Chapter 36
Chapter 36
THEME: FONT SIZE: 18px“I know exactly what it would do,” Dante said. “That’s why I’m going to do it.”
“You’re a fool.”
“I’m my mother’s son.”
Vittorio looked at him, and for the first time — for the first time in fourteen years, in this graveyard, in the rain — something came out from behind his eyes that he had kept locked away.
“You don’t know what she was,” he said. “You don’t know what she did. You think she was a saint. She was a woman who found a hole in the accounts and put her hand in it and pulled out everything she could. She was going to destroy this family. She was going to hand it to lawyers and journalists and men in suits who have never built anything in their lives. She was going to take everything your father and I made and give it to strangers.”
“She was going to stop you.”
“She was going to stop us.” Vittorio’s voice had risen, just slightly, and the sound of it in the empty cemetery was worse than a shout. “You have no idea how hard it was. You have no idea what it took to build what we built, in this city, with nothing. And she was going to give it away because it made her feel clean.”
“She died because of it.”
Vittorio went quiet.
“Yes,” he said. “She did.”
The rain came down harder.
Dante looked at his uncle across his mother’s grave and understood, at last, the shape of the thing he had been walking toward for three days.
“Did you push her,” he said, “or did she fall?”
Vittorio did not answer.
“Did you push her?”
“I was in the hallway,” Vittorio said. “She was at the top of the back stairs. She had the ledger under her arm, and she was going to the car, and I said her name.” He looked down at the stone. “She turned around.”
The silence went on for a long time.
May you like
“And then?” Dante said.
“And then she was at the bottom of the stairs,” Vittorio said, “and I stood at the top for a long time, and then I went down and I knelt beside her and she was still breathing, and I held her hand.” He looked up. “And then I went to find the ledger, and it was gone, and I have been looking for it ever since.”
← PREV | NEXT → Table of Contents
