My Don Chose My Best Friend-So I Took His Empire novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: The Head of the Table
On the first Sunday after the trial date was set, I served veal at the head of the Balestra table.
It was the same plate as the night I left.
The house was full.
Forty-one widows sat along both sides, each in her best coat, with a cashed check folded in her purse and a grandchild on her knee.
The baker from Hylan Boulevard had brought cannoli.
Santino sat at my right hand, where I had promised him, and the old counting woman beside him, wet-eyed, kept patting his sleeve.
Twelve captains sat below them with their wives, and nobody looked at the cloth.
Nino had come in a wheelchair with his cast propped up on a footstool.
"Your father would have cried," he said into his wine.
"My father never cried."
"He did at your wedding," Nino said, and then he stopped, and we both looked at our plates.
I pushed my chair back.
Forty-one widows and twelve captains turned toward me at once.
"I owe this table a sentence," I said. "I'll say it once."
Nobody moved.
"For three years I sat at the end of this table and was told I was unwell. I wasn't. I was right, and I was alone, and I'll never be the second again."
I lifted my glass.
"To the Sartori widows' fund," I said. "Back where it belongs."
The room came up out of its chairs.
An old woman in a yellow hat began to cry and laugh at once.
The old Balestra captain whose mother had waited three years for a check lifted his glass to me, and his eyes were wet.
At the far end, Dario's mother sat very straight in her black silk.
She had been told she could stay.
She leaned over and passed me a glass of water.
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