My Mob Fiance Offered Exits, So I Took Them novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: At Your Disposal

Bianca and Lucia explain the forty days in which only the bride can end the match, and Domenico's driver shows up to serve Rosa. She uses the car for everything until Domenico has to ask for it back.

I got out of the car and went back in for dessert.

The driver shut the door behind me without a word, which I later learned was the highest review he gave.

Domenico pulled out my chair again, and this time it was the one beside his.

Nobody spoke through the tiramisu.

Carlo Bellandi did not touch his.

At five on Friday morning the black car was parked outside the bakery with its engine running.

"Good morning, miss," the driver said, opening the back door. "Mr. Bellandi has put me at your disposal."

"Is that still on?" I said.

"Nobody has told me it's off."

I went inside and found my mother at the long steel table, kneading rye dough with both fists.

My sister Lucia sat on a flour sack with the green notebook open on her knee.

"You took all three exits," Lucia said.

"He offered them," I said.

"That's what I said. You took all three."

"Rosa." My mother did not look up from the dough. "Sit down. You should know what you're holding."

I sat on a bucket.

"For forty days from that dinner, you may take the ring off," my mother said.

"You put it on a silver dish in front of his men and you walk out," my mother said.

"Nobody owes anybody anything, and the peace holds."

"And him?" I said.

"He can't. If the Bellandis end it, they lose the whole Halsted market to us."

I looked at the oven timer instead of at my mother.

"So the exits aren't a courtesy," I said. "He wants me to use the dish."

"He wants to know if you'll stay without a door," my mother said.

"Or he wants me gone."

"Also possible," my mother said, and slapped the dough.

Lucia closed the notebook and sat on it.

"Do not look at the notebook," Lucia said.

"I didn't look at the notebook."

"You looked at the notebook."

My mother lifted a hand, and we both stopped.

"What do you want, Rosa?" she said.

It was the first time anyone in my family had asked me that since I was nine years old.

"I want him to ask me," I said.

"Ask you what?"

"Anything. Plainly. I've never been asked for anything in my life. Somebody arranges it, and then they bring me a dress."

My mother's hands slowed.

"I asked your father if he wanted to marry me," she said.

"What did he say?" I said.

"He said he could offer me a ride home," my mother said.

"Did you say yes?" I said.

"It was raining," my mother said.

At six the delivery van refused to start.

We owed the hospital four hundred rye loaves by eight.

"The car is at my disposal," I said.

"Rosa," Lucia said.

"He said so in front of twenty people. Refusing it would be rude."

The driver loaded a hundred and forty loaves per trip, three trips, with the back seat down and the leather smelling of caraway.

"I've been disposing since five, miss," he said, on the third trip. "I don't mind."

At nine he took my mother to the hairdresser, because she said it would be rude to waste a car that was already out.

At ten he took Lucia's cat to the vet, and he held the carrier on his own lap in the front seat.

At eleven thirty Domenico Bellandi walked into the bakery.

There were fourteen customers in line for the morning rolls.

All fourteen stopped talking.

He wore the charcoal suit, and he stopped at the end of the line, where the numbers are.

"Miss Vitale," he said. "I would like my car back. I have a meeting at noon."

The woman at the register dropped her tongs.

I had grown up in this bakery, and no Bellandi had ever said I would like to anyone in it.

The only thing a Bellandi had ever sent us was a typed letter.

It was still folded in four at the bottom of the cash drawer.

"Of course," I said. "It's at the vet."

"The vet."

"With my sister's cat. It'll be twenty minutes."

He looked at the clock, and then at the line, and then he took a number from the dispenser and stood waiting for it.

The customers offered him the front of the line.

"I wouldn't dream of it," Domenico said.

I knew what that sentence meant in my family and in his.

It meant he would dream of nothing else.

Number fifty-one came up in nineteen minutes.

He bought a single roll he did not want and ate it standing by the door.

When the car pulled up, he nodded to me once and got in the back.

The driver stayed on the sidewalk and watched him go.

"Miss," the driver said. "He stood on that corner from five o'clock this morning."

"Which corner?" I said.

"The one by the pharmacy," the driver said. "I drove past him twice when I came for you. He asked if you'd eaten."

"What did you tell him?" I said.

"I told him eggs and toast," the driver said.

Out on Harlem Avenue, the pharmacy corner held a paper coffee cup and nothing else.

"He asked me to say one more thing," the driver said. "The car's at your disposal tomorrow as well. He wouldn't dream of requiring it."

"That's a request," I said.

"Yes, miss. It's the nearest he's come."

Lucia leaned out of the bakery door with the phone against her chest.

"Ma has invited Carlo Bellandi to lunch tomorrow," she said. "Here. At the bakery. Both of them are going to be very polite."

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