Don, Your Regret Can't Keep Me novel · Chapter 32 of 32
Chapter 32: Pisano Bridal
I checked the shop door.
Locked.
I checked the alley door, and the storage room window, and the fire escape.
Locked, locked, locked.
Nothing broken, no chalk, no brick.
I stood in the middle of my shop in my robe with my hands over my mouth.
Sergio was in a cell on Arch Street.
Gabriella was on her mother's couch in Atlantic City.
I picked up my phone to call Mauro, and the shop door rattled.
A key turned in it.
The spare key I'd given Annette the night her salon burned.
Annette backed in through the door holding one end of a long white garment bag.
Mrs. Zito held the other end, in curlers.
They both stopped dead when they saw me.
"Oh, she's up," Annette said. "Why is she up? You said brides sleep in."
"I said Italian brides sleep in," Mrs. Zito said. "She's a Pisano. Pisanos get up at six to look at their dress."
"Where," I said, "was my gown?"
"Don't yell. You'll get wrinkles." Annette hung the bag on my mirror. "Sit."
I didn't sit.
Mrs. Zito unzipped the bag herself.
My mother's gown came out ivory and whole, with the hem down to the floor.
She turned the bodice to the lamp.
The little square window was still there, where I'd cut the lace for Dom's pillow.
But now there was a border around it.
A thin frame of old lace, stitched in so fine I had to lean in to see it.
I knew that lace.
I'd cut it.
"When you made the pillow," Mrs. Zito said, "you trimmed the square to fit. You threw the edges in my wastebasket."
"I remember."
"I took them out." She touched the frame with one finger. "I kept them in my missal two years. Under the funeral card."
I couldn't say anything.
"I don't sew," Mrs. Zito said. "So the soup-cans lady sewed. At her kitchen table, till three. I fed her."
"She ate four bowls," Annette said.
"You didn't fill the hole," I said. "You left it open."
"You said he's coming to the wedding," Mrs. Zito said. "So we gave him a door."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–16 of Don, Your Regret Can't Keep Me are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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