Chapter 7: The Banquet

On the night of the banquet I wore green.

It was the dress Gaspare had picked out for me three years ago, and I had never found an occasion grand enough for it.

I told him nothing about the market.

If I told him, he would bury my father before dawn, and I would not be there to see why.

The port hall held three hundred guests under crystal chandeliers.

Every capo in Sicily was there with his wife, and every minor Don with his entourage, and the long tables shone with silver.

My parents sat at the head table.

My mother wore black, and my father wore his good grey suit and a bright, fixed smile.

Venera sat beside them in cream silk with her two guards standing at her back.

She had been crying in the car.

I could tell by the powder under her eyes.

At nine, Gaspare rose with a glass in his hand.

The room stopped talking.

"I'm not a man for speeches," he said, in his low, even voice. "I'll say one thing tonight."

He turned and looked down at me.

"Everything in this room belongs to my wife's patience. Nine years of it. I have not deserved a day."

Three hundred people stared at us.

He had never said anything like that in public.

I knew what it was.

It was the nearest he would come to the goodbye I had forbidden.

"To Rosaria," he said.

Glasses rose all across the hall.

I sat very still, because my hands had begun to shake.

My father was already standing.

He leaned toward Gaspare and said something into his ear, and pressed a hand to his stomach.

"A touch of heartburn," I heard him say. "Forgive me. I'll take the air outside."

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