The Mafia Heir's Revenge Baby novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: The Funeral

The deputies put Carmine in the last pew.

The priest waited until the chain stopped rattling.

Then he went back to the reading, and four hundred people pretended to listen.

Nobody did.

I could feel Carmine behind us the whole mass, the way you feel a draft.

Archie felt it too.

He turned around twice in the pew, and both times Gianni put a hand on his knee, and both times he turned back.

The third time, he didn't turn around.

He reached over and took Gianni's hand instead, and held it on the pew between them, and kept it there through the whole homily.

I saw Carmine see it.

I didn't have to turn around. I saw the aunts across the aisle see him see it.

When it was over, the pallbearers came for the casket.

Gianni was the first one on the right.

The capos took the rest of the handles, the twelve who'd stood along the bedroom wall, no guns.

They carried the old man down the center aisle, and the whole church stood up.

The deputies stood Carmine up, too.

They'd told him he could watch it pass and then he was going back.

The casket went by his pew.

He watched it go.

Then Archie and I came down the aisle behind it, and Carmine leaned out as far as the chain would let him.

"Hey, kid," he said.

Archie stopped.

I stopped with him.

The whole back half of the church stopped behind us.

Carmine smiled at my son.

It was the smile he'd used on judges.

"Ask your mother where she got you," he said, loud enough for every pew. "Ask her about the freezer. You were a theft, kid. She stole you out of a box with my name on it. Every time she looks at you she's thinking about me."

A woman behind us gasped.

Archie looked up at me.

He didn't look scared.

He looked like he was waiting to see what I'd do with it.

So I did it.

"He was never in your box," I said.

My voice carried up into the arches. I let it.

"You hid behind your wife and your brother for years. And then you sent a man to my lab with orders to use a five-year-old."

I put my hand on Archie's shoulder.

"Every time I look at him, Carmine, I see the best thing that ever came out of your family. And it never once came out of you."

The church was so quiet I could hear the casket wheels on the stone outside.

Carmine opened his mouth.

Archie got there first.

"Also, I'm not a theft," he said. "I'm a tank baby. And my dad's Gianni, and he's carrying Pop."

He turned around and walked down the aisle after the casket.

He didn't look back.

One of the aunts laughed out loud through her tears, and then three more, and then it rolled back through the pews behind us.

The deputies took Carmine by both arms.

He didn't fight them.

He looked once, over the heads, at the doors where his father's casket had gone.

Then they walked him out the side door into the gray, with the chain dragging on the floor.

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