This Time I Choose Mr. Mafia novel · Chapter 30 of 32

Chapter 30: Holy Family

The cedar closet was at the top of the back stairs at Kinnear Hall.

It smelled exactly the way it had when I was eight.

My father opened it with a key he kept on his watch chain.

The dress hung in a long white bag at the very back, behind his old Navy coat.

He unzipped it himself.

Ivory satin, gone soft and creamy with age.

Long lace sleeves, a high neck, thirty tiny covered buttons down the back.

"She married me in it at Fourth Presbyterian," he said. "Then she spent the reception complaining about the buttons."

I touched one of the sleeves.

In my first life I'd walked down the aisle at Fourth Presbyterian in a dress Danielle had picked.

My mother's had stayed in this closet in the dark.

"Dad," I said. "It's perfect."

"It's thirty-five years old."

"So are the buttons," I said. "I'll complain about them for her."

On the morning of the wedding it snowed.

At eight o'clock Damiano stood beside me at my mother's grave in Graceland, with snow on his shoulders.

He'd brought white roses.

A dozen, long-stemmed, no card.

He laid them against the stone without saying anything and stepped back.

I looked at the roses for a long time.

"Every Christmas," I said. "Wasn't it?"

He was quiet.

"Since the alley," I said. "Four Christmases. And on Memorial Day, before Danielle came up the path."

"I'd read in the paper where she was buried," he said finally. "The first Christmas, I didn't know what else to give you."

"You never told me."

"It wasn't for you to know," he said. "It was for her. To tell her somebody was watching."

"And in May?"

"In May you were going to stand there alone with Danielle," he said. "I wasn't letting you stand there with nothing from me."

I put my gloved hand in his.

We stood there in the snow until my father honked the horn from the road.

Holy Family is the oldest church on the West Side, on Roosevelt Road, tall and gothic and dark with old wood.

The neighborhood had come.

The old women from Oakley Avenue sat in the back rows in their church coats.

Damiano's men filled four pews on the right, with their wives and children, in their good suits.

The driver sat on the aisle with all six grandchildren lined up beside him.

Bruna stood at the front as my witness, in black velvet, with her glasses for once nowhere in sight.

She'd told me in the car she'd have them on for the reception, because she wanted to see everyone's face when the band played.

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