Married to My Ex-Father-in-Law novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Cast 1147

The reader learns the real reason she filed, the pill ledger she photographed and hid in a plaster cast of Nicky's teeth, and her grandmother alters her own wedding dress for her; Nicky corners her and says his father married her to watch her.

"Your son," I said. "As your best man."

"My son."

"He put me in a chair Sunday like a sack of flour."

"I know. I watched." Dom picked the box knife back up. "So will the table, when he hands you to me."

I understood it then.

Nicky would stand at that altar in front of every old man in the family and give me away to his father.

After that, no one could say the son hadn't agreed.

"He'll hate it," I said.

"Yes."

"That's not a reason to do it."

"It's one of three." He slit open the next crate. "Your divorce will be final Friday. Go home and sleep, Daniela. You look like a dentist."

I went to work instead.

There was a reason I'd filed, and it wasn't the girl in the white dress.

Three weeks before that Sunday, I came home early from a class.

I went to hang my coat in the hall closet of our condo.

Nicky's gym bag was on the floor.

It was unzipped, and Nicky never went to the gym.

Inside was a laundry bag with SCARPA LINEN stamped on it, knotted at the top.

I untied it.

It was full of little blue pills, thousands of them, stamped like oxycodone. No pharmacy ever saw them.

Under the laundry bag was a small black notebook in Nicky's square handwriting.

Columns of dates. Cities. Omaha, Wichita, Tulsa, Springfield. Numbers with a lot of zeros.

At the bottom of every single page: "A. 30%."

I stood in that closet with my coat still on and photographed every page.

Then I tied the knot the way I'd found it, zipped the bag, and put it back where it lay.

My hands didn't shake until I was in the car.

The next morning I copied the photos onto a memory card and wiped my phone.

At the clinic there's a shelf in the lab room with about two hundred plaster casts on it.

They're my father's and mine, every patient whose bite we ever took.

They're labeled by chart number.

Chart 1147 is Nicky.

I poured that cast four years ago, the month before our wedding.

I put a gold onlay on his lower left molar for free, because I was in love.

The base is hollow.

I folded the card into a square of gauze and pushed it up inside his own teeth.

A week later I filed.

I never told a soul.

I didn't know if Dom knew what his son kept in the closet.

The whole city knew Dom Scarpa had banned drugs the day he took the chair. His brother died of them at nineteen.

But the whole city also knew Dom Scarpa knew everything.

Thursday night I stood on a kitchen chair in Nonna's kitchen in her wedding dress.

It was ivory silk, gone the color of milky coffee, with sleeves to the wrist and a hundred buttons down the back.

She'd worn it in 1963 at Holy Rosary.

Carmela sat at the table eating pizzelle out of the tin and supervising.

"Suck in, Dani."

"I'm not sucking in. I'm a grown woman with hips."

"Nonna, she's got your hips. You'll have to let it out."

Nonna had six pins in her mouth and she still managed to swear at both of us.

"I had these hips when I came off the boat at nineteen," she said around the pins. "Your grandfather didn't complain."

She let out the seams on both sides and took the hem up two inches, because I'm shorter than she was then.

She didn't ask if I was sure.

When I got down off the chair she held my face in both hands and kissed me on the forehead, hard.

"He's a criminal," she said. "But he stands up when I come into a room."

Carmela pointed a pizzelle at me.

"I've got forty bucks in the pool that you're in his bed by Memorial Day."

"There's a pool?"

"There's always a pool."

On Friday afternoon a judge who owed Dom something signed my divorce eleven days early.

The priest at Holy Rosary didn't ask about an annulment. Nobody asked Dom Scarpa about paperwork.

At four I went to the bakery on Holmes Street to pick up the cookie trays.

Nonna sold the bakery five years ago, but the new owners still let her bake the Saturday bread in back.

They'd made the wedding cookies to her recipes.

I went into the back room alone.

The door to the alley opened behind me.

Nicky.

He shut it and leaned on it.

He had his gold chain on, and he smelled like my old shampoo.

The coconut kind. I'd left a full bottle in the condo shower.

"Hey, Mom," he said.

I picked up a tray of almond crescents and held it in front of me.

"Get out of my grandmother's bakery, Nicky."

"It's not hers anymore." He came off the door. "Nothing's yours anymore. Have you noticed?"

He walked around the table. I walked around it the other way.

He laughed.

"You zipped it," he said.

My mouth went dry.

"The bag. In the closet." He tilted his head. "I never zip it. I came home, and it was zipped all the way to the end. Neat. Like a dentist."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Sure you don't."

He reached across the table, took an almond crescent off my tray and ate it.

Powdered sugar on his lips.

"You think my father's saving you?" he said, chewing. "He's marrying you so you'll be in his house, where he can watch you."

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