Mafia Boss & His White Rose novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: Sunday Dinner
The Carraro family table, the ring, and a cousin who sneers; Nonna Lina notices the boss's hand shook.
Sunday dinner at Nonna Lina's house started at two and lasted until nobody could stand.
"Don't speak until she asks you a question," Domenico said on the sidewalk outside the Bella Vista rowhouse.
"I wasn't planning to."
"Then you'll be fine."
"And if I'm not?"
"She'll tell me after."
He stopped on the step and took a small black box from his coat.
Inside was a thin gold band with one seed pearl set low.
"My mother's," he said.
I looked at it and didn't touch it.
"You don't have to," he said. "The paper says ring. The paper doesn't say whose."
"It's yours to give away?"
"It's mine. Nobody else wanted it."
I held out my left hand.
He slid it on, and his fingers weren't quite steady, and he saw me notice and put his hand in his pocket.
Inside, the house was hot and loud and smelled of garlic and veal.
Eighteen people sat along a table that ran down the whole front room, and every one of them stopped talking when we walked in.
At the head sat the smallest woman I'd ever seen.
Her name was Pasqualina Carraro, and the whole neighborhood called her Nonna Lina.
She wore a black dress and a gold cross, with her white hair pinned in a bun.
She held a wooden spoon the way a judge holds a gavel.
"Domenico," she said. "You're late."
"Nonna, this is Noelle."
"The florist."
"Yes."
"The funeral girl," Fabio said from halfway down the table, and a few people laughed.
He had a wine glass in his hand and his wife on his arm, a thin pretty woman who looked at her plate.
"She did my aunt's casket spray in March," he said. "Very good lilies. Very sad."
"Thank you," I said.
"Does she work weddings or just the ones where somebody's already dead?"
The table went quiet in the particular way tables do when they want to see what you'll do.
I looked at the spoon in Nonna's hand, and then at Fabio.
"Your aunt wanted yellow roses," I said.
"You told me they were bad luck and ordered lilies."
"She'd left a note in her purse with my number and the word yellow underlined three times."
Nobody breathed.
"I used yellow on the inside of the spray where you couldn't see," I said. "She would have liked knowing."
Fabio's mouth worked.
Somebody at the end of the table choked on a laugh.
Nonna Lina's spoon came down on the edge of her plate once, with a crack.
"Sit," she told me. "There. Beside me."
I sat.
For the next two hours she fed me.
Nobody had ever fed me with so much menace.
She asked about my mother in the first five minutes, and how she died in the sixth.
I told her, and she crossed herself without looking away from me.
"Your sister is sick the same way," she said.
"Yes."
"And you?"
"I carry it," I said. "My heart is fine. They check every year."
"Mmm."
She put another meatball on my plate.
Across the table, Domenico was cutting his food into small precise squares.
When he thought no one was looking, he pressed two fingers to the inside of his wrist and held them there.
I filed it away.
After the cannoli, Nonna told me to carry the dishes into the kitchen.
She followed me in and shut the door on the noise.
The kitchen was small and yellow, with a calendar from a funeral home pinned over the stove and a crucifix over the door.
She stood on a little step stool at the sink with her back to me.
"The ring is Giulia's," she said.
"He told me."
"He told you what?"
"That nobody else wanted it."
"Nobody else was allowed to want it."
She turned the water on.
"Giulia was my son's wife," she said. "She gave that ring to Domenico when he was thirteen."
"She told him to give it to the one he can't lie to."
My mouth went dry.
"It's a business arrangement, Mrs. Carraro."
"Nonna."
"It's a business arrangement, Nonna."
"Yes." She rinsed a glass and held it to the light. "My grandson's hand shook when he put that on you."
"I noticed."
"He is not a man whose hand shakes."
She set the glass on the rack, and the look she gave me over her shoulder was the sharpest I'd seen all day.
"So I ask myself," she said. "What is he afraid you'll find out?"
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