that the man who didn't want children?" he asked me.

The room went so quiet I could hear the oxygen tank.

Carmine's smile didn't move, but his eyes did.

"Who told you that?" he said to Archie, very gently.

"My mom," Archie said. "She doesn't lie. It's a whole thing with her."

Bess made a sound behind me that she turned into a cough.

Lucia was staring at me with her lips pressed white.

"How," she said. "How? You couldn't. Five years, you couldn't."

I took Archie's sticky hand.

I'd decided on the drive down that I would never again lie at this table, not even to protect myself.

"This is Carmine's son," I said. "I grew him without Carmine, and I'm not sorry."

Nobody breathed.

I watched Lucia understand it.

It went through her face in stages.

The appointment next month that never happened.

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