Chapter 18: The Front Gate

The front door was locked.

I stood in front of it in my green dress with my brother on one side and my sister on the other.

"Open it," the old capo called from the garden room. "It's a house, not a prison."

The gate guard with the bad knee limped down the hall with the keys.

He opened the door himself.

"Miss Livia," he said, and then, quieter, to all three of us, "Good luck."

We walked out the way I had walked out before, only this time nobody stopped us.

Elio had his sneakers in his hand.

I had no idea when he had taken them off.

Valerio's car was at the curb.

He opened the back door, and my brother and sister got in.

His men stood at the top of the steps and watched him go.

None of them came down.

"Where?" he asked, when I got in beside him.

"I have a couch."

"It sleeps one."

"Then where do you sleep?"

"A house," he said. "Aurelio said I could keep it."

His house was in Ridgewood, brick, with a porch and a lawn nobody had mowed.

It had four bedrooms and a kitchen with a table that had never been sat at.

The refrigerator held a lemon and a jar of olives.

"This is what you eat?" Bianca asked.

"I ate at your father's."

I found eggs in the back of the bottom shelf and a heel of bread in the freezer.

By midnight I was frying four eggs in a pan he had never used.

Elio ate his standing up, with his elbow on the counter, and fell asleep in a chair before he finished.

Bianca washed the pan and got most of the egg off it.

"I'll practice," she said. She was crying, and she was smiling. "Go to bed, Livia. I'll put him in a room."

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