I Bought His Love, Then He Became the Don novel · Chapter 42 of 76

Chapter 42: The Shoemaker's Window

"A baby," Damiano said, when he could breathe.

"A baby." The old woman folded the letter. "He says he's eighty-four, and he's not getting younger, and Joe is cheating him at cards so he needs an ally."

"He has an ally. Me."

"He says you're no good. You let Joe win."

Damiano looked at me across the apricots.

I waited for him to laugh it off the way he laughed off everything Pasquale said.

He didn't laugh.

He turned his cup around once on the saucer and said, "That sounds like him," and then he asked her about the bus to the beach.

I noticed.

I didn't say anything.

We did Pasquale's list in order, because he would ask.

The church was cool and dark inside and smelled like wax and stone.

On the left side, in a rack of red glass cups, we lit a candle for his mother.

Damiano put the coins in the box.

Then, without a word, he lit a second one beside it.

I knew who it was for.

His parents had been gone since he was nine. I'd never once heard him say their names out loud.

By the door was a stone font, worn smooth at the rim by three hundred years of hands.

"He was baptized in that," Damiano said. "He told me he screamed so loud the priest dropped the shell."

"Of course he did."

He put his gray hand on the rim and left it there a second longer than he needed to.

The shoemaker's shop was on the corner of the piazza, under a striped awning.

The shoemaker was a big man of about sixty with a leather apron and half-glasses.

When Damiano said whose grandson he was, the man took off the glasses and came around the counter and hugged him.

"My grandfather taught him," he said. "Every morning, a little boy with a broom. My grandfather said he swept like a priest and stitched like a surgeon."

He showed us the floor.

Under the bench by the window, the tiles were worn into two smooth dips.

"Where he sat," the shoemaker said. "Thirteen years."

Damiano crouched down and put his palm in one of them.

The shoemaker showed us the old wooden stamp they still pressed into every heel. A little star inside a circle.

"Your grandfather's boots had this," he said. "The ones he wore on the boat. He made them himself, at nineteen."

I bought a pair of sandals for the bride, because she'd asked, and paid for them, and the shoemaker let me.

When I turned around, Damiano was standing at the window.

There was a pair of baby shoes on a little glass shelf in the corner of it.

White leather. Tiny. Laced with ribbon, for a baptism.

He was looking at them.

Not long. Maybe ten seconds.

Then he saw me watching and opened the door for me, and the bell rang, and we went out into the heat.

He never brought up the letter again.

Neither did I.

We swam in a cove below the harbor where the water was so clear our feet looked close enough to touch.

We ate the almond granita at the right bar, and once, by mistake, at the wrong one, and decided never to tell Pasquale.

He filled the black sketchbook almost to the end.

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