They Gave Her a Convoy, I Built My Own Legacy novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Four Cream Cards

On the ferry, Gianluca shows her the four replies signed with her name and tells her the girl riding in her father's convoy is being presented as Renata; someone will sit in her chair.

"I'm not getting in your car," I said.

"I didn't offer," Gianluca Marchesi said. "I asked who's been answering my letters."

"And I said I never got any."

He nodded once and didn't argue.

I picked up my suitcase and walked toward the ferry terminal. He walked beside me, a careful arm's length away.

"You can't follow me," I said.

"It's a public street."

"It's a street where my father's men eat lunch."

"Then let's go somewhere they don't eat lunch."

I stopped at the corner and looked at his gray car.

Then I looked at the empty street where my family's three cars had just left.

"The ferry," I said. "It's full of people and it has cameras. You pay for your own ticket."

"I'd have it no other way."

The terminal was crowded with commuters.

I paid my fare in cash and he bought his from the machine.

We stood at the rail on the open deck, and the wind pulled loose pieces of my braid across my face.

He took a flat leather case from inside his jacket.

"Four letters," he said. "Four answers."

He handed me the first card.

It was cream, heavy and typed, with a signature in pencil at the bottom.

It said she had liked his description of the ocean at night.

It said Miami sounded too hot to live in, and that he should write again.

I read it twice.

"That's nice," I said. "I didn't write it."

"The second one is better."

The second one asked what kind of man sent letters in the age of the text message.

The third said he could keep writing, but she lost her patience easily.

The fourth was three lines long.

Please stop writing to me.

I have nothing more to say to you.

Don't contact me or my family again.

At the bottom, in pencil: R. Ostuni.

I turned it toward the light.

It was my signature, with my loop at the top of the R.

But the R was too careful. I never wrote it that slowly.

"That's close," I said. "It's close to mine."

"Close."

"Somebody practiced it."

He took the cards back and slid them into the case.

"The letters went to your house," he said. "To the address your father gave my father. Who brings your mail in?"

"My mother."

"Every day?"

"Since I was twelve."

I thought of her at the dining table that night, sorting envelopes into piles beside her plate.

Nothing had ever been in my pile.

I had thought that was because nobody wrote to me.

"My acceptance packet from school hasn't come," I said slowly. "My counselor says it's late."

"Then I'd check your mother's piles," Gianluca said.

A gull landed on the rail beside us and left again.

I held on to the metal and watched Staten Island get smaller.

"Why did you write to me at all?" I asked. "You've never met me."

"My father asked your father for a bride in March.

"He asked for the daughter who keeps his books.

"Your father sent back a name and an address."

"My name."

"Renata Ostuni."

My hands went cold on the rail.

"A bride," I said.

"The alliance needed one.

"My father read the old ledgers your family sent down, and he liked how careful the person was.

"I liked it more. So I wrote."

He said it plainly, without looking at me.

I understood then what the map had been for.

"They're driving Lucrezia to Miami," I said. "My twin. She's riding down in the convoy tomorrow, with the dresses."

"Lucrezia," he said. "Your father told mine the daughter arriving was Renata."

"She isn't."

"I know that now."

"They don't want me gone," I said. "They want me home with their books."

I laughed, and it came out unsteady.

"I balance my father's restaurant ledger every Sunday. He'd lose track of his own cash drawer without me."

"So he kept the daughter he needs and sent the one he can spare."

"The one everybody likes to look at," I said.

He was quiet for a moment.

"I'm not here to take you anywhere," he said.

"I flew up because I didn't trust a convoy to tell me the truth. I wanted to see which girl came out of that house."

"And now you've seen."

"Now I've seen."

The Manhattan skyline came up out of the haze, glass and gray stone, enormous.

I faced him.

"Here are my rules," I said. "I take no money from you, no rides, no room and no favors."

"No favors," he said.

"I start school in two weeks on my own twelve thousand dollars. Nobody gets to say they paid for it."

"And you don't tell me what I did," I said. "You tell me what was in the cards."

"That's fair."

His phone buzzed in his hand.

He read the screen, and for the first time his face changed.

"My father's men are setting the table for Friday," he said.

"There will be a dinner for the Ostuni daughter, and all of Miami will be there."

"They'll seat Lucrezia."

"They'll seat the girl whose name is on the card."

The ferry horn sounded.

"Someone is going to sit in your chair, Renata," Gianluca said.

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