My Don Married My Pregnant Sister So I Choose His Mafia Rival novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: The Second Wedding

I knew it before I touched it.

The square gold face, the scratched crystal, the brown leather band worn pale where his wrist had bent it on a thousand lines.

My father's watch.

He'd worn it on the water every day of my life.

It had been missing from his wrist when they turned him over on the pier.

"It was in his desk," the detective said quietly. "Top drawer. In a cigar box. With his cufflinks."

I couldn't say anything.

Behind me, I heard my grandmother's church shoes come down the hall.

She stopped at my shoulder.

She looked into the box.

She didn't cry.

She reached past me and picked the watch up and turned it over, and ran her thumb across the back of the case.

"It stopped," she said.

"It's a wind-up, Nonna. It ran down."

She held it out to me.

"Then wind it."

I wound it.

My fingers knew how.

I'd watched him do it every morning at the kitchen table on Todt Hill, before the coffee, before anything.

The second hand shivered and started to move.

The detective put his hat back on.

"Congratulations, Mrs. Sarno," he said, and went down the steps.

I put my father's watch on my left wrist.

It was too big.

It slid down to my hand.

I didn't care.

I wore it to the cathedral.

The Five Families filled the pews again, a year to the day.

The Bay Ridge boss sat on the left with his sons and his granddaughter, walking now, in a white dress with a bow.

The old man from Howard Beach sat beside him, eighty-one, with his cane across his knees and his good glasses on.

The Sarno men had come in suits that didn't fit.

The dockworkers had come in suits that fit worse.

The widows had the third row, eleven black church hats, every one of them looking like they'd sewn the bride themselves, because they had.

My sister sat in the second pew with her daughter on her lap.

The engineer sat beside her in a jacket that wouldn't close over his pressure sleeve.

The deckhand was an usher, and took it more seriously than anyone had ever taken anything.

At the end of the back row, there was an empty seat.

That was where the groom's oldest enemy was supposed to sit and watch the vows, so the whole city would know the war was over.

On it lay a folded newspaper, open to the crossword, with a pen across it.

Ettore had put it there himself that morning.

"For tradition," he'd told the priest.

Nobody in the cathedral had asked who it was for.

They all knew.

I came up the aisle on Assunta's arm.

Not from the choir loft.

From the front doors, in the June light, with the whole city turned around in the pews to see.

I wore my grandmother's ivory satin with twenty-two buttons down the back.

The new tulle veil came down over my face to my chin.

Under it, I could see everything.

The organ.

The candles.

Ettore at the altar, in a dark navy suit, not black, with his hands at his sides, not folded.

He didn't look like a saint.

He looked like a man trying very hard not to come down the aisle to get me.

Assunta stopped at the front pew.

She lifted my hand and put it in his.

"On time," she said to him.

"Early," he said. "Forty minutes."

"Show-off."

She sat down.

The priest opened his book.

I let go of Ettore's hand.

I took the edge of the veil in both hands and lifted it myself.

I folded it back over my hair, and stood there with my face bare in front of every family in New York.

The cathedral went silent the way it had a year before, five hundred people holding one breath.

Ettore looked at me.

He took his time.

It wasn't slow.

There's a difference.

"There you are," he said quietly.

"Here I am."

"Do you want to know if I've decided?"

"I'd like to know why you're taking so long."

"I'm memorizing it," he said. "Ask the priest to start before I forget my own name again."

Somebody in the Howard Beach pews laughed out loud, and didn't bother to turn it into a cough.

The priest started.

We said our vows to each other's faces.

I didn't whisper mine.

When the priest said he could kiss the bride, he didn't go for my knuckles.

He took my face in both hands and kissed me.

He did it in front of the altar, and the families, and the empty seat in the back row.

My father's watch slid down over my hand, and I felt it ticking against his jaw.

The party was on my pier.

It was short, because the widows had decided it would be, and nobody argued with the widows anymore.

The dockworkers' band played the song Papa whistled.

Ettore danced it with me all the way through without stepping on me once.

Assunta watched from her chair with her arms folded, and nodded once at the end.

At ten, the engineer handed me the keys to the Assunta in front of everybody.

"She's fueled," he said. "She's provisioned. Your grandmother put food in her for a week."

"It's one night."

"Tell your grandmother."

The deckhand cast us off.

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