Mom Married the Don for Peace, So I Made His Son Kneel novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Sunday Gravy

At the Iannotti table Fortunato names the two of them as the faces of a year-long peace, and under the table her foot goes up his calf.

On Sunday the Iannotti family served gravy to forty-one people at a table that had been built to seat them.

Gravy is what Italians in Providence call tomato sauce.

I learned that in the first minute, when a cousin corrected me for calling it sauce.

The house on Blackstone Boulevard was brick, three stories, with a lawn that ran down to a carriage house at the back.

My mother sat at the head of the table at Fortunato's right hand, in a blue dress, with her back very straight.

I sat halfway down on the left, between an aunt of his and a boy of twelve.

The boy wanted to know if I could really drive a boat.

Riccardo sat across from me, three chairs down, in a gray sweater with the sleeves pushed up.

He had left my bed before six.

I had woken to an empty pillow and his tie folded on it.

I had put the tie in my coat pocket, where it was now.

He did not look at me once during the soup.

"Quiet," Fortunato said, and tapped his glass.

Forty-one people stopped talking.

"I'll say this once, in front of both families, so nobody can say they didn't hear it."

He had a big warm voice, and he was not smiling.

"We have a year," he said.

"By the Blessing of the Fleet in July, the Iannotti and the Rebelos either share one pier or we bury people again."

Nobody at the table moved.

"Between now and July, the men on both sides are going to watch two people."

He looked at his son.

Then he looked at me.

"Riccardo. Madalena. You are the faces of this," he said.

"You go where the families go. You stand together. In front of the men you are brother and sister."

"Stepbrother," my mother said, dry. "Say it correctly, Fortunato. We are not children."

A laugh went down the table, and the tension went out of it.

Under the table, I slipped off my shoe.

Riccardo was talking to his father about the trucks.

He sounded calm and formal, and he did not so much as glance down.

I put my bare foot against his ankle, and then slowly up the inside of his calf.

His voice stopped in the middle of a word.

"Riccardo?" his father said.

"Yes, Papa. The Tuesday run. Sorry."

I slid my foot up past his knee and stopped there, warm against the inside of his thigh.

A muscle jumped in his jaw.

His fork slid off his plate and rang against the floor.

"Butterfingers," said the boy of twelve.

"Grease," Riccardo said, and picked it up without looking at me.

I told myself it was grease.

Fortunato looked from him to me and back, and then at his plate.

"You two get along?" he asked.

"Fine," Riccardo said.

Fine meant a bed with navy sheets and a headboard rail that he had held until his knuckles went white.

Fine meant my last name, said into my hair at dawn.

"Fine," I said. "He's very polite."

My mother put a hand over her mouth and coughed.

After the pizzelles, I went to the kitchen with a stack of plates, because it was somewhere to be.

My mother came in behind me and closed the door.

"You left with him," she said.

"You saw."

"Three hundred people saw. Joaquim saw. It was well done."

She took a dish towel from the counter and stood close.

"Is the chain on?"

I put a hand to my collar.

"Yes, Mãe."

"Leave it on. Not for a man, not for a bath, not for the beach. Never."

"You said that in church," I said. "Why? It's Papai's ring. I'd never take it off."

"Good."

"That's not an answer."

"It is the whole answer you are getting today," my mother said, and her eyes were wet. "I will tell you when I can."

She kissed my forehead hard and went out.

In the kitchen doorway, with a plate in each hand, I felt my phone buzz against my hip.

I got it out with my elbow.

The text was from the number he had typed into my phone at dawn, saved as Iannotti.

Carriage house. Back door. Midnight.

I looked across the kitchen at the window, and down the lawn at the little brick building with one light on.

I typed with my thumb: Be on your knees.

Then I sent it, and went back to the table to eat cannoli with my mother's husband.

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