My Don Husband Wants Two Wives novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Lamb Stays on the Table
Rocco announces his second wife at Sunday dinner, Livia walks out, and the bride is waiting on her step.
Rocco told twenty people he was taking a second wife while I was standing at the table with a lamb roast in my hands.
I had cooked it for six hours.
The dish was still hot through the towels.
Every Sunday for five years I had carried that dish to the head of the table and set it in front of my husband.
This Sunday he tapped his glass with a fork before I could.
"Everyone, a word," Rocco said.
The room went quiet.
The capos stopped chewing, and their wives put down their wine.
Rocco stood at the head of the table with one hand flat on the cloth, his scar white above his eyebrow.
"The council has chosen a second wife of the table for me," he said. "She is Aldo's daughter."
Nobody looked at me.
Twenty people looked at their plates, and one of them was his sister.
She had taught me to pin a hem when I was nineteen and I had been to her house every Christmas since.
She stared at her fork and did not lift her eyes.
"The rite is in three weeks, on a Saturday," Rocco said. "Nothing changes for Livia. She is my first wife and she keeps her place."
He said it smoothly, with no change in his voice at all.
I looked at the old man sitting three seats down, the one guest I had never been introduced to.
He had white-silver hair and a gold watch chain across his vest.
He was the father of the girl and he was the only person at the table looking straight at me.
He gave me a small nod of sympathy.
I set the lamb down in front of Rocco's plate.
My hands were steady and I was proud of that.
"How long have you known?" I asked.
"Livia."
"How long, Rocco?"
He didn't look away, which I will give him.
"Since March," he said.
It was October.
In March I had sewn him a new lining for his winter coat, and he had kissed my forehead and thanked me.
"The council voted in March," I said. "And you didn't say no."
"The council decides, Livia. You know how it works."
"I know how it works," I said. "I'm asking whether you said no."
He opened his mouth and nothing came out.
That was the answer.
I took the towels off my wrists and laid them over the handle of the dish.
Somebody coughed.
"Eat," I told the table. "It's getting cold."
Then I walked out of the dining room.
In the front hall my coat was on the hook where it always is.
I put it on and picked up my bag.
Behind me I heard a chair scrape and Rocco say my name once, low, the way he does when he expects me to stop.
So I stepped out.
The cold hit my face on the front steps.
My car was parked at the end of the drive.
Footsteps came down behind me, slow and even, and I knew they weren't Rocco's.
"Serra," a man said.
Nobody in that house had called me by my maiden name in five years.
I turned.
Aldo Corsetti stood on the step above me with his coat over his arm.
Up close his eyes were warm and tired.
"Forgive an old man for following you out," he said. "It's a bad way to hear news. It should have come from him in private."
"It should have come before March," I said.
"Yes." He nodded. "It should."
He walked me down the drive to my car.
He opened the door for me, and when I was inside he leaned down a little.
"Drive carefully," he said. "It is cold, and you're upset."
"I'm fine, Mr. Corsetti."
"Of course you are," Aldo said, and shut the door gently.
In the mirror I saw Rocco come out onto the porch with Sandro behind him.
I drove away before either of them reached the drive.
I didn't go back to the house in Oak Park that night.
I went to my shop on Harlem Avenue and climbed the stairs to the flat above it.
It was the flat I'd lived in before I married him.
I had kept the lease for five years and told myself it was for storage.
I lay on the bare mattress with my coat on and watched the streetlight on the ceiling.
At midnight someone knocked on the street door downstairs.
Not hard.
Three small knocks, and then a pause, and then three more.
I went down in my socks with a pair of tailor's shears in my hand.
On the step under the shop sign stood a girl of twenty-three in a cream blouse with a suitcase.
I knew her face from the photograph Paola had once shown me of the Corsetti family at a christening.
Bianca Corsetti.
She looked up at the shears and then at me.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I don't want to marry him either."
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