The Mob Gave Me a Week to Leave, So I Took Over Dorchester novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Keys
At Brendan's wake Frank takes the widow's wrist at the casket and gives her until the first Sunday in February; Kathleen tells two hundred people the bar opens Monday, Marek takes Frank's hand off her, and she locks her ransacked house and says, Boston Street.
Frank Cullinane, my husband's uncle, took my hand at the casket and asked me for the keys to the bars.
He said it softly, with his thumb on the inside of my wrist.
Behind him the line ran out the door of the funeral home and down the street.
Two hundred people were waiting to tell me they were sorry, and every one of them could hear.
"The house belongs to the family, Kathleen," Frank said. "So do the bars. The old men have talked it over."
My husband lay behind me in the black suit I had picked out of his closet, two days dead.
He meant the five old men who settled what the courts would not.
"You have until the first Sunday in February to be out of Savin Hill," Frank said. "Your mother has a spare room in Weymouth."
Under the makeup on my left cheekbone there was a scar and a titanium plate, twenty days old.
I had told the emergency room it was a cabinet door.
Nobody in the line had believed me, and nobody had said so.
Before Frank, the woman who cleans my house on Wednesdays had knelt at the casket for one minute.
She said something in Polish, and she did not cry.
She touched my sleeve once and went out into the cold.
The keys were in my coat pocket, on a ring with a green shamrock tag.
They opened the safe at Cullinane's, the office, the beer cooler and the back door.
I had carried them for eight years, and I had counted every dollar that went through that safe.
"Tonight," Frank said. "To me."
His thumb pressed down on the place where my husband used to take hold of me.
I did not pull away.
I turned my head and spoke to the room.
"Cullinane's opens Monday at eleven," I said. "Same hours, same prices."
The room went quiet all the way back to the door.
"Anybody who wants to talk to me about the keys can sit at the bar and order a drink."
Frank smiled for the people behind him.
"She's grieving," he said. "She doesn't know what she's saying."
"I know exactly what I'm saying," I said. "Let go of my wrist, Frank. My husband is lying right there."
His grip tightened.
It was a small tightening, meant for me alone.
I felt the plate in my face throb with my pulse.
A man had stood against the back wall for three hours without taking off his coat.
He was six foot five, and he drove a truck.
He held the Polish seat among the five old men, the ones everyone called the Table.
His name was Marek Kubiak, and he had been my husband Brendan's friend since they were nineteen.
In six years of Sunday dinners at my house he had never once spoken to me above a murmur.
He crossed the room now.
People moved out of his way without looking up at him.
He put his hand over Frank's, and it covered Frank's entirely.
"Frank," he said.
"This is family business, Marek."
"She's family," Marek said. "Let go."
He did not raise his voice.
He did not squeeze, either, that I could see.
Frank's fingers opened one at a time, and my wrist came free.
Marek's hand stayed where it was for a second longer, warm against the back of mine.
Then he took it away and stepped back to the wall, and I could breathe.
Frank straightened his gray overcoat.
"Sunday, the first of February," he said, and he walked out through the line.
The wake ran until nine.
I shook every hand, and when the last man had gone I did not cry.
Marek drove me to Savin Hill without being asked, because I had told the director I was going home and he had heard.
The front door of the house stood open.
Every drawer in the kitchen was on the floor, and the safe in the hall closet had been pried off its hinges.
Someone had cut open the couch and emptied Brendan's desk.
The garage behind the house still had police tape across its door.
I did not look at it.
I went to the freezer and took out a bag of frozen peas.
Under the peas, in a plastic bag, were the three green ledgers.
I had written down eight years of the family's cash in them in my own hand.
Brendan had never known where I kept them.
Neither had Frank.
I held them against my chest.
"You can't stay here," Marek said from the kitchen doorway. "His men will be back tonight."
"I know."
"There's a third floor at my mother's house, on Boston Street. Frank's people won't walk into a Polish house."
"I know where Boston Street is," I said.
"Mrs. Cullinane."
"Kathleen," I said. "Tonight it's Kathleen."
I carried the ledgers out through the hall.
I pulled the front door shut and locked it with the key from my own ring.
I put that key in my coat pocket with the keys to the bars.
"Weymouth is out," I said. "Boston Street. Now."
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