Bound to My Mafia Stepuncle novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: Gladwyne

"Yes," I said.

He didn't move.

"Angelo. I said yes."

"I heard you." His voice was rough. "I'm just looking at you saying it."

The welterweight let off the air horn again.

Angelo put the ring on my finger with his scraped hands shaking.

It fit.

My mother said afterward that she'd known it would, because she'd measured my old ring while I was in the shower.

In March the men of the local met at the union hall to vote on what to do with the house in Gladwyne.

The company owned it now.

Which meant they did.

I stood up at the front, under the wall of hooks, with my father's jacket hanging on the second row.

"I sat with Domenic Corso while he died in that house," I said.

"Most people don't get a room like that at the end. They get a hallway."

"I want it to be a hospice. For dock families first, and then for anybody."

The vote took less than two minutes.

The gray-haired gate man counted the hands.

"That's everybody," he said.

By May the stone house had ramps at both doors and a nurses' station in the front hall.

The housekeeper stayed to run the kitchen.

She said she'd fed Corsos for thirty years and wasn't about to let a caterer touch her stove.

Domenic's room became the first room.

We kept the carved bed's headboard on the wall and put a hospital bed under it, by the window over the garden.

We kept the walnut cabinet.

I put the painting of the Packer Avenue dock back up in the study, over the empty safe.

In April a jury said guilty.

I sat in the second row with Angelo's hand in mine.

Paulie didn't turn around.

We were married at the gym on the second Saturday in May.

The fighters pushed the heavy bags against the walls and set out every folding chair from the union hall.

The SEPTA driver did the flowers.

The cook did the food, and argued with the housekeeper about it for two weeks.

I wore white.

Not beige.

My mother walked me down the aisle between the speed bags, with her nails done short and pale.

"Don't trip," she whispered. "Everybody's watching."

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