Regrets of the Don: His Beloved Walked Away novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: 18th Avenue

Lili moves into the dusty apartment over her grandfather's lock shop, Cesare's sister Connie arrives with a suitcase and a lasagna, and Lili's mother and sister turn up wanting to sell the building for the baby.

I didn't sleep in the van the second night.

At eleven I stood under the steel shutter of Bruno Lock & Key with my flashlight in my teeth.

Somebody had put a new padlock on it.

I'd worked this counter on Tuesday, and on Tuesday it hadn't been there.

It was a cheap brass one from the hardware store, still shiny.

My mother's work. She'd locked me out of my own grandfather's shop.

I took the tension wrench and a short hook out of my apron pocket.

It gave way in seconds.

The shutter went up screaming.

The air inside smelled like oil and dust and the cold metal of ten thousand blanks.

I found the light switch by memory.

The fluorescent tubes blinked twice and came on.

I'd worked here three days a week for three years.

I had never once stood in it at night with nowhere else to go.

The key rack covered the whole back wall.

The counter had the burn mark where Nonno set his soldering iron down in 1988.

His machine sat at the end of the counter under the cloth I put over it every night.

I pulled the cloth off.

The old Ilco was green paint and steel, worn silver where his thumb used to rest.

I put my thumb in the same place.

Then I went outside and looked up at the sign.

BRUNO LOCK & KE.

The Y had fallen off in August, and I'd been too busy being the Donna to fix it.

I went upstairs.

The apartment over the shop was full of my mother's boxes.

Valentina's old prom dress hung on the back of the bedroom door in dry-cleaning plastic.

I moved it to the hall closet and lay down on Nonno's couch in my coat.

The radiator knocked all night.

At eight in the morning someone actually did.

I came down the stairs with a pry bar in my hand.

Connie Lanza was standing on the sidewalk with a rolling suitcase and a foil pan.

She was wearing hospital scrubs under her puffer jacket and the expression of a woman who'd made up her mind.

"I brought lasagna," she said. "My mother's. I can't cook."

"Connie, go home."

"I'm a nursing student. I have boards in May. I need quiet to study."

She looked past me at the dusty shop.

"That house has twelve men in it and my brother hasn't slept. It's the opposite of quiet."

"You can't live here."

"Watch me," she said, and rolled her suitcase over my boots.

She put the lasagna on the counter and looked around.

"Wow. It's like a museum of keys."

"Don't touch anything."

She touched the key rack.

I sat down on Nonno's stool.

She leaned on the counter across from me.

"I'm not here for him," she said. "Just so you know. He didn't send me. He's furious I came."

"He knows you're here?"

"He knows everything. There's a car at each end of the block."

I went to the window.

There was a black Lincoln at the corner of 79th, and a gray one at the corner of 80th.

"What did he do?" Connie asked behind me.

I didn't answer.

"It's Valentina," she said. "It's always Valentina. I saw her face at dinner."

I still didn't answer.

"If he touched her," Connie said, "I'll kill him myself. I know where the femoral artery is."

I laughed for the first time in two days.

It came out wrong, half a sob.

Connie came around the counter and hugged me hard.

She smelled like hospital soap and her mother's garlic.

I let her.

"Last night at three he took the car out alone," she said into my hair. "He came back at five with his knuckles bleeding."

I pulled back.

"Who did he hurt?"

"Nobody. He hit the wall of the social club in Gravesend. The one where he got shot."

She shrugged.

"The underboss hasn't come out of his house since. I think he's waiting to find out if he still has a job."

I went out the front door and down to the corner.

The man behind the wheel of the Lincoln rolled down his window.

"Donna."

"Don't call me that. Tell him to take you off my block."

"With respect, Donna, I can't."

"Then park at the next block. You're scaring my customers."

He looked at the shop with the broken sign.

He had the decency not to say it.

By noon both cars had moved one block down.

Connie and I spent the day digging out the apartment upstairs.

We carried my mother's boxes to the curb.

We swept the dust of four years off the floors.

Connie tried to pick the old padlock with a bobby pin and stabbed herself in the thumb.

"Is this what you do all day?" she asked, sucking it.

"Mostly I listen to men lie about losing their keys."

"So it's like being a Lanza."

At six we ate cold lasagna on the counter with two forks out of the pan.

It was the best thing I'd eaten in a year.

I was licking sauce off my thumb when the bell over the door rang.

My mother walked in with her good handbag on her arm.

Valentina was behind her, wrapped in a camel coat.

Behind them came a man in a quilted vest with a tablet under his arm.

He looked at the key wall.

My mother didn't say hello.

She didn't ask why I was sleeping above the shop.

"This is the gentleman from the development company," she said. "He's made a very generous offer on the building."

Valentina put her hand on her stomach.

"We need to sell, Lili," my mother said. "For the baby."

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