Chapter 13: The Feast

The black car pulled away from the gate.

Leandro was out of the sedan before I could catch his sleeve.

He stood in the middle of the road with his hands empty and watched it turn onto Van Brunt Street.

Then he got back in and went after it.

We lost them at the mouth of the Battery Tunnel.

A cement truck pulled out, and the black car slid under the river and was gone.

Leandro pulled over and sat with both hands on the wheel.

"He waved at you," he said.

"I saw."

"He knew we'd be there."

"He's known everything I've done since the clinic."

He turned his head and looked at me for a long time.

"Then from now on you don't go anywhere alone."

"From now on," I said, "neither do you."

The driver never came back to the piers.

Leandro's men asked in every bar in Red Hook. By Monday a new man was running the crane.

At the night window I asked the wives, carefully, without a name.

A man with a blue bird on his hand. Red Hook. A crane.

Nobody knew him.

One woman came every Tuesday at midnight and asked for chamomile.

She sat in the second folding chair and held the cup in both hands and watched the street.

She never said where she lived. She never said her husband's name.

Three weeks went by. Then four.

I was seventeen weeks along.

My white coat still hid it. My jeans didn't. I wore them with the top button open under a long sweater.

Vittorio's sixty days ran out on the Tuesday after the feast.

Papa kept a coffee can on top of the refrigerator. Every night he put the register's twenties in it.

It wasn't enough. We both knew it wasn't enough.

The feast came the second Saturday in September, the way it had every year of my life.

Lights strung across Court Street from the funeral home to the bakery. Sausage and peppers smoking on grills.

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