The Don's Dying Wish novel · Chapter 20 of 32

Chapter 20: Sanctuary

I didn't let her see anything on my face.

"The second casket is in our showroom, Mrs. Brancato," I said. "Paid for. Nobody's lying in it."

"Yet," Tiziana said, and went back to her son.

I made it through four more hours.

I shook every hand.

When the last car pulled away at ten, I locked the front doors and leaned my forehead on them.

Then I went to the back kitchen and told them.

Amalia.

The embalmer.

The driver, who'd been standing at the front windows all night with his hands in his pockets.

Marcello, who had spent the whole wake in the embalmer's office with the door locked and the embalmer sitting outside it on a folding chair.

"She said it out loud," the driver said. "At the wake."

"She said it to me. Quietly. Smiling."

"Same thing," said Amalia.

Marcello stood up from my father's chair.

"I'll go tonight," he said. "There's a hotel in New York. My father's old friend..."

"Sit down," said Amalia.

"Nonna, she means it. If I'm in this building, she'll come into this building."

"She already came into it," my grandmother said. "Twice. Sit down."

He sat.

The embalmer took out his phone and typed something.

The driver took out his and did the same.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Calling in favors," said the embalmer.

By eleven the side bell had rung six times.

The driver's grandmother came first, eighty-four, with her knitting bag and a pot of lentils.

She set up in the front hall window in my father's armchair, where she could see the gray sedan across 9th Street.

"I don't sleep anyway," she said. "Let them look at me."

The widow from the port came next, the pallbearer's wife.

She had a foil tray of baked ziti and her little girls home asleep with her sister.

Then three more women from the block.

Every one of them had buried a husband with us in the last eight months, while the fund's checks bounced.

I'd never sent any of them a bill.

They didn't mention it.

They came in with casseroles and rosaries and sat down around my kitchen table.

The pallbearer's widow saw Marcello in my father's chair and stopped dead in the doorway.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, my God."

"He's fine," I said. "He's awake. Nobody can know yet."

She came over slowly.

She looked at him for a long time.

"My husband carried your mother," she said. "Fourteen years ago. He was nineteen. It was his first time with the Families."

Marcello stood up again.

"I remember him," he said. "Front right. He kept fixing his tie."

Her face crumpled, and then it didn't.

She took his hand in both of hers and shook it hard.

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