Chapter 20: The Feast

Santo's POV

The Table meets at the Feast in a convent refectory above Monreale.

It has done so since before anyone alive was born.

There is one long board, and twelve chairs, and a thirteenth at the foot that nobody sits in.

I had thought about that thirteenth chair for twenty-three years.

On the morning of the Feast I stood in the cloister with my arm strapped to my chest and watched my wife take the coat out of its bag.

She did it herself, and she shook it once, and she laid it over her arm.

"Not like that," Gaspare said. "Fold the cuff outward. Let them see it before they smell it."

She folded the cuff outward.

"You're not carrying anything," she told me.

"I can carry a letter."

"You can walk next to me and say nothing."

"I'm the one with the quarrel."

"You're the one with a hole in your shoulder," Viola said. "I'll say it, because it's my father's coat."

She said it so evenly that nobody in the cloister argued.

I had expected to be afraid, and I was, but not in the way I had planned.

I was afraid that I would stand beside her and want to take the floor.

For twenty-three years I had been the only person who could say it.

I had been the one under the stairs.

The gold-toothed driver brought the car to the cloister door, and I got in with my mother's medal in my fist.