The Mob Boss Said My Father Owed Him a Life, So He Took Mine to Keep novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Her Flat

Rocco takes her to watch her home searched and stops the worst of it; Vincent holds up her mother's ring box and Rocco takes it from him and gives it to her.

At eleven o'clock Rocco knocked on the open door and said, "Get your coat."

"Where?"

"Your flat.

"You can watch them do it."

"Is that a kindness?"

"No," he said.

"It's so you'll know what's gone."

I put on my fleece.

The black car took us down to Allens Avenue with the harbor lights smeared across the windshield and Rocco silent beside me.

He sat as far to his own side as the seat allowed.

He kept his hands on his knees.

I looked at those hands, big and square, a white line across one knuckle, and I looked away.

The bait shop was dark, with its sign swinging.

My flat was up an outside stair, and the stair was wet and had no railing on the second landing.

I put my boot on the slick tread, and the wet iron slid.

His hand came flat against my back.

It was there for exactly as long as it took me to catch the rail.

Then it was gone, and so was the heat of it, and I felt every inch of where it had been.

"Thank you," I said, stiffly.

"Watch your step," Rocco said.

It was the line I'd said to four hundred people that day.

I didn't think he knew that.

The door to my flat was already open.

Three men were inside.

They had pulled the cushions off the couch and slit the lining.

They had emptied the drawers onto the floor, and one of them was standing on my mother's rosary box with his boot.

"Get off that," I said.

He looked at Rocco.

Rocco jerked his chin, and the man stepped off.

The box had cracked down the lid.

I picked it up.

My whole kitchen was on the floor.

My cat calendar lay face-up beside the stove, and the postcard from Worcester was out of its drawer and torn clean in half.

I knelt and picked up both pieces, put them together, and held them in my palm.

"You said you'd look," I said.

"You didn't say you'd smash it."

"I said look," Rocco said, to the room.

"Who smashed it?"

Nobody answered.

"Who," he said, "is Vincent's, and who is mine?"

Two of them looked at the third.

He was a thick-necked man with a pleased face, holding a hammer.

"Boss, Vincent said to go through the walls," the man said.

"Through the walls," Rocco said.

"He said if the old man was clever, he'd have hid it in a wall," the man said.

Rocco took the hammer out of his hand as easily as taking a mug from a child.

He set it on the counter.

"Out," he said.

"All three.

"Tell Vincent I'll finish this one myself."

They went.

On the stair the thick-necked one said something to the others and laughed.

I didn't hear what.

I stood in my flat with the torn postcard in my hand.

It was a single room with a kitchen along one side and a narrow bed, and a window that looked out over the water and the masts of the boats on their moorings.

I had paid for every stick of it myself.

I'd lived there since I was twenty-two.

"My father used to come here Thursdays," I said.

"He'd bring a pie from the bakery on Broadway and a ruler from his desk, and we'd sit on that couch and check the ferry log against the tide table.

"He taught me a way to write it when I was twelve.

"Two columns.

"A little code so nobody could read over my shoulder.

"I never asked him why a girl needed one."

I hadn't meant to say it.

It was out before I knew.

Rocco was standing at my wall with his back to me, looking at the calendar.

It hung over my table, a big wall calendar from the tackle shop with a cat in a sailor's hat.

I had written on it in pencil, every day, in the shorthand he taught me.

Dock numbers and tide times, a column on the left and a column on the right.

"That's it?" he said.

"That's how I keep the log.

"Habit."

He looked at it for a long time.

His eyes moved down the columns, and I saw him not understand them, and decide to leave it.

"Your father kept the family's books for twenty-two years," he said.

"I never once saw him write something a person could read."

"He's shy," I said.

"He's a bookkeeper," Rocco said.

"Then I suppose that's the same thing," I said.

Something odd happened to his mouth.

It wasn't a smile.

It was what a smile would look like on a man who'd forgotten how.

He looked away fast.

"Dario said that about people too," he said.

"That they were shy.

"He'd say, 'Rocco, nobody's a monster, they're all just shy.' He was wrong about a lot."

"I'm sorry."

"The report," Rocco said.

I waited.

"I haven't read it.

"Vincent handled it.

"I was the one who found him, and then Vincent said he'd take care of the rest.

"I haven't asked."

"Why not?"

"Because it was my brother," he said.

I didn't know what to say.

A voice came from the doorway.

"Found something."

Vincent stood in my door in his charcoal suit, with the tail of his overcoat dusted white from the stair.

He had come himself.

In his hand he held a small, flat box of worn blue velvet.

"Under the bed," he said, with his gentle smile.

"Tucked in the springs.

"I thought it might be a place a father would hide something small."

My heart lurched.

That was my mother's ring box.

The ring was her mother's, a thin gold band with a chip of garnet, and I had hidden it in the springs after she died so no one would find it.

No one had known but me.

Vincent held the box up to the light and flicked the lid open with his thumb.

"Garnet," he said.

"Pretty.

"Is it the kind of thing a man would give his daughter, if he were leaving town?"

"That's my grandmother's ring," I said.

"Give it to me."

"Of course.

"After we've looked it over."

He turned it over between his fingers, close to the window light, with the gentle patience of a man who had all night.

I took one step toward him.

Rocco crossed the room in three strides.

He took the box out of his cousin's hand without hurry, closed the lid with his thumb, and held it out to me.

"It's hers," he said.

Vincent's smile held, but only the smile.

"Rocco, we don't know..."

"It's hers."

I took the box.

My fingers weren't steady, and the velvet was warm from Vincent's hand.

I put it in the pocket of my fleece, against my ribs, where it stayed.

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