Chapter 7: Widow's Tax

Nick took a step toward him.

I put my hand flat on his chest.

His heart was going hard under the black sweater.

"Not at his funeral," I said.

He stopped.

He didn't step back, though.

Antonia stood up from her chair.

She was small. She was sixty-two years old. She had a funeral program crushed in one hand.

She walked across the room until she was close enough to Paolo to smell his coat.

"I have known your face since you were nine," she said. "You'll leave my son's repast now, or I'll tell everybody in this room what I know about it."

Something moved behind Paolo's eyes.

Just for a second.

Then he smiled and bowed his head to her.

"Signora."

He walked out. His men went with him.

Marisa stood in the middle of the room with her hand still on her stomach.

My mother hurried over and put a coat around her shoulders and took her out the side door.

I watched my sister go.

She didn't look back once.

On Monday the Carbones came up the Hill.

They didn't come with guns.

They came with clipboards.

Two men in nice jackets went door to door on Atwells. The florist. The butcher. The shoe repair. The little grocery with the good olives.

They said the Castiglione family was in transition.

They said the shops would need new protection.

They said three hundred a week, starting now, and they smiled the whole time.

The florist came to my back door that afternoon.

She was sixty, maybe. Her husband had been shot on Spruce Street in 1998. She'd done every wedding bouquet on the Hill since, including mine.

"They said they'd take care of my windows," she said. "I didn't know my windows needed taking care of."

She was holding her October rent notice.

Behind her was the butcher's widow. Behind her, the woman who sewed hems at the cleaner's. Behind her, two more I knew only from church.

By five o'clock there were eleven of them in my bakery, and by six there were twenty-three.

I flipped the sign to CLOSED.

They sat at my little tables and on the flour sacks in the back.

They held their rent notices in their laps.

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