My Father Sold Me at Eighteen, but the Mafia Lord Was the One in Debt to Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Folder
In her dead mother's wedding dress, Graciela marries a mafia lord she has never met, takes her father's 'dowry papers' out of his hands in the sacristy, reads the first page aloud and finds her own name as creditor.
I was wearing my dead mother's wedding dress, and I had been eighteen for forty-one days.
The dressing room at St. Ann's smelled of candle wax and old lace.
Through the door my father said, "It's signed, Gracie."
I stood in front of the cracked mirror with the veil in my hands.
"The contract is signed, the man is outside, and he is waiting."
"I've never met him, Papi," I said.
"You'll meet him at the altar," he said.
"That's how it's done."
"That is not how it's done," I said.
I heard him breathe out through his nose, the way he did when a bet was going wrong.
"Mija, I owe the Riccis four hundred and ten thousand dollars."
"I know what you owe," I said.
"Then you know what you're worth," he said.
I put the veil on my own head.
My mother had worn it in this church twenty-three years ago, and the lace still had her hairpin holes.
Rosalia Montalvo had been dead for six years.
I had never missed her so badly as I did that minute.
The organ started up in the nave.
The door opened, and my father stood there in his good navy suit with his gold ring catching the light.
He did not look at my face.
"Walk," he said.
I walked.
The church was full of men in dark suits and women in black lace.
I knew the cigar rollers from my father's factory in the back pews, because I had spent a week reading the newspaper aloud to them from the lector's chair.
They did not look at me either.
At the front, a man turned around.
He was tall, with black hair and a close beard, and a white scar cut through his left eyebrow.
He was thirty-three, and half of Tampa Bay called him the Padrino.
His name was Luca Ricci.
Everyone said he was the kind of man who never raised his voice because he never had to.
I came up the aisle on my father's arm, shaking so hard that the lace trembled.
My father put my hand in his and stepped back.
Luca's hand was warm and dry and very steady.
At the altar the priest read the words, and I said what I was told to say.
I could hear my own voice.
I read aloud for a living, and it carries.
Then Luca lifted my veil with two fingers.
His eyes were gray and tired, and they went over my face once.
They stopped on my mouth, which I could not keep still.
He leaned in until his beard was an inch from my ear.
"You're shaking," he said, very low, for me alone.
"I'm fine."
"No."
His breath was warm on my cheek.
"Nobody in this church will lay a hand on you," he said.
"Including me."
I looked up at him.
I had no idea what to do with that, so I said nothing at all.
The priest pronounced us married, and Luca kissed my forehead and not my mouth.
Two hundred people clapped.
My father clapped hardest.
The sacristy was behind the altar, a small cold room of dark wood and brass, where the priest kept his vestments.
The families crowded in for the signing.
A tall man in a gray suit with reading glasses on a cord stood at Luca's shoulder.
His name was Ottavio Lindner, and he ran the Ricci house's money.
He had a kind face and a patient smile.
He had also carried the marriage contract to my father's office by hand three weeks ago, because he said it was too delicate to trust to a courier.
I remembered that, standing there.
I didn't know yet why I remembered it.
"Luca," my father said, loud and warm, to the whole room.
"My son."
He took a thin leather folder out of his breast pocket.
"Her mother's dowry papers," he said.
"Rosalia put them by for the day her girl married."
He held the folder out.
Luca looked at it and did not move.
Ottavio's hand came out smoothly.
I don't know what made me do it.
Maybe it was my mother's name in my father's mouth.
I stepped between them and took the folder out of my father's fingers, quick, before it reached anyone's hand.
"Graciela," my father said.
"They're my mother's papers," I said.
I opened it.
There were three pages.
The first was heavy cream paper with a notary's gold seal pressed into the corner, and I knew the first line before I understood it, because I have been trained my whole life to read a page out loud.
"Promissory note," I read.
My voice filled the little room, just as it filled the reading hall.
"Creditor, Graciela Rosalia Montalvo, by assignment on her majority."
Nobody was talking now.
"Debtor, Luca Vincenzo Ricci, by succession."
I looked up.
Luca's face had gone perfectly still.
I read the next line, and the next.
The principal was six hundred thousand dollars, signed by Vincenzo Ricci six years ago in front of my mother, with the Montalvo cigar factory on 8th Avenue, a warehouse lease on Channelside and the house's shipping licence all put up as collateral.
It had never been paid.
The last line was in my mother's handwriting.
My father had stopped breathing, I think.
I looked at the number at the bottom.
"With interest," I read, "eight hundred and ninety thousand dollars."
Then I looked straight at the two hundred faces in the doorway, the Riccis on one side and the Montalvos on the other.
"This isn't a dowry," I said.
"This is a bill."
I folded the three pages along their old creases.
I slid them down inside the bodice of my mother's dress, against my skin, where nobody in that room could take them without touching me.
Ottavio Lindner's smile had not changed.
Luca Ricci looked at me for a long moment.
Then he spoke quietly, to everyone.
"Out," he said.
"All of you.
"My wife and I are going to read the rest."
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