The Don's Brother's Bride

1. The Third Husband

THE THIRD HUSBAND

VALERIA

My third husband dies before he can kiss me.

He gets four words into the last line of the rite and stops.

It isn’t dramatic. Giulio D’Amato blinks like a man who has lost his place in a book. There’s sweat along his hairline that wasn’t there at 10:40 a.m., and a gray coming up under his jaw like weather.

Behind us, four hundred people wait for a kiss.

His knees go.

I get under him. His weight comes down across my forearms and the beadwork of a dress that cost more than my first car. His hand finds my wrist and closes, and his mouth arrives at my ear.

“Finish it.”

Not help me. Not a name and not a prayer. Two words, and he spends the last air he has on them.

I don’t repeat them. Not to the priest, who has been losing to a head cold since ten and is on his knees now in his good vestments. Not to anyone in this building.

Somebody comes over the altar rail.

He takes Giulio’s weight off me with one arm, and his other hand closes around my wrist. The same wrist. His thumb lands on the artery where his brother’s fingers were half a second ago.

Lorenzo D’Amato smells like gun oil and clean wool and nothing else.

“How long?”

“Nine seconds. It’s his heart, not his throat.”

Fabrizio is already down on Giulio’s other side with his hand inside the suit jacket.

“Left inside pocket,” Lorenzo tells him.

“He moved it. Right side, since Easter.” Fabrizio comes up with the injector, orange cap, and slaps it into his Don’s palm.

Lorenzo takes the cap off with his teeth, drives the needle into his brother’s leg, and holds it there, counting under his breath. It’s the first ugly thing I’ve ever seen him do.

Then the drug takes.

His chest fills. One breath, and it’s a real one, deep enough that it lifts my hands off him. Four hundred people make the sound people make in the half second before they’re allowed to be relieved.

He doesn’t look at me. His eyes go past my shoulder and find his brother and stay there.

“Tell…”

The word stops before the air does. The hand drops back to the marble, and the room is still making its relieved sound when the window above the north aisle goes.

Glass comes down in a sheet of broken saints. The report arrives afterward, flat and unimportant, a door slammed two streets over. Giulio’s chest jumps under his brother’s hands, and then there’s a hole in the gray suit the size of a fingertip and a stain going out from it the size of a hand.

One syllable.

I see the next shot before it happens. Up on the scaffold behind the broken glass there’s a wink of white where nothing white belongs. It’s tracking left, and Lorenzo is left.

I get two fists in his collar and drag him down with everything I have.

Marble bursts where his head was. Powder in my mouth, hot and gritty, tasting of lime.

Then he’s on top of me, chest to chest, one hand flat on the back of my skull. His heart is going hard enough that I can count it against my cheekbone, and this is the worst possible moment for my body to notice anything whatsoever.

It notices.

Four hundred people stand up at once. About a hundred and thirty of them are armed, because both families came to this wedding dressed for the other one.

Fabrizio is up on the top step with his arms out like a man stopping traffic, sending the old women low and out through the left transept, and not one person in that building does what he says.

The pews empty toward the west doors in a wave that takes the flower stands with it.

Somebody’s grandmother goes down in the side aisle, and somebody’s cousin hauls her up by the coat collar.

Under the screaming comes the sound I’ve been listening for since I was nine years old, a hundred jackets opening at the same time.

Rinaldi men look up at a broken D’Amato window. D’Amato men look at the Rinaldi woman kneeling in their Don’s brother’s blood.

Both families solve it in under three seconds, and both of them get it wrong.

My father’s man comes up the aisle with his revolver out, because he can count to three dead husbands. A D’Amato meets him over the body with a Glock, and they’re ten inches apart.

“Your window.”

“Your bride.”

Two hammers. One body between them. And me on my knees in the middle of it with my hands laced over Giulio D’Amato’s sternum.

I go down onto the compressions.

Thirty and two. Something goes under my hand on the fourth push, cartilage or rib, and I keep going.

My shoulders have started to shake at the top of every push.

Then the tears come, and they come hard, and there is nothing I can do about them, because both my hands are in my husband’s chest. So I let them come.

I count out loud through them and I do not stop pushing.

Everybody still in that building watches the bride cry all over him while she breaks his ribs to keep him.

Somebody in the transept is praying out loud in the voice people use when they have forgotten the words. I sit back on my heels with my hands red to the wrists and put my voice into the vault of that ceiling.

“He is not dead yet.”

The praying stops.

“His brain has had oxygen for every one of the last four minutes, and it’s had that because of my hands. If either of you fires that weapon over this man, I will testify to it. In a church. To both families. Now get out of my light.”

Both barrels come down.

I go back to the compressions.

At 11:19 a.m., Fabrizio crouches beside me and puts two fingers on my shoulder and does not press.

“Valeria.” He has never used my first name in his life, and he uses it now the way a man sets down something with a crack already in it. “You can put your hands down.”

I stop.

The cathedral empties like a tub draining. It takes a quarter of an hour, and by the end of it what’s left is my own breathing and a white glove on the floor of the center aisle and one child’s shoe under the fourth pew.

The sacristy smells of candle wax and wet wool. Nineteen people in a room built for six.

Ottavia D’Amato is eighty-six and takes the first word, because she has taken the first word since Eisenhower.

“My bag is in pew three,” she announces from the only chair, “and I’m not leaving this building without it.”

Somebody starts to tell her there was a shooter.

“There was a shooter in a bell tower, and there’s a handbag in pew three. Only one of those two things is still in the building.”

The boy on the door comes back at a jog with it held in both hands like a chalice. She opens it, checks past her Aldo’s reading glasses, and lets us all see the Beretta lying underneath them.

“The Beretta is why I’m eighty-six.” She pats the boy’s cheek twice. “Eat something, you look like a coat rack.”

The laugh that goes around that room is four seconds long.

Then she looks down at her hands.

“He took three sugars,” she murmurs. “A grown man with a law degree. Three sugars, every morning of his life. Un insulto al caffè, I told him. And every morning he stirred the third one in with slow circles of the spoon, in front of me, so that I’d have to watch him do it.”

That’s the thing that gets me. The sugar.

Lorenzo has not sat down since the ambulance. He is standing at the end of the vesting table where they have put his brother under a server’s white cloth, and he does not lift his head when he speaks.

“Nobody could have done more today, Fabrizio.”

“I wish it had been enough.”

Neither of them looks at the other, not once, and neither of them moves.

“Three husbands,” the old man at the door says. “I want her held tonight.”

My father comes up out of his chair.

“You want her shot. Say the whole sentence out loud, in front of a priest.” His voice doesn’t rise, which is how everyone in the room knows. “Put a hand on my daughter, and there won’t be enough D’Amato left on this coast to carry the last one to the hole.”

Fabrizio has the contract open on the vesting table, and he has gone quiet, which, for Fabrizio, is a five-alarm emergency.

“Don. Page thirty-one.”

Everyone waits.

“Nothing transferred this morning. It all still moves on Monday, to whoever holds this marriage.” He looks up. “And there’s a substitution clause.”

Lorenzo crosses the room, and everyone gets out of his way, including my father.

He stops closer than he needs to. Close enough that I have to make a decision about my breathing, and I make the wrong one, and he sees me make it.

“The second shot was for me.” He’s looking at the rust dried into the corner of my mouth, and at the two clean tracks running down through it. “Not for him. Not for you. You had half a second and no obligation to me whatsoever. You spent it on a D’Amato.”

He opens my right hand, the one that won’t stop shaking, and I let him. Then he puts something in my palm and folds my fingers down over it and keeps his hand closed around my fist.

It’s Giulio’s ring, and it’s still warm, and not from Giulio.

Somebody starts to speak about a vote.

Lorenzo doesn’t look away from me.

“There’s no vote. My brother was husband number three. I become number four.”