Mafia's Good Girl novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: The Door

I packed on Sunday afternoon with the window open and the smell of gravy rising from the kitchen.

It took barely ten minutes.

The check for twenty thousand dollars sat folded in my back pocket.

I had come to that house with a coat, a purse and a revolver.

I was leaving with a duffel bag and a pair of gold hoops Rosa had pushed into my hand.

Rosa stood in the doorway of the guest room, crying.

"You don't have to go, babe."

"I know."

"Then why?"

"Because I've never been anywhere I could leave from," I said.

"Everything so far had a clock on it, or a gun, or a bill. I want to know what I do on an ordinary Tuesday with no page in my pocket."

She wiped her face with the back of her wrist.

"That's a terrible reason."

"It's mine."

"It's a good one." She hugged me hard, the way she did everything. "Come back for the gravy. I'm not teaching Benny."

Benny stood at the bottom of the stairs holding a foil tray the size of a door.

"Lasagna," he said. "It's frozen. Forty minutes at three-fifty. Miss Janelle, I'm sorry for the arm."

"Benny, it's been six weeks."

"I'm going to be sorry for a long time."

I kissed his bald head, and he turned the color of a tomato.

Luciano waited in the front hall.

He had the duffel bag in one hand and the door in the other.

He had opened the door himself, as he had promised my mother he would.

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