My Don's Friends Spoke Italian to Shut Me Out novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: Not One Real Word

Gaspare walked down the long dining room with one arm in a sling and his shirt hanging open.

A bandage showed under it, spotted red.

The captains half stood.

"Gaspare, sit," Tommaso said. "You are not well."

Gaspare ignored him.

He stopped at the end of the table and said something to Cesare in Italian, loud and shaking, with the words running into each other.

I caught *porto*.

I caught *Gallo*.

I caught my husband's name three times.

Cesare put down his glass.

"Gaspare," he said in English. "Sit down."

"In Italian."

"You're hurt."

"Say it in Italian!"

The room went silent.

One of the wives looked at her lap.

Cesare's hand lay flat on the tablecloth beside mine, and I felt him go still.

"I just got off a table with a hole in my shoulder," Gaspare said. His voice cracked. "Because my Don was standing in front of me. And tonight I come in here and I hear my docks go to Gallo's company. And you say bene. You."

"It's temporary," Tommaso said. "Only until you heal, Gaspare. The Don agreed."

"He agreed in Italian?" Gaspare laughed, ugly and short. "That's the first Italian I've heard come out of him in three years."

"Gaspare," Cesare said, very low.

"You haven't said one real word of it to me since your father's funeral. Not one. You sit there and say good, and I thought it was pride. I thought, he's too big for it."

His voice broke on that last word.

"I thought you were laughing with us," he said.

Nobody breathed.

Across the table, a captain stared at his plate with the face of a man hearing a hymn he knew.

Tommaso stood and put a hand on Gaspare's good shoulder.

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