Chapter 7: The Table

He left without me at noon.

I watched his black car go down the hill from my blue window, and then I called Bernie.

"Engine running," I said.

"Already outside, babe. Nonna let me in the gate. She gave me a meatball."

The social club on Passyunk Avenue had a green awning and blacked-out windows and a sign that said MEMBERS ONLY in old gold letters.

Bernie parked in front of a hydrant.

"If you're not out in an hour, I'm coming in with the tire iron."

"Please don't."

"I'll be very polite with it."

Two men stood inside the door in their Sunday suits.

They knew me.

Everybody in South Philly knew me now, the girl in yellow who kissed the Don for a full minute in church.

The bigger one stepped in front of me.

Then he remembered something and stepped back.

Nobody touches a man's wife without him.

I had written that rule.

I walked right through it.

The front room was an espresso bar and four old men playing cards, who all stopped.

The back room had a long wooden table, a crucifix, and a picture of a racehorse.

Five men sat at the table.

Luciano at the head.

Raimondo at his right hand, in a brown cardigan, with a stack of paper in front of him held together with a binder clip.

Across from him, an old man with a cane hooked over his chair.

A heavy man with flour still in the creases of his knuckles.

A young one with a shaved head and a gold chain, who looked at me like I was a parking ticket.

There were five chairs.

None of them was for me.

Luciano didn't stand up.

His face didn't change at all.

But his hand closed slowly on the table, and I watched his knuckles go white.

"Sweetheart," Raimondo said. "Wives don't come to the table."

Keep reading free with an account. Start Oops, My Online Ex Is the Mafia Don from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.