Chapter 6: Table Nine

Domenico's seating chart was a list of threats written in a very neat hand.

We were in the banquet hall behind the bakery on Thursday night.

Thirty round tables stood under the fluorescent lights.

Three hundred and four index cards lay spread across a folding table.

The hall's caretaker had let us in and gone home, which in my family was how you gave two people privacy and a long evening.

"Table twelve," Domenico said, tapping a card. "The speakers are directly over it."

"Who sits there?" I said.

"My cousin's husband. He told my father the linen was too stiff."

"It's your family's linen," I said.

"Yes," Domenico said. "Nobody has ever recovered from table twelve."

I picked up a card and turned it over.

"What about the man by the kitchen door?" I said.

"He criticized your mother's bread," Domenico said.

"At the engagement?" I said.

"Years ago. At a funeral."

"My mother does not forget a funeral," I said.

"My father does not forget a seating chart," Domenico said. "That's why I wanted to do it right."

He stopped, put his pen down, and squared it to the table's edge.

"Rosa," he said. "I want your help. I don't know where to put anyone."

I waited, because a person who has just said the plain thing deserves a moment to hear it.

"My side is eleven cousins and forty men my father employs," he said. "I don't know which of them like me."

"Do you know which of them are afraid of you?"

"All of them."

"Then we'll start there," I said, and slid a pile of cards across to him.

By ten o'clock we had made nineteen tables.

By eleven we had reached the three uncles.

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