The Don's Animal-Talking Little Girl novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Report

The county gives them thirty days, Etta storms Teo's restaurant to accuse him, and his uncle Ignazio walks in already knowing about Agata's girl.

The caseworker sat at our kitchen table for an hour and a half.

She wasn't cruel. That made it worse.

She looked in the fridge. She looked at Gran's pill organizer and the oxygen tank and the shotgun I'd forgotten to put away.

She looked at the fresh screws in the back door latch.

"Who fixed this?" she said.

"I did."

"Why was it broken?"

"Somebody kicked it."

She wrote that down.

Dilly sat on the floor feeding the white bird crumbs off her toast and translating nothing, which was a mercy.

At the end, the caseworker closed her folder.

"Bernice, you adopted her at sixty-five. I'm not saying you did anything wrong."

"Then don't say it," Gran said.

"Your heart is at twenty percent. You're on oxygen at night. If something happens to you, nobody has legal custody of this child."

"Etta does everything."

"Etta isn't on any paper I have."

The caseworker turned to me.

"You can petition for guardianship. But a judge will look at this house, and at what happened on that step."

"Nothing happened on that step that was our fault."

"I believe you." She stood up. "Thirty days. A younger guardian on the papers and a home I can sign off on. Otherwise she goes into foster care while the court decides."

Gran didn't say anything.

She sat with her hands flat on the table, and her chin started to shake.

I'd seen Gran cry once, at my mother's funeral.

Dilly got up off the floor and climbed into her lap without a word.

The caseworker let herself out the front door.

I stood in the kitchen and made myself think.

Nobody had called the police last night.

Teo's men had wrapped the dead man in a tarp and carried him off into the dark.

There was no report. There was no tape. There was a wet step and a bucket.

So who knew a man had been shot here?

Us, and the men in the black cars.

I got my keys.

"Where are you going?" Gran said.

"To return something."

Teo Speranza's restaurant was on Liberty Avenue, white tablecloths and red leather booths, closed on Mondays.

The door was unlocked.

Two men in dark suits stood up from a table by the bar.

"We're closed," one of them said.

I kept walking in my work boots, mud on the heels, straight across the clean floor.

"Hey."

One of them reached for my arm.

"Touch me and I'll put you through that fish tank," I said.

He looked over my shoulder at someone.

"Let her come," Teo said.

He was in the back booth in shirtsleeves, a coffee cup and a ledger in front of him.

He didn't stand up.

"You called the county," I said.

"Good morning."

"An anonymous report. A sick old woman raising a child in a graveyard where a man was shot. Nobody knew about that man but us and you."

He set his cup down.

"Sit."

"I'll stand."

"Then stand closer. I'm not shouting across my own restaurant."

I came to the edge of the booth.

He looked up at me, and his eyes were very dark and very steady.

"I didn't call anyone."

"Somebody did."

"If I wanted her, I wouldn't send a woman with a clipboard. I'd come and get her."

"You tried that last night."

"And you stood in a doorway with a shotgun you've never fired."

"How do you know I've never fired it?"

"You held it like a rake."

One of the men by the bar coughed into his fist.

"Thirty days," I said. "That's what she gave us. Thirty days, or Dilly goes to strangers."

Something moved in his face.

"Then thirty days is what we have."

"We?"

"You think I'll let my sister's girl go into foster care?"

"I think you've known her for fourteen hours."

"I've known her mother for twenty-nine years."

He stood up then.

The booth was narrow and he was suddenly very close, close enough that I could smell coffee and cold air on him.

I didn't step back. I never step back.

"I didn't make that call," he said, low. "But I'll find who did. Look at me."

I looked.

"I'm many things, Ms. Birchall. I'm not a liar."

The front door opened behind me.

Small feet came across the floor, fast.

I'd left Dilly in the truck with the doors locked and the radio on.

Of course I had.

She came straight to my side and took a fistful of my jacket, the white bird puffed up on her shoulder.

"The bird didn't like the radio," she said.

Teo's face softened, just a little, when he looked at her.

The front door opened again.

A man came in out of the cold with a white pastry box tied with string.

Silver hair combed back. A neat gray mustache. Reading glasses on a chain against a camel cardigan.

"Teo," he said warmly. "You didn't eat. I know you didn't eat."

He kissed Teo on both cheeks.

Then he turned and saw Dilly, and his whole face lit up.

He put his free hand over his heart.

"So this is our little Agata's girl," he said, and he smiled at me.

I looked at Teo.

He had gone completely still.

He hadn't told anyone.

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