Married to My Ex-Father-in-Law novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Furniture
At Dom Scarpa's Sunday table Nicky orders Dani out of her seat for his pregnant girlfriend and shoves her back down, so Dani lays divorce papers on his plate and walks out; that night the consigliere explains that wives who leave get buried, and at midnight the Don sits in her dental chair with a ring: marry him, or let them bury her.
I served my husband divorce papers on top of his veal, at his father's Sunday table, in front of thirty people.
I thought I was buying my freedom.
In the Scarpa family, I was buying a grave.
It started the way every Sunday started in the big brick house on the bluff.
Old men at one end of the long table. Their wives at the other. Gravy in the good tureen.
Dominic Scarpa sat at the head, the way he had for fourteen years, and said grace in a voice so quiet you had to stop chewing to hear it.
Nicky's chair beside me stayed empty through the antipasto.
He came in during the veal.
He had a girl on his arm in a white dress, maybe twenty-three, with her hand on her stomach.
The room went quiet.
Nicky walked straight to me and tapped the back of my chair.
"You're in her seat, Dani."
I looked up at him. "This is my seat. It's been my seat for four years."
"Move down. By the kids."
His aunt at the far end made a little sound and covered her mouth.
Nobody else moved.
Nicky lifted his wine glass and smiled at the table.
"Everybody. I've got news. I'm going to be a father."
The girl giggled.
One of the old men put his fork down very slowly.
I stood up.
I didn't say anything. I just picked up my bag, because I was leaving.
Nicky grabbed my wrist.
He squeezed until the bones in it slid together, and then he put his other hand flat on my shoulder and shoved me back down into the chair.
"Sit," he said. "You're furniture."
Thirty people watched me land.
Nobody said a word.
Then, from the head of the table, very low: "Nicholas."
Just his name.
Nicky let go of me.
My wrist was already turning red in the shape of his fingers.
I opened my bag.
I had been carrying the envelope for six days, waiting to find the nerve.
He had just handed it to me.
I took out the papers, unfolded them once, and laid them on his plate, right on top of the veal.
The gravy soaked up through the first page.
"You'll want to read those," I said. "My lawyer says you have twenty days."
Nicky stared at the plate.
Then he laughed, a big laugh meant for the room.
"She thinks she can divorce me."
Nobody laughed with him.
That was the first thing that scared me.
I walked the whole length of that table to the front door, past every old man and every wife, and not one of them looked at me.
They looked at Dom.
Dom didn't look at anyone.
He was looking at the gravy on my divorce papers.
I drove back to Columbus Park with both hands shaking on the wheel.
My clinic was dark. Lentini Family Dental, my father's name still in gold on the glass.
I let myself in and turned on one lamp in the front office, and I sat at the desk and cried for a while.
Then I texted my cousin Carmela, who cleaned teeth in operatory two and had begged me to leave Nicky for three years.
"I did it. Papers on his plate. Don't tell Nonna Filomena yet."
She wrote back in nine seconds.
"ON HIS PLATE??? Nonna's going to light a candle at Holy Rosary. I'm going to light his car."
I laughed out loud in the empty office, and it hurt.
Then I got an ice pack out of the freezer for my wrist.
At ten o'clock somebody knocked on the front glass.
It was Augie Iuliano, Nicky's uncle, in his gray cardigan, with a white bakery box in his hands.
I knew him. Everybody knew him. He came to my wedding and cried.
I let him in because he was sixty years old and holding cannoli.
He set the box on my reception counter and looked at my wrist.
"That was ugly tonight, sweetheart. I'm sorry."
"Thank you, Augie."
"Nicky's a pig. Everybody at that table knows it."
"Then why didn't anybody say so?"
He sighed and took off his glasses and polished them on his sweater.
"Because you did something worse than he did."
I almost laughed. "I filed a piece of paper."
"Daniela. You've been inside this family four years. You've sat at that table. You've heard things after the cannoli."
"I don't listen after the cannoli."
"Nobody believes that. That's the problem." He put his glasses back on. "There's a rule. It's older than Dom. A wife who marries in doesn't walk out. She knows too much."
"So what happens to her?"
"The table sits. The table votes." He patted the bakery box. "The last time was 1994. A nice woman. They found her in the river by the Broadway Bridge."
The ice pack was dripping onto my shoes.
"You're telling me they'll kill me for getting divorced."
"I'm telling you the table sits next Sunday." He looked at me kindly. "Eat something, sweetheart. You're too thin."
He let himself out.
The bell over the door rang behind him.
I locked it. I checked it twice.
Then I went upstairs to the apartment I hadn't lived in since my wedding and did not sleep.
At midnight I heard the bell again.
I had locked that door.
I came down the stairs barefoot with my father's old baseball bat.
The lamp in the front office was off. The light in operatory one was on.
Dom Scarpa was sitting in my dental chair.
He had his suit jacket folded over his knee and his big hands flat on the armrests.
He looked at the bat.
"You can put that down. I'm not here to hurt you."
"You let yourself into my building."
"Nicky's building," he said. "He gave my men the keys a year ago."
I did not put the bat down.
"Augie came to see you," he said.
"With cannoli."
"He always brings cannoli." Dom looked at the overhead light, then at the drill on its arm, and his jaw went tight. "You heard about the river."
"I heard."
"It's true. I never used that rule. I never ended it either." He breathed out through his nose. "On Sunday they'll vote. My son will ask them to. I can't stop a vote on my son's wife."
"I'm not going to be his wife."
"No," Dom said. "That's the point."
He reached into his shirt pocket and set something down on my instrument tray, between the mirror and the explorer.
It was a ring. An old gold band with a square diamond, worn thin on one side.
His late wife's ring.
"There is one woman in this family the table can't vote on," he said. "My wife."
I stared at him.
He was fifty-one years old. He was my father-in-law. He was the most dangerous man in Kansas City, and he was sitting in my chair, gripping the armrests like a little boy.
"Marry me, Daniela," he said. "Or let them bury you."
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