Chapter 19 - Closing the Ledger
I didn't go back to the restaurants downtown. I didn't check on the clubs or the apartment buildings on Racine.
Instead, I drove out to the old Moretti family estate on the far edge of the South Side—an abandoned brick mansion surrounded by overgrown iron gates and dead oak trees where my father had ruled his little empire of fear and debt for forty years.
The front door was unlocked, hanging slightly off its hinges where the federal search teams had kicked it in earlier in the week.
I walked through the dark, echoing hallways, past the mahogany desk in the study where the black calfskin ledger had once sat in the bottom drawer. The room was empty now, stripped bare of furniture, carpets, and family portraits.
Only one thing remained.
Sitting in the middle of the bare hardwood floor of the library was the old sewing machine with the tiny silver rose carved into its wooden base.
I walked over, knelt down, and lifted the hinged metal cover. Inside the accessory compartment, beneath a spool of faded black thread, was a small, handwritten note on yellowed stationery written in my mother’s neat Catholic-school cursive.
“A debt isn't something you collect, Nate. It’s something you pass on until someone has the courage to tear up the paper.”
May you like
I pulled a box of wooden matches from my pocket, struck one against the brick hearth of the fireplace, and dropped it onto the sewing machine base.
The old wood caught instantly, dry as tinder after thirty years in the dark.
