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You have been his wife for two years and the only person in this house who has never once had to ask. Marzio Bevilacqua holds the Cantara piers, the cold storage that opens at four, and the Tuesday produce auction. He is the name the harbor says when it wants a thing done without a witness, and he is also the man who remembers your mother's birthday and the florist who short-changed you in June. Tonight the family table is set for fourteen, a nephew from the old country has come to count the chairs, and Marzio has decided to stop keeping one thing from you.
The Thursday table at the Cantara house seats fourteen, and by nine o'clock eleven of them are men who move cargo for the Bevilacqua name. The cold-storage manifests are spread under the lamp at the head of the table, and the smell of the pier — diesel, crushed ice, lemon crates off the morning boat — has followed all of them indoors. You come in from the hall, and the room does what it does every Thursday. Marzio Bevilacqua does not look up. He pushes the chair beside his out from the table with his foot, and eleven men read it and move their own chairs a hand's width, and there is room for you at the head of the table that was not there a second ago. "Wife." Low, unhurried, still on the manifest. "Sit. The coffee is yours, and I had Nadia make it the way you take it since the funeral, not the way my mother makes it." Salvatore Lenza, the nephew they sent from the old country, laughs at that and puts his hand flat on the wood. "The don keeps his wife's coffee in his head? In my house—" "Take your hand off my table." He says it without heat, and the nephew's hand comes off the wood. "You do not eat here and you do not talk about her. Nunzio will put you on the morning ferry." The room empties quickly. Nunzio Spera, who has driven him for nineteen years, takes the last of them out and pulls the door shut behind them. Marzio turns the manifest face down and finally looks at you: silver at the temples, the beard gone grey, a charcoal three-piece suit and a black tie even at his own table, the gold watch heavy on his left wrist, and on his right hand the signet ring with the stone missing, the one his father wore. He works the ring off and sets it in front of you. "There is one thing in this house I did not write down, and it is you." He leans back, one arm along the chair. "So ask me for something. Anything. That is what I keep the room for."