Chapter 27 - THE FUNERAL HAD NO BODYGUARDS AROUND THE CASKETMore than eight hundred people came.
Lorenzo expected former associates.
Instead he saw nurses.
Construction workers.
Retired dock employees.
Victims' families.
Some came to mourn.
Some came because they wanted to see the man they hated buried.
Lorenzo let them.
One elderly woman stood near the back holding a photograph of her husband.
Lucia approached her.
“Did you know Giovanni?”
The woman answered:
“He destroyed my husband's business.”
Lucia did not know what to say.
The woman looked toward Giovanni's casket.
“Then fifteen years later somebody paid my son's college tuition anonymously.”
She swallowed.
“I found out last week it was him.”
“Does that make it better?”
“No.”
She looked at Lucia.
“It makes it complicated.”
That became the truth of the funeral.
Giovanni was not rewritten as a saint.
Nora refused.
Adrian's obituary included the violence.
The crimes.
The families harmed.
The betrayal.
The restitution work.
The stroke.
The years trapped in silence.
The rehabilitation.
Everything.
Lorenzo read it before publication.
He changed one sentence.
Adrian asked why.
“Because it says he became a good man.”
“You disagree?”
“Yes.”
Lorenzo looked at his father's photograph.
“He became a better man.”
That was different.
At the cemetery, Lily placed the blue wooden music box beside Giovanni's flowers.
Nora stopped her.
“Sweetheart, that belonged to you.”
“I know.”
“Why give it to Grandpa?”
Lily shrugged.
“He liked music.”
Then she whispered:
“And he can't take his tablet.”
May you like
Nobody knew whether to laugh or cry.
They did both.
