Don's Regret Came Too Late novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Not Anymore

Vittorio warns that Corsetti wives don't leave, Noemi hears her baby's heartbeat and walks out of the clinic keeping it, and when Vittorio calls asking if it was his, she answers, 'Not anymore.'

I took a picture of the label with my phone.

Then I put the bottle back in the bag exactly the way I'd found it.

My hands were steady. My stomach wasn't.

Behind me, chairs scraped in the dining room, and somebody said my name.

I didn't wait for the elevator.

I took all the flights of stairs down in my flats and came out onto the street with my lungs on fire.

The river smelled like diesel and salt.

I was halfway to the corner when a car door slammed behind me.

"Noemi."

Vittorio walked fast when he was angry. He never ran. Dons don't run.

He caught my arm under the streetlight.

I looked at his hand until he let go.

He held something out to me. My ring.

It was still wet, and there was a pink smear of bisque in the setting.

"Put it back on," he said.

"No."

"You embarrassed my mother. You embarrassed Silvia in her own home."

"Her home. Your building."

His jaw worked.

"Go home. Sleep. Tomorrow you'll apologize to her, and we'll forget this."

"I'm not going home."

He stepped closer and dropped his voice.

"Corsetti wives don't leave, Noemi. You know that. Your father knows that."

"Then I guess I'm not a Corsetti wife."

A cab turned onto the street. I put my hand up.

He didn't stop me. He just watched me get in, with the ring in his fist.

The cab smelled like pine air freshener.

I rolled the window down and breathed through my mouth all the way to Court Street.

The pharmacy was dark.

I let myself in through the side door and climbed the narrow stairs to the apartment where I grew up.

Papa was asleep in his recliner with the Mets game muted.

I didn't wake him.

I lay down on my old bed under the poster of a horse I'd hung when I was eleven.

My phone buzzed nine times before midnight.

All Vittorio.

At 12:40 it buzzed once more.

Silvia had posted a photo of the soup container on her counter, lid off, my ring gone.

"Some people can't handle a happy family," the caption said.

Four hundred likes.

I turned the phone face down and put my hand on my stomach.

Nothing there yet. Just me.

Sunday I worked the counter like it was any Sunday.

Papa watched me sideways from the register all day and didn't ask.

That was the worst part. He always knew when not to ask.

Monday at nine I was on a paper sheet in a gown that tied in the back.

The clinic was on the Upper East Side, where nobody from Court Street would ever see me.

The doctor was kind and quick.

She asked if I was sure.

I said yes.

She said they'd do a quick ultrasound first, to confirm the dates.

The gel was cold.

She angled the screen away from me, the way they're trained to.

Then the room filled with a sound.

Fast. Wet. Like a horse galloping somewhere far off.

"Is that..."

"That's the heartbeat," she said. "Strong one. You're about nine weeks."

I'd counted that heartbeat for other women a hundred times.

I'd handed them the vitamins and told them congratulations.

Five years of shots in my own stomach. Five years of one pink line.

And there it was, galloping.

"Turn it around," I said.

She hesitated, then turned the screen.

A little gray bean in a black pocket. A flicker in the middle of it.

I sat up so fast the paper tore under me.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm not doing this."

"That's completely okay. You don't owe anybody..."

"Can I have the picture?"

She printed it for me.

I got dressed with my hands shaking so hard I put my sweater on inside out.

I didn't fix it.

I walked out through the waiting room past three women who didn't look up.

On the sidewalk I stood in the sun and held the printout against my chest.

Twenty minutes, start to finish.

Then I saw the car.

Black, long, parked across the street at a hydrant with the engine running.

The back window was down two inches.

I knew that car. I'd ridden in it to Emilio's funeral.

Davide's car.

The window rolled up, slow, and the car pulled away into traffic.

I didn't move until it turned the corner.

On the subway home I folded the printout into my wallet, behind my pharmacy license.

My phone rang as I came up the stairs at Carroll Street.

Vittorio.

I almost didn't answer.

"Where are you?" he said.

"Going to work."

"Davide says you were at a clinic this morning."

The street noise went far away.

"Davide is very helpful," I said.

He was quiet so long I thought the call had dropped.

When he spoke again his voice had cracked down the middle.

"Noemi. Were you pregnant?"

I didn't answer.

"Was it mine?"

I looked up at my father's sign over the pharmacy door. PELLEGRINO, in green letters he'd painted himself in 1979.

I thought about cold soup and cream silk and four hundred likes.

"Not anymore," I said.

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