The Don's Widow Carries His Heir novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Two Widows

At dawn in Antonia's kitchen the will leaves everything to the unborn child through Lia, the widows' fund turns out empty, and Lia's parents arrive to swear she can't have children.

Antonia didn't say another word until we got to the house.

Nick drove us.

She sat in the back with a white plastic bag on her lap.

PATIENT BELONGINGS, it said in blue letters.

Inside were Massimo's watch, his wallet and his keys.

The front hall still smelled like gunpowder and Marisa's perfume.

Antonia walked straight through it to the kitchen and turned on the light over the stove.

"Sit."

I sat at the long table where I'd eaten eighteen months of Sunday dinners with nobody passing me the bread.

She put the bag down at the end of the table.

Then she filled the moka pot, set it on the burner and stood with her back to me.

"I never liked you," she said.

"I know."

"You know."

"You moved my cake off the table at your cousin's christening. You put it on the windowsill next to the ficus."

She turned around.

"It was three tiers. It was blocking the sfogliatelle."

"Your sfogliatelle were from a box, Antonia."

Behind me, Nick made a noise that he turned into a cough.

Antonia's mouth went thin. Then something at the corner of it moved, very slightly.

"Box," she said. "You've been waiting a year to say that."

"Fourteen months."

The coffee started to hiss.

She poured three small cups and put one in front of me.

She put the next one in front of Nick, who had planted himself by the back door with his coat still on.

Then she sat across from me and folded her hands.

"Now you tell me everything. If you lie to me once, I'll know, and Nicky will drive you back to that river."

Nick looked at the ceiling.

"I won't," he said.

"I wasn't asking you."

So I told her.

I told her about the fourteenth and the clinic on the East Side.

Marisa had stayed with us that week because her landlord had a mold problem.

My laptop sat on the desk in the den, where I always left it.

I told her about the night Marisa cried, and the four codes on the back of a receipt.

"I should have said no," I said.

"Yes," Antonia said. "You should have."

She didn't soften it.

I didn't want her to.

"Massimo found out about the money tonight?" she asked.

Nick answered. "Yesterday. The fund's bank called about the balance."

"He went through it all night. Marisa came over with printouts this afternoon. Your laptop history, with your login on every wire."

"And he believed her," I said.

"He believed paper," Antonia said. "He was always like his father. Show him a number, he stops looking at faces."

Her voice broke on "faces".

She picked up her cup and drank to cover it.

The doorbell rang at six fifteen.

It was the family lawyer, a heavy man in a raincoat with a leather folder.

He'd been called at four and had driven from Barrington in his slippers.

I could see the plaid edges.

He sat at the head of the table.

He didn't look at me once while he read.

The house went to Antonia. That was old business.

Then he came to the rest. Massimo's share of every Castiglione business on the Hill. The seat at the table.

"To my child," he read. "Held in trust by my child's mother until my child turns twenty-one. If I die without a child, to my mother, Antonia Castiglione."

He put the paper down.

"He wrote it the week of the wedding," he said. "He never changed it."

The kitchen was very quiet.

Antonia was looking at my hands.

They were on my stomach again.

"So it's hers," Nick said.

"It's the child's," the lawyer said. "If there is a child."

"There is a child," I said.

"Then there's a second problem." He opened the folder again. "The widows' fund."

Everyone on the Hill knew about the widows' fund.

Massimo's father had started it after the war with the Carbones in the nineties.

When a soldier died, the fund paid his wife's rent, her gas bill and her kids' shoes in September.

About thirty women lived on it.

"There's nine hundred and twelve dollars left," the lawyer said. "October rents are due Thursday."

Antonia closed her eyes.

"Some of those women," she said, "I sat with at the hospital the same way I sat tonight."

I got up.

I needed something to do with my hands, so I picked up the white plastic bag to move it off the table.

It was too light.

I opened it.

The watch. The wallet. The keys. A pack of gum.

"Where's the picture?" I said.

Nick came off the door. "What picture?"

"My ultrasound. It was in his hand. It was in his hand when they pulled me off the bed."

I turned the bag upside down over the table.

Gum. Keys. A receipt from a gas station in Johnston.

No picture.

"Who held this bag?" I said.

Antonia opened her eyes.

"Your sister," she said slowly. "She carried it from the room while I signed the forms. She said she wanted to help."

The doorbell rang again.

Nick went. I heard voices in the front hall, high and low.

My mother's voice.

He came back with his jaw set and three people behind him.

My mother, in her good camel coat. My father in a Patriots jacket, like he'd been pulled out of bed.

And Marisa, out of my dress now, in black leggings with her face scrubbed clean and pink.

My mother didn't look at me.

She went straight to Antonia and took both her hands.

"Antonia, I am so sorry. I'm so sorry. We came as soon as we heard."

Then she turned and saw the will on the table, and the lawyer, and me.

"What's going on?"

"Massimo left everything to his child," the lawyer said. "Through the mother."

My mother laughed.

It was short and surprised, and it went right through me.

"Through Lia?" she said. "Lia can't have children."

"Mom."

"She told Marisa in July." My mother squeezed Antonia's hands tighter. "Right, sweetheart? Tell her what your sister said."

Marisa looked at me across the kitchen.

Then she looked at Antonia, with big wet eyes.

"She said the doctors told her it would never happen," Marisa said. "She cried about it all night. I held her."

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