The Don's Son Drowned Me, So I Came Back to Sink His Family novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Toast
Zuza wakes at the head table of her engagement party, sees the man who watched her drown, and walks out of the toast to sit beside him.
The band was playing "Volare," and the last time I heard it, I was under the river.
I opened my eyes at the head table of my own engagement party.
A new ring sat on my left hand, heavy and cold.
Two hundred guests filled the charter boat's main deck, and I knew where every one of them would be standing in two hours.
I had drowned off the upper deck of this boat.
Dominic's hand rested on the back of my chair.
"Ten minutes," he said into my hair. "Then I make you cry in front of everyone."
I had cried. It was a good toast.
I was twenty-six, I kept the books for my father's towboats, and I knew the toast by heart.
He would say I was the best thing that ever came off the river.
He would say my father's boats and his father's docks were one company now.
He would end with the line that got the standing ovation: no family on the river would ever pay again.
Then I would go upstairs to find his sister and tell her what I had found in his family's second set of books.
It was a skim from every dock on the river, written in a bookkeeper's neat hand.
I told the wrong sister.
Her fingers closed on my wrist at the upper rail, and the rail gave way under my back.
Everyone said afterward that I had been drinking.
My father signed the merger at my wake lunch.
I knew that because I had spent a very long time in the dark learning what the living did without me.
Dominic's mother sat three seats down with a steel thermos beside her plate.
She had carried it aboard herself, and she offered none of it to anyone.
When the cook came past with a tray of veal, she told him to let the cutlets swim in the butter.
She had a gentle voice for it. I noticed because it was a strange thing to say.
Then I saw the man at the Croatian table.
He sat alone at the far end with a glass of water, a broad man in a dark suit that did not fit him.
Tomo Vukovic collected the burial dues for the Millvale lodge, and he had once carried my grandmother's coffin up the church steps at St. Mary's.
I had never said more than ten words to him.
But I remembered one face at the upper rail as I went over, big and very still.
I had said one thing to it before the water closed.
Tomo was looking at me now, and he was gray around the mouth.
He put his hand flat on the white tablecloth and kept it there.
Then he spoke across forty feet of noise, with his lips only: "I can swim."
Nobody else on that boat had heard me say it.
I stopped hearing the band.
He had been there. He was here again. He remembered.
"Zuza?" Dominic said. "You've gone white. Are you all right?"
"I'm fine," I said, and I meant something else entirely.
Dominic's sister smiled at me from the end of the table.
Her name was Paola, she wore a rope of pearls, and at eleven o'clock she would be waiting for me at the upper rail.
I looked at the pearls and thought about her heel on a loose rail.
Then Dominic stood, and the guests quieted, and the band went soft.
"Friends," he said, and lifted his glass. "Family. Tonight two rivers become one."
I put my napkin on the table.
In the first life, I had sat through every word of this and smiled.
I was done sitting.
I stood up in the middle of his sentence, and Dominic's glass stopped halfway to his mouth.
"Zuza," he said, laughing a little. He expected something sweet.
I stepped away from the head table.
I walked down the long aisle between the round tables, past my father's captains in their good jackets and the Bloomfield wives in silk.
Two hundred phones came up as I passed.
Nobody said a word.
I stopped at the Croatian table and pulled out the chair beside the collector.
I sat down and turned my knees toward him.
"Tomo," I said, loud enough for the head table to hear every syllable. "I need a dance."
His eyes were wet, and he did not look away.
"And I need to know what you did with the rest of your life," I said.
The band stopped on the last note of a bar.
Dominic's smile stayed where it was.
His mother's lasted a moment longer than his, and then it was gone.
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