Chapter 15: The Widow's Price

Agnese sat down at the kitchen table where her son had been bleeding the night before.

She looked at the broken basin in the corner and said nothing about it.

I stood at the stove in Ettore's shirt, making coffee, because it gave my hands something to do.

"I raised two boys," Agnese said. "I know what a morning looks like."

Ettore leaned against the doorframe with his arms crossed over the fresh stitches.

"Mamma."

"Sit down, Ettore. You will want to hear the price."

"What price?"

"My votes."

She turned her cup a quarter turn on its saucer.

"Six of the twelve follow me. Five of them are old men who have kept their harbors by doing what I say for thirty years."

"The sixth is the one with the grey moustache, and he followed you before he followed me."

Ettore said nothing.

"On Sunday at noon the council votes on who is Don. I can give you all six. It is enough."

"What do you want?" I asked.

She looked at me for a long time.

"Dario lives."

The coffee pot hissed over.

I took it off the flame and set it down very carefully.

"He drilled my tank. He locked a woman who carries a child in a cage. You want him alive."

"I want him judged by his own family, with his own name on the paper. Then he lives."

"You may take his chair, his boat, his name and his freedom," Agnese said. "I will sign every page of it myself."

"You will not take his life."

"Why?" said Ettore, very low.

"Because I have already buried one son in an empty box," his mother said. "I will not bury the other in a full one."

The kitchen was silent.

Ettore looked at her, and I could see two years of anger fighting with an old, plain love.

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