The Thorn Sacrament

Seraphina

The bell over the door rang at eight minutes to nine, which was eight minutes before I could legally stop smiling at people.

I was on my knees behind the counter with a bucket of stem water, trying to work a rubber band off a bundle of eucalyptus without snapping it, and I said the thing I always said. “We close at nine, but if you know what you want, I can do it fast.”

“I know what I want.”

It was the voice that made me look up. Low, unhurried, with an edge of Brooklyn sanded down by somebody’s expensive education. The kind of voice that didn’t need to be raised because the people around it had learned to lean in.

He was standing just inside the door, rain on his shoulders. Black overcoat, open. Black suit under it, no tie, a white shirt with the collar undone one button past what my aunt Teresa would have called respectable. His hair was dark and cut close at the sides, damp at the front, and there was a thin pale line through his left eyebrow, as if someone had once tried to erase half of it and given up.

He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the cooler.

“White roses,” he said. “All of them.”

I stood, wiping my hands on my apron. “All of them is forty-two stems.”

“Then forty-two.”

“They’re not cheap.”

At last he turned his head, and his eyes found mine. They were brown, so dark that under the shop lights they looked black, and they moved over me without hurry, from the pencil stuck through the knot of my hair to the wet patch on my apron to the scuffed toes of my boots, and back up. It wasn’t the look men usually gave me on Arthur Avenue. It wasn’t hungry. It was the look a jeweler gives a stone he’s already decided to buy.

“I didn’t ask if they were cheap.”

“No,” I said. “You didn’t.”

I opened the cooler. Cold air rolled out over my wrists, carrying the green, clean smell of cut stems and wet paper. The white roses were Vendelas from Ecuador, cream at the heart, the outer petals faintly ruffled, the best I’d had all month. They were for the Mancuso anniversary on Saturday, and I knew I was going to let him have them anyway, because there was something in the way he’d said all of them that sounded less like a purchase than a debt.

I gathered them in my arms. Forty-two roses are heavier than people think.

“Wrapped or loose?”

“Wrapped. Plain.”

“Is it an apology or a funeral?”

He had moved to the counter while my back was turned. I hadn’t heard him cross the tile, and the old floor in my shop creaked under everyone. He rested one hand on the glass beside the register. Long fingers, a gold ring on the small finger of the right hand. On the cuff of his white shirt, just where it showed below the black sleeve, there was a stain the color of rust.

I looked at it for exactly one second too long.

“Does it matter?” he asked.

“It matters to the ribbon.”

“Then it’s a funeral.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It was six years ago,” he said, as if that settled whether I should be sorry.

I laid the roses on the work counter and began stripping the lower leaves. My mother had taught me to do it with my thumb and a twist, never a knife, because a knife bruised the stem and a bruised stem drank badly. The habit had stayed in my hands long after she’d stopped being able to correct it. Leaves fell onto the paper in soft green curls.

“Six years is a long time to keep bringing roses,” I said.

“Is there a limit?”

“Most people stop after two. Then it’s a wreath at Christmas, then a phone call to the cemetery office to ask if someone can wipe the stone.”

“You know a lot about how people grieve.”

“I sell flowers on Arthur Avenue. I know a lot about everything people do.”

That got me something. Not a smile exactly. A small loosening at the corner of his mouth, there and gone. “What else do people do?”

“Cheat,” I said. “Get caught. Buy red roses on the way home. Propose. Buy peonies out of season and act surprised that they cost money. Bury their mothers.” I reached for the next stem without looking. “Mostly they bury their mothers.”

There was a pause, and in it the rain picked up against the window and ran down the gold letters my mother had paid a sign painter from Fordham Road to put on the glass in 1999. FIORI DI LUCIA. From inside they read backward. I had spent most of my childhood reading them backward.

“Ow.” The word came out of me before I knew why. Then I knew. A thorn the size of a cat’s claw had gone into the side of my finger. I’d been talking instead of looking.

“Let me see.”

“It’s fine. It’s a thorn. It’s my job.”

But he had already reached across the counter and taken my wrist. His hand was warm and dry and very steady, and he turned my palm up under the light the way a doctor would, his thumb resting over my pulse. I could feel my heartbeat knocking against it. I was annoyed that he could feel it too.

“You have a scar here,” he said. Not the new prick on my finger. The old white crescent on the heel of my left palm.

“I broke a vase when I was twelve.”

“On purpose?”

“On my brother. He deserved it.”

He let go of my wrist. Then he picked up the rose I’d dropped, the one with the claw, and before I could stop him he ran the forefinger of his left hand down the stem. I saw the thorn catch. I saw him let it. A bead of blood rose on the pad of his finger, very dark, and he looked at it with an expression I couldn’t name. Interest, maybe. Like someone checking a clock.

“What did you do that for?”

“Now we match.”

“That’s not how matching works.”

“Isn’t it?”

“You’re bleeding on my roses.”

“My roses,” he corrected gently. “I’m paying.”

I should have handed him a tissue. That’s what you do with strangers. I reached under the counter instead and pulled a length of the green satin ribbon I used for christening bouquets, cut it with my shears and came around the counter, which I never did after dark, not with a man I didn’t know and the street outside empty except for the rain.

“Hand,” I said.

He gave it to me. He was so much taller up close that I had to tip my head back, and he smelled of rain and cold air and, underneath, something like cedar and smoke, as if he had been standing beside a fire somewhere before he came in. I wound the ribbon twice around his finger, snugly, over the bead of blood, and tied it in the small flat knot my mother used on boutonnieres.

“There,” I said. “Very masculine.”

“It’s green.”

“It’s what I had.”

“It’s the color of your eyes,” he said. “Nearly.”

I stepped back. The counter was behind me. That was the moment I understood how little space there was in my shop, how much of it he took up, how quietly he had arranged to stand between me and the door.

“My eyes are gray,” I said.

“Gray-green. In the light from the cooler they’re green.”

“You should get your eyes checked.”

“My eyes are excellent.” He looked down at the ribbon, then at me. “How much do I owe you?”

I told him. It was a large number and I added the rush fee for the Mancusos to it on principle. He took a fold of bills from inside his coat without counting them and laid them on the glass. Even upside down I could see it was far too much.

“That’s double.”

“Keep it.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Then give it to the church.” He was wrapping the roses himself, in the plain brown paper I’d laid out, with a deftness that surprised me. When he was done he lifted the whole armful as easily as I’d lift a sandwich. At the door he stopped, his hand on the brass handle, and the bell gave one small nervous ring.

“You should lock this,” he said, “when you’re alone in here at night.”

“Thank you, Officer.”

“I mean it.”

“Everybody on this street knows me.”

“That,” he said, “is exactly the problem, Seraphina.”

The door swung shut behind him. The bell rang and rang and then stopped, and I stood in the cold breath of the open cooler with my heart going like I’d run up the subway stairs.

I hadn’t told him my name.

My name wasn’t on anything. The shop was my mother’s name. The card machine said Fiori di Lucia LLC. Everybody called me Sera, even the priest at Santa Rosalia. Nobody called me Seraphina except my father when I was in trouble, and my mother, who had been dead for eight years.

I went to the window. The street was black and shining. A long dark car was pulling away from the curb in front of Calandra’s, no lights on until it reached the corner, and then the lights came on all at once, and it was gone.

I locked the door.

I live, or I lived then, in my father’s house on Mayflower Avenue in Pelham Bay, a brick two-story with a fig tree in the back that my father wrapped in burlap every November as if it were one of his children. I drove home in my mother’s old Volvo, which had a clutch like a bad marriage, with the window cracked to keep myself awake, and tried not to think about the ribbon.

The porch light was on. So were the lights in the front room, the kitchen and my father’s study, which meant something was wrong, because my father counted kilowatts the way other men counted sins.

There were two cars I didn’t recognize at the curb. Black. Polished. A man in a dark raincoat leaned against the second one, smoking under an umbrella someone else was holding for him. He watched me park. When I got out he dropped the cigarette into the gutter and said something into his collar.

My hand was on my keys. I turned them so the longest one stuck out between my knuckles, the way my mother had taught me when I was fourteen and started taking the bus alone.

Aunt Teresa opened the front door before I reached it. She was still in her apron, and her eyes were red.

“Where were you?”

“At work. Where I always am. Who’s here?”

“Come inside. Come inside, your father has to talk to you.”

The house smelled of garlic and old coffee and the lemon polish Teresa used on everything that didn’t move. From upstairs I could hear music, the thump of something Bianca liked, too loud. Someone had told her to stay in her room, then. Matteo’s jacket wasn’t on the hook.

My father was in the kitchen, not the study. He was sitting at the table with a glass of Strega in front of him and the bottle beside it, and he looked smaller than he had that morning. My father was a heavy man, thick through the chest, with gray hair he still combed back with water and a face that had gone soft in the jowls over the last few years, ever since his heart had started to complain. Tonight the softness had collapsed into something gray.

“Papa.”

“Sit down, Sera.”

“Who’s in your study?”

“Sit down.”

I sat. Teresa stood behind me with her hand on the back of my chair as if I might bolt.

My father looked at the glass instead of at me. “You know about the trouble in April.”

Everybody knew about the trouble in April. A container of untaxed cigarettes and fake handbags and God knows what else had come through the Red Hook docks under my father’s guarantee, and the federal government had been waiting for it. Two of my father’s men were still in federal detention. The rest I knew only from the silences at dinner.

“I know you lost a shipment,” I said.

“I lost a shipment on Castellari docks. With Castellari money in it.” He turned the glass on the table. “And it isn’t only the shipment. The three million I borrowed from Vittorio, before he died, they never forgot it. They just let the interest run. Six years of interest, Sera. Then April, and the lawyers, and the families of the two men inside, and they lent me more, and I took it. All of it together, it’s fourteen million dollars.”

I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say to a number like that.

“I’ve been talking to them,” he said. “For months. Asking for time. Tonight they came to tell me there isn’t any more time.”

“So we sell the house. We sell the Westchester lots. We…”

“It’s not enough. You think I haven’t counted?” He rubbed a hand over his face. “Dante Castellari doesn’t want money. He wants the Bronx. He wants my family under his name so the Commission can’t say he took it by force. He wants it done the old way.”

The old way. My stomach knew what it meant before my head did.

“He wants a wife,” Teresa said behind me, very quietly, as if the walls had ears. In our house the walls usually did.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “He can’t be serious.”

“He’s serious,” my father said.

“Then tell him no.”

“Sera.”

“Tell him no, Papa. This isn’t 1952. You can’t just…” I stopped, because something in the way he wouldn’t look at me had finally reached me. “Which wife?”

My father lifted the glass and didn’t drink.

“Which one of us did he ask for?”

“Bianca,” he said.

The music upstairs thumped on. Bianca was seventeen. Bianca was a senior at St. Clare’s who wanted to study architecture at Cornell and had a corkboard over her bed covered in pictures of bridges. Bianca still slept with the light on when there was thunder.

“She’s a child.”

“They’d wait until she’s eighteen. He said they’d wait until she finishes school. That he’d…” My father’s voice cracked. “He said they would treat her well.”

“And you said yes.”

“I didn’t say anything yet. I asked for the night.”

“You asked for the night,” I repeated. “To think about whether you’d give your daughter to the Castellari to pay for your handbags.”

“Seraphina.” Teresa’s hand tightened on my chair.

I stood up so fast the chair legs shrieked on the floor. My father flinched, and I hated that I’d made him flinch, and I hated more that some cold, clear part of me had already started doing the arithmetic. Fourteen million dollars. A truce that had held for six years by a thread. Two of our men in jail and a bad heart and a boy of twenty who thought a gold chain made him dangerous.

“Where is he?”

“Sera, don’t…”

“He’s in the study, isn’t he? He came here himself.”

I didn’t wait. The hallway was dark except for the line of light under the study door. I could hear the murmur of men’s voices behind it and the click of a lighter, and when I put my hand on the brass knob it was cold, colder than it should have been, as if the room on the other side had been left open to the rain.

I opened it.

My father’s study was the same as it always was: the walnut desk, the green banker’s lamp, the bad oil painting of the Bay of Naples, the smell of cigars and old paper. A man stood by the window with his back to the room, a younger man with curly hair, who turned when the door opened and gave me a startled, interested look. Another, older, sat in the leather chair by the bookcase. I didn’t look at either of them long.

Because in my father’s chair, behind my father’s desk, with his long legs stretched out and his coat thrown over the arm, sat the man who had bought forty-two white roses an hour ago.

He had a glass of my father’s whisky in his right hand. On the forefinger of his left hand, resting on the arm of the chair, was a twist of green satin ribbon, tied in a flat boutonniere knot.

He looked up at me and didn’t seem surprised at all.

“Seraphina,” said Dante Castellari. “Good. Now we can begin.”