The Godfather's Heartbroken Lover novel · Chapter 6 of 24
Chapter 6: The Check
I should have shut the door.
But my aunt was already behind me in her robe, and my aunt had never once in her life let a visitor stand on a landing.
"Who's this?" she asked in German.
"His mother," I said.
My aunt looked Annunziata up and down, pearls to shoes.
"Ah," she said. "Coffee?"
Annunziata sat at my aunt's kitchen table.
She set the white box in the middle of it and opened the lid.
Six perfect little tarts from the most expensive hotel on Unter den Linden.
"I didn't know what Germans eat," she said. "So I bought what the hotel had."
"Germans eat bread," my aunt said, and lit a cigarette.
Annunziata waved the smoke away from her face with two fingers.
"Is he here?" I asked.
"My son is on a call with Brooklyn. He doesn't know I came up." She smiled. "He thinks I'm at the cathedral."
"What do you want?"
She took a folded check out of her handbag and laid it on the oilcloth next to the tarts.
She smoothed it flat with one fingertip.
Two hundred thousand dollars.
My name was already written on it, in her small, neat hand.
"For your trouble," she said.
"My trouble."
"Five years is a long time for a girl like you. You gave him your youth. I'm not a monster. I know what a woman's youth costs."
My aunt made a noise into her coffee.
"There are two conditions," Annunziata said. "You sign a letter that the bakery on Court Street belongs to the building. Equipment, name, recipes, everything. And you never contact my son again. Not a call. Not a message. Not a birthday card."
"The bakery was my money."
"The bakery was my building."
"Two hundred thousand dollars of my money. My savings. My mother's life insurance."
"And now it's two hundred thousand of mine." She tapped the check. "You see? I'm giving it back. Most people in Bay Ridge would call that generous."
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