The Don's Widow Carries His Heir novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: The Grave

"Wait," I said.

The driver stopped with his hand on the door.

"Take it back."

"Ma'am?"

"The flour. Load it back on the truck." I held the new invoice out to him. "And tell your boss I'm not paying a tax for being a widow. He made me one. He can pay for it."

He looked at the sacks on his dolly.

He looked at Nick, standing in my office doorway with a dish towel over one shoulder and a face like a closed door.

"I'll lose my route," the driver said quietly.

"I know. I'm sorry. Tell your daughter good luck on Saturday."

He stood there one more second.

Then he loaded the flour back up and wheeled it out to the truck, and I listened to it back down the alley.

"So," Nick said. "No flour."

"I have enough for today."

"And tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow I'm going to need your car."

At seven, when my morning baker came in, I asked him to run the counter.

Then I had Nick drive me to St. Ann's in Cranston.

The grave was still raw dirt under funeral flowers going brown at the edges.

The stone wasn't up yet. A little metal marker held his name on a card.

Nick stopped twenty feet back on the path with his hands in his coat.

"I'll be here," he said.

I walked the rest of the way by myself.

I'd brought nothing.

I'd thought about flowers on the drive and decided he didn't get any from me.

I stood at the foot of the dirt for a long time.

"You were supposed to look at my face," I said.

My voice came out small in the cold. I made it bigger.

"I begged you. In our front hall. I said look at me, and you looked at her hand on your shoulder instead."

The wind moved the dead flowers.

"Eighteen months, Massimo. I baked your father's favorite cake every Sunday so your mother would stop hating me."

"I learned to shoot because you wanted me to. I sat up with you every night you came home with somebody's blood on your sleeves, and I never asked whose."

I was crying now. I let it.

"And one afternoon my sister shows you some paper, and you send me to the river."

I wiped my face with my sleeve.

"And then you looked at that picture in the hospital and you knew. I saw you know. And you didn't get to say it. And I hate that you didn't get to say it, because now I'll never hear it."

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