Too Late. I'm Married to the Godfather novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Sunday Table

On Sunday I put on my good gray dress and told Giancarlo I was coming to the table.

He was tying his tie in the hall mirror. His hands stopped.

"The table," he said.

"The Sunday table. In the back room. Where the Donna sits."

"You've never come. Four and a half years."

"I've never been asked to empty my bag on a hotel floor before either." I took the tie out of his hands and finished the knot. "If they're going to call me Donna in a lobby, they can call me Donna to my face."

He looked at me in the mirror for a long time.

"They're going to test you," he said.

"I work in an ER. Drunk men test me every night."

Nonna came out of the kitchen with a tray of cannoli and saw my dress.

"Finally," she said, and crossed herself. "I'm wearing my pearls."

The back room on Court Street was full of men in dark suits and smoke from cigars nobody was supposed to light inside.

There were nine of them around the long table. Capos, Giancarlo's consigliere, a cousin from Staten Island.

They all stood up when Giancarlo walked in.

Then they saw me on his arm, and some of them took a second longer.

At the far end of the table, facing Giancarlo's chair, was an empty one.

Nobody had sat in it since his mother died.

Giancarlo pulled it out for me.

I sat.

The room was very quiet.

A heavy capo with a gold pinky ring cleared his throat. He was sixty and had known Giancarlo since diapers, and he'd never once said more than hello to me at a christening.

"With respect, Don Vincenzo," he said. "The table is business."

"It is," Giancarlo said.

"The doctor is a civilian. She doesn't know our business."

Every head turned to me.

"That's true," I said. "I don't know your business."

He nodded, satisfied.

"I know your blood pressure," I said. "One sixty-eight over a hundred and four, last time you came into my ER at three in the morning with chest pain you swore was the clams."

Somebody choked on his wine.

"I know your son's knee," I said to the cousin from Staten Island. "I set it. And I know which of you has a girlfriend in Bay Ridge, because she came in with you, and I didn't tell your wife."

Nine men stared at me.

Then the consigliere started to laugh.

He laughed until he had to take his glasses off.

The capo with the pinky ring went purple, then red, then finally laughed too and pounded the table.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. Donna."

Nonna, at the side table with the cannoli, said loudly, "I told you."

Giancarlo didn't laugh.

He just looked at me down the length of the table.

We were halfway through the gravy when the door opened.

One of the men from the front came in and bent to Giancarlo's ear.

Giancarlo's face didn't change.

"Let him in," he said. "Let him come here."

Grayson Tate walked into the back room of the Marchese family's restaurant.

He wasn't wearing a suit.

He had on a wrinkled blue shirt and jeans, and his left hand still had my dressing on it. He hadn't shaved. He looked like he hadn't slept since Tuesday.

Nine capos turned in their chairs and looked at him.

He stopped just inside the door.

"Carly," he said. "I'm sorry. I didn't know where else to find you."

"You found me."

"Her father fired me." He laughed, a raw sound. "Thursday morning. Security walked me out with a box. Whitney told him I knew about the stairwell. She told him I was in on it. She's trying to drag me down with her."

Nobody at the table moved.

"I didn't know," he said. "I swear to God. I didn't know until the roof. I've been sick about it for five days."

He looked at Giancarlo. Then back at me.

"The foundation gala is Saturday," he said. "At your hotel. Her father booked it a year ago. Everybody will be there. The donors. Her friends. The press."

"I know where my own ballroom is," Giancarlo said.

"Let me speak," Grayson said. "Let me stand up in front of all of them and tell them what she did. I was with her five years. I know what she's like. I know things about her nobody else knows."

He swallowed.

"Let me do one right thing, Carly. Just one."

I looked at him for a long time.

The pinky-ring capo leaned over and said, not quietly, "This the soda can guy?"

"That's him," the consigliere said.

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