The Don's Wife Stopped Asking novel · Chapter 19 of 24
Chapter 19: Eat, Zio
At ten the next morning every captain in the family sat down at the long table in the club on Richmond Avenue.
Nobody had put a coffee cup at the head.
My husband sat in the carved chair with the crest on its back, and his father's ring was on his hand.
I had never seen him sit in it.
He did not look like a man who was borrowing it.
The old man from Brooklyn took a plain chair at the corner of the table and laid his cane across his knees.
The widows stood along the back wall in their church coats, fourteen women with their handbags held in front of them.
I stood at Tancredi's shoulder with the green ledger in my arms.
Remo was in the hospital with his arm in a sling, swearing at a nurse.
Two captains brought Ignazio in by the elbows.
He wore yesterday's shirt, with a stain of wine on the cuff.
They sat him in a plain chair at the foot of the table.
He faced his nephew down the whole length of the wood.
He was still smiling a little.
"Don Falzone," the old man said, without raising his voice. "You have the floor."
Tancredi did not stand.
"My uncle shot at me at a table with eighty people watching," he said. "He killed Sabina's father, who was a man of this family, and he called it a debt. He took her from her house on a lie. He sent her brother to a warehouse on a lie, and a knife was put in him in the county yard."
Nobody at the table moved.
"I have sat in this room fourteen months and let him speak for me," Tancredi said. "That ends today."
"The penalty is known," the old man said. "We all know the penalty."
I had known it too, walking in.
Everyone in the room knew what the old man meant, and every face turned to Tancredi.
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