Chapter 10: He Took It for Me

My father fell asleep in the garage with his head against the car window.

I slipped into his dream, and it opened onto my parents' dining room on a Sunday.

The long table was laid for supper. The windows were full of gold light.

My father sat at the head carving a roast, and he was smiling.

Every chair was empty except one.

I stood in the doorway in the dress with the hole in it.

"Papa," I said.

He looked up from the knife.

"Rosalia," he said, and he put the knife down. "You are early. Your mother is still in the kitchen."

"Mama is dead."

The smile stayed on his face a moment longer, and then it came apart.

He looked at the empty chairs, and then at me, and I watched him remember.

"Sit," he said.

"I will stand."

"Rosalia."

"Tell me about the bullet, Papa."

He picked up his napkin and folded it very small.

"I want to hear it from the start," I said. "Not the Sunday supper. The truth."

He did not look up for a long time.

"It was a Tuesday night," he said. "There was a man in Kingston who kept a body shop and did some work for us on the side."

"Pagano."

"Pagano. He had started to keep part of the money. Your husband had just been made Don. He was thirty, and men were still testing him."

"So you took him there."

"I took him. We went to settle it quietly. We went in through the front door of the shop."

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