Don, I Left as You Wished novel · Chapter 6 of 32

Chapter 6: We Don't Run

I could have lied to her.

I'd been lying all week. To Joanie. To the kids' parents. To Dino on one knee in a puddle.

But my mother had raised me alone on tips in a one-bedroom over a laundromat in Woodside.

She'd know.

"Sit down, Mom."

"I'm not sitting. Tell me."

So I told her standing up, in the kitchen, with the cigar smoke coming under the door.

I told her all of it, from the vent to the piers, and I watched it land on her face.

Halfway through, she put one hand flat on the counter.

By the end, she was holding on with both.

She was shaking. Her pearls were shaking.

I'd never seen my mother shake. Not when the landlord came, not when the diner closed, not at her own husband's funeral.

"Tullio," she said. "Tullio stood up for you at your Confirmation. He gave you a gold cross."

"I know."

"He danced with you at sixteen."

"I know, Mom."

She took a breath that went all the way down.

Then she let go of the counter.

I watched it happen. The shaking stopped.

She straightened her black dress. She pushed her glasses back up on her head.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay?"

"Santo wants you on a plane."

"I'm not going."

"Good."

I stared at her.

"I thought you'd pack my bag yourself."

"Rosaleen, I spent twenty years carrying four plates up each arm for men who pinched me. I raised you in a back booth doing your homework. Do you know what I learned?"

"Don't marry a mobster?"

She almost laughed.

"If you run from a man like that, you run forever. He just waits for you to get tired."

She picked up a dish towel and folded it into a perfect square.

"We don't run," my mother said.

Somebody laughed loud in the cigar room. Tullio's laugh.

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