The Don's Wife Stopped Asking novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Coin at the Table
At Sunday lunch Tancredi texts Sabina that he freed her brother; she stands and walks out without asking, and at the county glass Emilio says nobody lifted anything and sentencing is Friday.
My husband texted me at Sunday lunch, from the head of the table, in front of twenty-two members of his family.
Tancredi Falzone never raised his voice at a meal.
When he had something to say to his wife, he said it to her phone.
It buzzed against my thigh while his uncle was carving the veal.
The message was three short sentences.
"The hold on your brother is gone. He stays in county. You're welcome."
I read it under the tablecloth, and then I read it again.
The hold was the lawyers' word for what stood between my brother and fifteen years upstate.
My brother had sat in county for six months, and I had not been allowed to see him once.
For three years I had asked Tancredi before I left this house.
The market, church, a dress fitting, always the same words in the same doorway.
May I?
On Thursday I stopped.
That night I had gone down to his study to ask him about my brother again, and I heard him through the door.
"Zio, I can't move that," he said, in a voice I had never heard him use.
Then he saw me through the gap, and he shut the door.
I decided I was done asking a man who would not answer.
For three days I had walked out into the garden without a word, and nobody had stopped me.
Tancredi had noticed.
He had decided I finally knew my place, and this text was my reward.
Orsola leaned in on my left and squeezed my wrist.
"Good news?" she whispered.
"He lifted the hold on my brother."
"Oh, Sabina." Her eyes filled, and she hugged me, cheek to cheek, with the lemon soap she always wore.
"That's wonderful. I told Papa you'd get him home."
"He's not home," I said. "He stays in county."
"Still. County is nothing."
On my right, his uncle Ignazio set a slice of veal on my plate with his own fork.
He was sixty-one, wide as a door, and he fed everybody at this table himself.
"So the boy stays in county," he said. "Good. Eat, cara. You've gotten thin."
I looked at the veal.
I had not told him what the text said.
I thought: everyone in this family knows everything before I do.
"Visiting ends at four on Sundays," Ignazio said. "My driver can have you there by three."
"Thank you, Zio. No."
"No?"
"I'll find my own way."
Down the table, Tancredi was cutting his meat.
He had not looked up since he sent it.
He did not look up now.
I put my napkin on my plate.
Then I did something no one had done at a Falzone table in my three years there.
I stood up before the Don did.
The forks stopped.
Somebody's chair creaked at the far end.
"I'm going to see my brother," I said, to nobody and to everybody.
Tancredi's knife stopped on the plate.
"Sit down, Sabina."
It was the first thing he had said to me out loud in three days.
I did not sit.
"Thank you for the text," I said.
Then I walked the length of that dining room with twenty-two people watching my back.
Remo was waiting by the front door with my coat.
He is Tancredi's driver, a broad man with a shaved head and a nose that has been broken twice, and he held the coat open without a word.
"The car's out front, Mrs. Falzone."
"I'm taking a cab."
"It's forty minutes to the county building by cab."
"Then I'd better call one."
He looked back toward the dining room, and then he looked at me.
He handed me forty dollars from his pocket.
"For the cab," Remo said. "I didn't give you this."
I walked down the long drive in my good shoes, past the gate and the two men who let me through, and I called the cab from the road.
At twenty to four I was sitting at the visiting glass with a phone in my hand.
My brother came in on the other side in an orange jumpsuit.
Emilio was twenty-two, and he had a yellow bruise going green under his left eye.
He picked up the phone and did not say hello.
"Sabi. Who let you out?"
"Nobody." I pressed my hand to the glass. "Emilio, he lifted the hold. You stay in county. He texted me."
My brother laughed.
It was a short laugh, with no air in it.
"Nobody lifted anything," he said.
"What?"
"A lawyer came Thursday, and he read me the paper. I'm sentenced on Friday, Sabi."
"Friday's county time. Tancredi said..."
"Fifteen years." He said it very slowly. "Upstate. The lawyer said it's already agreed."
The guard called ten minutes.
I looked at my brother's face through the scratched glass, and the text on my phone said the opposite.
"Nobody lifted anything," Emilio said again. "Whoever told you that is lying to you."
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