Banished at Dad's Wake, So I Came Back to Run the Boardwalk novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Dom's Night
At ten past midnight on the night her ten years and a day end, Nicki walks into the Taddeo club, sits in her dead father's empty chair, drinks the glass nobody has touched in a decade and asks the neutral chair for his roof.
My sentence ended at midnight.
At ten past, I walked into my father's club and sat down in his chair.
Thirty men stopped chewing.
The head of the long table had stood empty for ten years.
One small glass of anisette was poured at its place, fresh, as it was poured every year on Dom's Night.
Nobody ever drank it.
That was the point of it.
My uncle Silvio sat at the empty chair's right hand with his napkin tucked in his collar.
He had kept that seat warm for my father for ten years and never once moved up.
He set his fork down gently and smiled at me.
"Nicoletta," he said. "Look at you. You came home for the vigil."
"Ten years and a day, Zio," I said. "I counted."
At my father's wake, my cousin put his hand up my dress in the coat hall.
I split his eyebrow with a brass candlestick from the casket stand.
Two hundred people watched him bleed on the carpet, and my family put me out for it.
Out of my father's house, out of his name, out of his table, for ten years and a day.
I walked to the bus station at three in the morning with a duffel bag and two hundred and twelve dollars.
My cousin Nunzio stood behind his father's chair with a bottle of wine.
A white scar ran through his left eyebrow.
I had put it there.
"Get out of that chair," Nunzio said.
He came around the table, took my arm above the elbow and pulled.
His fingers closed on the same place they had closed ten years ago.
I did not get up.
I had decided on the bus that I would not get up for anyone.
At the foot of the table, a man in a dark suit put down his club soda and stood.
He wore plain glasses and no tie, and he was the only man in the room who wasn't drinking.
He walked the whole length of the table, and nobody said a word.
He did not hurry.
He took hold of Nunzio's wrist and lifted it off my arm.
"Let go of her," he said. His voice was dry and level. "It's after midnight. She's served her time."
"Sklar, this is a family table," Nunzio said.
"And I'm the chair that sits between families," the man said. "Let go."
Nunzio let go.
The man's hand slid down and closed around my wrist.
His thumb found my pulse and stayed there.
His hand was warm and dry, and it did not squeeze.
It only held.
My pulse jumped under his thumb, and he felt it jump.
"Miss Taddeo," he said.
"Mr. Sklar," I said.
I knew exactly who he was.
Asher Sklar owned the biggest hotel on the Boardwalk.
Ten years ago he stood in the doorway of the funeral home's back office while they decided what to do with me.
My uncle told me at the back door at three in the morning that the Sklar boy had said nothing.
Down the long table, three of the old men looked at my left hand lying bare on the cloth.
Then they looked at his right hand, where a thin gold ring sat on the smallest finger.
I did not know why they looked.
"Ten years and a day, Sklar," Silvio said, softly. "She's home. You know your part at the Closing."
"I know my part," Asher Sklar said.
He did not look at my uncle when he said it.
He was still looking at me.
I picked up my father's glass with my free hand.
Silvio stopped smiling.
Nobody had touched that glass in ten years, and nobody had dared.
I drank it in one swallow.
It tasted of licorice and of my father's kitchen on Sundays.
I set the empty glass down on his place mat.
"Papa says thank you, Zio," I said.
Nobody moved.
Behind my uncle, in a gold frame on the wall, my father looked out at the room with one eyebrow raised.
I took my wrist out of Asher Sklar's hand, and it took more doing than I had planned.
I stood up and left my father's chair empty.
I would sit in it again on the right day, with the right man behind it, and not before.
"The Table's rule says an exile who comes home can ask the neutral chair for his roof," I said. "I read it on the bus."
I walked down the whole length of the room, past thirty men who did not move, to the foot of the table.
Asher Sklar turned and watched me come.
"Mr. Sklar," I said. "I'm asking for your roof."
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend