After My Four Childhood Friends Abandoned Me, I Inherited a Mafia Empire novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Pins
At the Don's burial, the four friends hand Marta back their childhood pins and walk out. The lawyer calls: the Don left her everything.
Ettore Pagano unpinned the little silver key from his lapel while the priest was still closing his prayer book.
Then he dropped it into my open hand.
It was still warm from his coat.
Two hundred people in black stood around my grandfather's grave, and somebody at the back was holding up a phone to film us.
My grandfather had been dead four days.
He had given each of us that pin at his kitchen table when we were nine years old.
Four kids, four pins, one Sunday dinner every week for as long as I could remember.
"We're done, Marta," Ettore said, loud enough for the back rows. "The old man's house is finished. Nobody is going to eat in that kitchen again."
I opened my mouth, and nothing came out yet.
Everyone in our neighborhood had called me slow since I was seven.
I answered questions late, because I thought before I spoke, and people took the pause for an empty room.
My grandfather used to tell them the pause was where I did my work.
Nunzio Barone was next, in a suit that was too big for him.
He put his pin on top of Ettore's and his face crumpled.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry, Marta, I'm sorry."
He stepped back to Ettore's side without waiting for an answer.
Fiamma came around the grave last.
She had done my hair that morning in the car and told me not to answer anyone until she said so.
She put her arms around me and held on.
"Take your time," she whispered. "Don't say anything you'll regret. I'll call you tonight."
She pressed her pin into my coat pocket, and I felt her phone hard against my ribs as she let go.
I thought she was checking the time.
That left Ilario.
He had been standing behind the others with his hands in front of him and his eyes on the coffin.
He was the Don's driver's son, and he had eaten at that table longer than any of us.
Two years ago I had called him a dozen times in one night.
He walked up and held out his left hand, and the pin lay in a white bandage wrapped across his palm.
"What happened to your hand?" I asked.
It was the first thing I'd said out loud since the priest finished.
"Cut it on a bottle," Ilario said.
He didn't look at my face when he said it.
I took the pin.
He turned and walked down the gravel path after the other three.
Ettore stopped at the gate and called back to me.
"You nursed him for two years and you know what he left you? A rosary and a house that smells like medicine."
A few men near the gate laughed.
"Say something, slow girl. Go on. We'll wait."
I stood there holding three silver keys in one hand and a fourth in my pocket.
I counted the way my grandfather taught me over a checkerboard.
One, because he wanted me angry and fast.
Two, because every captain at that grave was watching to see which of us would break first.
Three, because I could not see a single thing I needed from any of them.
I was not going to beg four people to eat dinner with me.
"Go," I said.
It came out quiet, and the front rows heard it.
Ettore smiled and turned his back, and the four of them walked out through the gate in a line.
So I let them go.
The crowd came apart after that.
People shook my hand and didn't say anything, and a woman from my grandfather's parish pushed an envelope of Mass cards into my coat.
The priest said something kind that I didn't catch.
I walked to the black car the funeral home had lent me and sat in the back seat with the pins in my lap.
My phone rang before the driver had closed his door.
It was a number I knew from my grandfather's papers.
"Miss Lucchesi, this is your grandfather's lawyer," the man said.
"I'm sorry to call you at the cemetery. I need you at my office in an hour."
"Is it the will?"
"It is."
I looked out the window at the gate where they had gone.
"Ettore's father has been sitting in my waiting room since nine this morning," the lawyer said. "He brought his own paper, and he says the club is his."
"He doesn't know yet what your grandfather signed."
I held the phone tighter.
"What did he sign?"
"Everything," he said. "He left everything to you."
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