The Capo's Debt

She was supposed to be the one burying her brother. Instead she spends his wake working the room like a detective, because one of the men in those folding chairs was there the night he died. Gianna presses her palm flat against the casket lid. Polished mahogany, cold even through the layer of white lilies she chose herself. White for purity, although Filippo had not been pure since he was twelve and stole his first car. The funeral home smells of grief and cheap air freshener, lemon trying to mask death and losing. Vito asks from the corner whether she wants the spray adjusted. She does not. She traces the name on the brass plaque instead. Filippo Testa. Twenty-three years. Dead three weeks before his twenty-fourth birthday. Forty minutes into the wake, men in dark suits fill the first three rows and women in black cluster at the back whispering about who married whom and who was sleeping with whom while their husbands ran numbers. Gianna catalogues every face and keeps moving. Then a hand is extended. *Enzo Marchetti.* *I know who you are. Everyone knows who you are.* *Then you know I mean no disrespect by being here.* *My father invited you.* What follows is a bargain struck at a kitchen table, a silver bullet that should not exist, the weight of a cross worn by somebody who stopped believing years ago, a ledger kept in a woman's handwriting, truths extracted under morphine, and a witness whose account changes depending on who is in the room. There is a church, four days in, and a kiss she means, and a sentence she cannot take back afterwards. *I trust you*, she says, and it costs her more than anything else she says in this book. He told her he needed ten minutes. He was not lying about coming back. He was lying about the ten minutes, and about what he intended to do with them, and by the time she works out the difference the arithmetic of her brother's death has changed completely. He has her trust now. What he still has to do is deserve it, in front of people who have never once allowed him the chance.