My Don's Friends Spoke Italian to Shut Me Out novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Toast
At Sunday dinner eleven men laugh at a toast to Margo that she can't follow, and the old cook translates the recording: on Friday the Don signs and the gun on the crane does the rest.
Tommaso Gallo stood at the head of the table, raised his glass, and toasted me in Italian.
The other men laughed.
I didn't know what he had said.
That was the whole problem.
It was a Sunday dinner in the back room of Gallo's, the restaurant where the Santelli family ate when they wanted to be seen being a family.
I had been Cesare Santelli's wife for six weeks.
I was a night nurse in the ER at University Hospital, and I was sitting in a green dress his grandmother had picked out for me.
Tommaso talked for almost a full minute.
He was sixty-one, silver-haired and gentle-voiced, and he had been Cesare's father's best friend.
He kept his eyes on me the whole time, smiling.
Halfway through, a captain named Gaspare Bruno slapped the table so hard the silverware jumped.
Another man wiped his eyes.
They were laughing at something about me, and I was the only person in the room who didn't know what.
My husband sat on my right with his hand over mine.
I turned to look at him.
Cesare was laughing too.
It was a short, low laugh, the kind he used on people he was about to be done with.
In six weeks I had never heard him say one word of Italian.
When the men spoke it, he said "Good," or "Eat," and they laughed harder.
Tommaso lifted his glass higher and finished.
"Good," Cesare said.
The table roared.
Bianca Gallo leaned over from my left and put her warm hand on my wrist.
She was Tommaso's daughter, twenty-nine, with red lipstick and a smile that never wavered.
She had found me a parking spot my first night here and lent me her scarf when it rained.
"He said welcome to the family," she whispered. "He said you're the bravest woman in Jersey for marrying into this table."
I nodded and smiled.
Tommaso had spoken for nearly a minute.
Bianca's version took her five seconds.
I decided Italian must be a wordy language.
Then Gaspare said something across the table, and every head turned toward me, and I felt my face go hot.
"What was that one?" I asked Bianca.
"Oh, just that you're too pretty for him," she said. "Eat your veal."
Cesare squeezed my hand without looking at me.
I slid my phone out of my clutch.
I thumbed the voice memo on, laid it face down in my lap under the napkin, and told myself I was doing it to learn.
The men kept talking.
The talk came faster now, with Tommaso's voice running through it low and steady, and a few names came up that I knew.
Santelli.
Gallo.
La infermiera, over and over, and each time a different man laughed.
After ten minutes I said I needed to wash my hands.
Cesare's thumb brushed my knuckles. "Go ahead."
He didn't ask if I was all right.
I went through the swinging door into the kitchen.
The cook was standing at the big stove with flour to her elbows.
She was a small woman in her seventies who had slipped me a cannoli every Sunday for six weeks and who spoke to me in English when nobody else was in earshot.
"You look like you saw a ghost, cara."
"I want you to listen to something," I said. "Please. I don't know who else to ask."
I pressed play and held the phone out.
She wiped her hands on her apron.
She listened for maybe twenty seconds.
Then she reached over and turned off the burner under her sauce.
"Play it again from the start."
I did.
She closed her eyes.
When it was over, she took my hand in both of hers, and her fingers were cold.
"I didn't say this," she said.
"I won't tell anyone."
"He says it is a good table tonight, and the Don has a pretty wife." Her voice dropped. "Then he says, Friday. The port. The boy signs where we tell him to sign. After that, the man on the crane finishes it, and the papers are ours."
My stomach turned over.
"The boy is Cesare?"
She nodded.
"And the last thing," she said. "Gaspare says, and the nurse?"
"What did Tommaso say?"
"He says a pretty widow is good for the newspapers."
The kitchen was very quiet.
Through the door I could hear the men laughing.
"And my husband?" I asked. "He laughed. He said good."
The cook looked at me for a long time.
"Everyone laughs at the end of a toast, cara," she said. "That is how a toast ends."
I washed my hands.
I dried them on a clean towel and fixed my hair in the steel side of the fridge.
Then I walked back into the back room, and Bianca smiled up at me from her seat, and Cesare turned his dark eyes up to me.
"Everything okay, Margo?"
"Fine," I said.
"Good."
I picked up my fork and smiled.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend