Nero: Made Men novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: The Sunday Table

I was back under the sheet with my eyes shut when he came in off the balcony.

I didn't pretend very well.

"You were on the phone," I said into the pillow.

"Yes."

"I heard you say I'd be at the table."

Nero sat on the edge of the bed with his phone in his hand.

"My father eats at two o'clock every Sunday," he said. "Thirty people some weeks. He wants to meet the girl I broke a door for."

"And you said yes for me."

"I said you'd be there if you wanted to be."

"You said I would."

A corner of his mouth lifted.

"I know you," he said. "You were never going to say no."

That was true, which annoyed me, so I hit him with the pillow.

On Sunday his driver took us to Albemarle Street, to a brick house three stories high with a green door.

Inside, the hall smelled like garlic and tomatoes and simmering meat.

The dining room table was so long it ran into the next room.

There were twelve people already seated, aunts and cousins and men with thick wrists, and every one of them stopped talking when I walked in.

Nero's hand rested on the small of my back.

At the head of the table sat the old man from the restaurant, in shirt sleeves, stirring a huge pot himself.

"Papa, this is Mona Gilligan."

Don Aldo Bellandi looked at me over his glasses.

"The girl with the phone," he said.

I felt my face go hot.

"Everyone in Baltimore knows about the phone?"

"Everyone in this room," the old man said. "Sit. Next to me."

I sat.

He ladled gravy over a plate of rigatoni and set it in front of me with his own hands.

"Eat," Aldo said. "Then tell me about your mother."

My fork stopped.

"Papa," Nero said.

"I'm asking the girl."

"My mother was an aide at Bayview Hospital for twenty-six years. She died two years ago in March."

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