Bound to My Mafia Stepuncle novel · Chapter 16 of 32
Chapter 16: The Reading
They buried Domenic on Wednesday morning in a cold, fine rain.
The priest kept it short.
Domenic would have liked that.
My mother threw a white rose on the casket and then looked around to see who was watching.
Paulie threw a handful of dirt and wiped his palm on a handkerchief.
Angelo didn't throw anything.
He just stood at the edge of the hole with the rain on his shoulders until the last car had started its engine.
"He told me to make you eat," he said when he finally turned around.
"I heard."
"There's a ham sandwich in my coat."
"You brought a sandwich to a burial?"
"I brought two." He handed me one, wrapped in wax paper. "Eat it in the car. We've got a will to hear."
The reading was in the Gladwyne library, the room with the leather books nobody read.
The housekeeper had set out chairs in rows.
The front row was family.
My mother in black lace, with Corrine on one side and Paulie on the other.
Behind them sat four captains in dark suits, the oldest one with a hearing aid he kept touching.
I sat at the end of the second row.
Angelo didn't sit.
He stood against the bookshelves behind me with his arms crossed, where everyone could see him.
The lawyer read the small things first.
Angelo got their mother's rosary and the deed to the building on Washington Avenue.
He looked down at the floor when he heard it.
The housekeeper got her pension and the kitchen radio she'd always liked.
Paulie got his own shares, which he already had, and the restaurant, which he already ran.
He smiled.
"To my wife, Donna," the lawyer read, "one hundred thousand dollars, and the right to live in the Gladwyne house until the trustee decides otherwise."
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