I Bought His Love, Then He Became the Don novel · Chapter 40 of 76

Chapter 40: For Nothing

At eleven fifty-five I was standing across Taylor Street from her shop in my good coat.

Nonno had told me to wear it.

At dinner he'd watched me eat his soup, and kicked Joe twice under the table.

Joe lost every hand of scopa and went home at nine, saying he was tired.

He kept his eyes on me the whole way out the door.

"Wear the good coat," Nonno said, when I went upstairs.

"Why?"

"Because it's good."

The blue passbook was in its inside pocket, against my ribs, stamped CLOSED.

I'd carried it since the yard.

I had my answers ready.

I'd tell her I understood.

I'd tell her the shop was hers and the yard was her father's, and nobody would ever send her a bill.

I'd tell her she could have the cousins as long as she wanted them.

I wouldn't ask her to stay.

I'd made her sign a paper once. I wasn't going to make her say no to my face.

At midnight I crossed the street and opened the door.

The bell rang over my head.

The shop was dark except for one lamp, over the cutting table, under the skylight I'd drawn on the back of a menu.

The floor was swept. The dress forms stood against the wall in a row.

On the table there was a white shirt.

She was standing beside it in the red silk dress.

I'd seen it once, at the show in March, from the back wall, with my hand flat on the bricks to keep me up.

"Lucia," I said. "What is this?"

"Come here."

I went.

The shirt was my size. She'd never measured me.

I held it against myself and the shoulders landed exactly where mine were.

"Nobody's ever made me anything," I said. "Except Nonno. A pair of shoes when I was ten. They squeaked."

It wasn't true.

There was a dark blue tie in my top drawer with three words sewn inside it.

I didn't count it. That one had been a goodbye.

"This doesn't squeak," she said.

"I can see that."

I folded it the way she'd folded it and put it down, and asked her if that was why she'd wanted me at midnight.

"No," she said.

She opened her hand.

My grandmother's ring was lying in it.

I knew it before I could see it properly.

She told me Nonno had given it to her for herself, not for me to give.

"So I'm not asking with your family's ring," she said. "I'm asking with mine."

Then she got down on one knee.

On the floor of her own shop. On boards I'd drawn and her father's foreman had laid.

The last time Lucia Morelli made me an offer, she was sitting on a bench looking at a window, with a trust fund behind her.

This time she was looking straight at me.

"I don't have anything to pay you with," she said. "No trust. No checkbook. I spent the passbook on a roof."

The passbook was two inches from her, in my coat, against my heart.

"Lucia."

She kept going, about a shop and a father who cheated at cards and a dress she'd made.

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