Widowed a Year, I Masked Up and Took Both of His Brothers novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Gold Mask
A year to the night after her husband's crash, Celie buys a gold mask, crosses the ballroom in front of three hundred people, takes his brothers Tommy and Vince by the hand and tells Vince to drive.
A year to the night after my husband died, his family sat me at the head table in a black dress.
They wanted three hundred people to look at the widow.
I let them look through the soup and the fish.
Then I laid my napkin on my plate and walked to the ballroom door.
A boy sat there selling masks from a card table.
I bought a gold one for twenty dollars and tied it on myself.
It smelled of glue and glitter, and through the eyeholes the ballroom turned into a room full of strangers.
I was finally one of them.
His uncle had rented the room and written the seating chart himself.
He put me alone at the head table, with an empty chair on each side.
Everyone in that room thought they knew what the widow felt.
They thought I was grieving a good man.
My husband hit me for four years, always where a sleeve would cover it, and I told every doctor I fell.
Nobody alive knew that.
I had made sure of it.
I was tired of being the saint they needed me to be.
A brass quartet on the stage was playing something fast.
Three hundred people in tuxedos and gowns watched me cross the floor in a gold mask.
The talk died one table at a time.
I walked straight to the bar.
Two men stood there in black masks, with their uncle between them and a glass of bourbon in his hand.
Tommy Scalisi is thirty-eight and six foot three, and he does not speak unless he has to.
His brother Vince is thirty-four, lean and quick, and has never let a silence last.
Neither of them had touched me since the funeral.
Neither of them came to my door that night either, and I sat up in my kitchen until it got light.
But they are the only two people in that family who look at me and wince.
I took Tommy's hand in my right hand.
His fingers closed over mine and did not let go.
I took Vince's right hand in my left.
The last two fingers of it stayed curled, as they had for three years.
"Tonight we're strangers," I said. "Take me out of here, and don't say my name."
Their uncle set his glass down on the bar.
"Carlo," Santo said.
He said my dead husband's name low and slow, and it was an order.
Tommy did not turn his head.
"Sit down, Zio."
I had never heard Tommy tell anyone in that family no.
Santo looked at Tommy's hands, not at his face.
Then he sat down on a barstool, and his gold rings clicked on the wood.
Vince laughed once, under his breath, and squeezed my fingers with his bad hand.
"Kitchen's faster," he said.
They walked me out through the swinging doors, past the dishwashers and the caterers with their trays.
Nobody in the kitchen stopped us.
A loading dock opened onto the alley.
A second line was going past at the end of it, a brass band and a hundred umbrellas.
The drums shook the pavement under my shoes.
Vince's black car idled at the curb.
Tommy opened the back door for me and climbed in after me.
The whole seat tilted under his weight.
Vince got behind the wheel and turned around with one arm across the headrest.
He had pushed his mask up on his forehead, and I could see the green eyes I had been avoiding for a year.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Outside, the brass band was still going.
"Say what you were going to say," Vince told me. "You've got that look."
"I want to be told," I said. "I want it in your mouths what you think of me."
Vince laughed.
Tommy did not.
He took his mask off slowly and set it on his knee, and his brown eyes found mine and stayed.
"We know exactly who you are," he said.
The car did not move.
I heard more in it than I could name, and I was too far gone to ask.
I untied the gold mask and dropped it in my lap.
I put Tommy's big hand on my left knee, under the hem of the black dress.
Then I reached over the seat, took Vince's hand, and put it on the other one.
"Then drive," I said.
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