The Don's Wife Never Looks Back novel · Chapter 26 of 32

Chapter 26: Her Name First

I typed back from Marisa's mother's car.

Whose name is on the lease?

Nathaniel answered in four seconds.

Mine. Whose name is on the St. Agnes contract?

Mine.

Then I guess it's alphabetical, he wrote. A comes first. Sorry, Sartori. Rules are rules.

I showed it to Marisa's mother.

She read it and handed the phone back.

"Tell him if he puts his name first, I'll come down there with the towel."

I didn't have to tell him.

By the time I got to Pilsen, the painter had gone home and there was a tarp over the brick above the door.

Nathaniel was sitting on the bakery step in the snow with Tripod.

"What does it say?" I said.

"It's a surprise."

"Adler. What does it say?"

"It says you'll find out at the party." He stood up and brushed the snow off his jeans. "Third Saturday in March. I've invited everyone who ever owed me money."

The third Saturday in March was cold and blue and bright.

There were maybe sixty people on the sidewalk outside the old bakery on 18th Street.

Marisa's whole family, with folding chairs and two trays of sausage and peppers.

The old lady from next door to Mama's, who'd never been to Pilsen in her life and said so to everyone.

The butcher and his wife.

The junior, in a tie, with a date.

The old sister from St. Agnes, sitting on a folding chair with her cane across her knees, and two girls from the housing trust beside her who'd move into the first apartments in the fall.

Even the dentist from Ashland came, sheepish, with a bottle of wine.

"I'm sorry about the deposit," he told Nathaniel.

"Your waiting room is still not going to be shaped like a molar," Nathaniel told him.

The tarp hung over the door with a rope at one corner.

Nathaniel stood under it and clapped his hands.

"Thank you all for coming," he said. "Especially the people who owe me money. You know who you are."

The dentist looked at his shoes.

"Five years ago," Nathaniel said, "I quit a firm in the Loop because I couldn't stand to look at an empty desk. Now the desk's full. The woman at it is better than me. I'm putting that on the building, so I can't take it back."

He handed me the rope.

"You do it."

I pulled.

The tarp slid down the brick and fell in a heap on the sidewalk.

Above the door, in new gold letters on dark green, where the bakery's faded red name had been:

SARTORI ADLER, ARCHITECTS.

My name first.

Everybody cheered.

Marisa's mother cheered loudest, and waved her towel over her head.

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