They Auctioned Off My Housekeeping, Then the Mob Paid a Million for It novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Collect

Rocco pays for his week and walks Livia out through the kitchen, tells her her father is dead, and learns her uncle's car is already outside her building.

I let go of the door and turned around.

Rocco Danieli came up the center aisle at an even pace, and people moved their chairs out of his way.

He had never needed a microphone, even at thirty, when he had stood behind my father's chair and told other men to sit down.

The assistant in the black vest cleared his throat as Rocco passed the stage. "Sir, I'll need a paddle number."

Rocco handed him a card.

The young man read it, and his face changed. He walked it to Margot with both hands.

Margot read it too. "That's a bank letter," she said. "Is this a real one?"

"It's real," Rocco said, without turning. "A million, to the children's ward. Wire's already sent."

His voice was low and unhurried, exactly as I remembered.

Thurston had followed me up the aisle with his napkin still in his fist. "Hold on. Who is this?"

Nobody answered him.

Rocco stopped an arm's length from me. The scar through his eyebrow was whiter than it used to be.

"I bought a week," he said. "I'd like to collect it."

"I'm not a lot in a catalogue, Rocco."

It was the first thing I had said to him in six years, and the whole room heard it.

A few people near the front laughed, nervously.

"No," he said. "You're the only thing in this room I'd have paid for."

My hands were steady. My knees were not.

Rocco offered me his arm.

I looked at it.

Then I looked at Thurston, who had gone pale and was staring at the four men standing at Rocco's back.

"Livia," Thurston said. "Who are these people?"

"Ask Margot," I said. "She's got the slideshow."

I took Rocco's arm.

It was solid. It was warm through the sleeve. Under the cuff, the edge of a tattoo of a rope went down to his wrist, and I remembered tracing it with a fingertip once, when I was nineteen and a fool.

"Not the front," Rocco said quietly. "Kitchen."

"Why?"

"Third table from the left, gray jacket. He looked at your picture on the screen and walked out."

I turned my head just enough.

An empty chair, a half-eaten plate, a napkin dropped on the floor.

"Who is he?"

"One of your uncle's," Rocco said.

My stomach turned over.

Rocco's four men fell in around us without being told, and we went through a side door and into a service corridor that smelled of bleach and fried onions.

A cook with a tray of tiny tarts pressed himself against the wall.

I stopped.

"My uncle's," I said. "Silvio's? He is in Baltimore?"

"He's been in Baltimore his whole life, Livia."

"Why would he care about my picture?"

Rocco didn't slow down. "Because he's been looking for you for eight weeks."

"Why eight weeks?"

He pushed open a steel door, and the cold air off the harbor hit my bare shoulders.

There was a black car at the loading dock with its engine running.

Rocco stopped beside it and turned to face me.

"Your father died," he said.

I heard it, and for a moment I couldn't do anything with it.

"He had a heart attack at the club. It was quick. I wrote to the box in Pittsburgh. I wrote every month."

"I stopped checking it," I said. "I stopped checking it three months after I left."

"I know."

"How long ago?"

"Eight weeks, two days."

The loading dock lights were very bright. I held my own elbow with my other hand.

My father had once carried me on his shoulders through the whole of Little Italy on the feast day. He had been wearing a cream suit and had not cared about the grease on it.

I hadn't called him in six years.

I had told myself I was staying away to protect him. That was the lie I used to get through every Christmas.

"You didn't come," I said. "In six years. You never came."

"I came today."

"To bury him?"

"He's already buried." His jaw worked once. "I came to bring you home."

"I don't have a home."

"You do. You just haven't been in it."

Behind us, through the door, I could hear the ballroom come back to life, a rising tide of confused voices and chairs.

Thurston's voice was in it somewhere, shouting my name.

Rocco opened the car door for me.

I didn't get in.

"Everything I own is in that apartment," I said.

"We'll get it."

"Tonight."

"Tonight, if you want."

One of his men had been holding a phone to his ear. He leaned in and spoke to Rocco in Italian, very low.

Rocco went still.

"What?" I said.

"Silvio's car is outside Thurston's building," Rocco said. "It's been there since before the auction started."

Then, for the first time, his eyes went to the ring on my right hand.

He didn't say anything about it at all.

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