Chapter 6 #2
"Okay," I said. "See, that wasn't hard. That's one true thing. At this rate I'll have a whole biography by Christmas."
"Hm."
Around noon I made lunch, because it was noon and I'm Italian and the alternative is death.
Pasta with whatever's in the pan — garlic, oil, the last of the good peppers.
And here is a thing about my family, my whole family, going back to villages none of us have seen: we cannot eat in front of a person.
It is not possible. It is genetic. Nonna fed the meter reader.
I put a plate on the arm of his chair.
"I can't eat in front of a person, it's a whole Italian thing, don't read into it."
He looked at the plate. And there was a hesitation — one beat, maybe two, something crossing behind his face that I couldn't name — like a man consulting a rulebook nobody else could see. Then he picked up the fork.
He ate everything. Quietly, completely, no commentary, and when it was done he set the fork down parallel on the plate like the plate was being graded, and said, "Thank you," and it came out — odd. Formal. Like a phrase in a language he knew but hadn't used in a while.
"It's pasta, Barrett. It's ten minutes and a pan."
"Hm," he said. But he looked at the empty plate a moment longer, and I went back to my easel and pretended I hadn't watched every bite.
The afternoon needled along. He checked the window, and checked it again, and around two I couldn't stand it anymore.
"You know you do that every four minutes? The window. I timed you. You could set a clock by you."
"Four minutes is the interval."
"The interval for WHAT?"
"Coverage."
"Coverage." I put the swab down. "Of my empty street. In Bensonhurst. Where the biggest threat in forty years has been Mrs. Esposito's opinion of your parallel parking."
"Then the interval is inexpensive," he said, and swept the window again, right on schedule.
"Oh my God. WHAT?" I put the swab down entirely.
"What do you think is coming through that window that you have to check it every four minutes?
Seriously. What's the scenario? Some kind of mass art heist?
On Bay 50th? The last crime on this block was Sally Aiello's son taking the church bingo cash box, and he brought it BACK—"
And then it landed.
Mid-sentence, all at once, the way the obvious lands when you've been standing on it. The window sweeps. The not-startling. The oaths at the door. I've seen battle.
Oh.
Oh, you idiot, Cate.
Is this — was this a soldier thing? A came-home-but-not-all-the-way thing?
Because I know that thing. Frankie Marchetti from the parish came back from his second deployment and sat with his back to the wall at his own daughter's christening, checked the exits at Sunday dinner, and nobody said a word about it, ever, because you don't. That's the rule. You don't.
I picked the swab back up.
"You know what — never mind," I said, to the varnish, gentler than anything I'd said all day. "Check the window however often you want. It's a good window. Somebody should be looking at it."
He didn't answer. But the next sweep came a few seconds late, and when I glanced over, he was looking at me instead of the street — just for a second, something I couldn't read moving behind all that stillness — and then the window had his eyes again and the interval reset and neither of us said anything else about it.
And then the stool.
Mid-afternoon I needed the raking-light rig repositioned — the camera mount lives on the high shelf over the sink, because the basement has eleven saints and no storage — and I was up on the stepstool, one foot, reaching, the way I have reached a thousand times, and the stool's bad leg did the thing the bad leg does.
The world tipped.
And then it didn't, because there was a hand at my waist.
I never heard him cross the room. Eight feet of concrete floor, a metal chair, a man the size of a vestibule — nothing.
Just the tilt, and then his hand, spread flat against my side, taking the whole weight of me like the weight was a rumor.
One breath. Two. His hand was warm through my shirt — warm like a stone in the sun, warm like something that had been holding heat for a long time — and every nerve I own reported for duty on that six inches of skin.
He set me upright. Handed me the camera mount off the shelf — didn't reach for it, HAD it, like it had jumped down on its own — and did not go back to the chair.
He looked at the stool.
"This equipment is compromised." He nudged the bad leg with one shoe and the stool did its shameful little curtsy.
"The joint's been loose long enough to wear the screw hole oval.
It fails under off-center load — which is every load, the way you climb.
A person of your stature requires proper retrieval equipment. "
"A person of my STATURE."
"You work at height on a compromised platform above a concrete floor." He was still looking at the stool the way he'd looked at my old Segal lock, like it had personally offended the concept of safety. "A fall from that height onto this surface — wrist, hip, or head, depending on the rotation."
"It's a STEPSTOOL, Barrett, it's two feet—"
He took out his pen and wrote something on the clipboard.
"What are you writing?"
"That tomorrow you will have a proper stool."
"I like my stool."
"No."
"No? What do you mean, no? You can't no my stool. It's my stool. That's not a — you don't get to just write things—"
"It's written," he said, and went back to the chair.
And here's the problem with my new policy of compassion: I'd decided to be gentle with whatever war he brought home, and forty minutes later the man was legislating my furniture, and I stood there discovering that you can feel tender toward someone and want to throw a stool at him in the same breath.
Nobody warns you those fit in the same hand.
I stood at the sink and washed a brush that did not need washing for approximately four minutes.
Some of that was the stool argument. Most of it was the whole right side of my body, ribs to hip, holding the shape of his hand like the ground holds heat after the sun goes down.
It held it for an hour. I checked. And I'd like the record to show that there was no bus this time, no knife, no adrenaline with somewhere to hide.
Just a stool, and a hand, and my entire nervous system standing up and applauding like the cheap seats at a Springsteen show.
That's Exhibit E, and the case against me is building.
He left when the sun went down. "Lock the door," at the top of the stairs, not a request — and then the street took him the way the street takes him, which I have stopped going up to verify, because the verifying was starting to feel like the crazy part.
I ate dinner. I called Nina and gave her a report with a hole in the middle of it shaped exactly like a hand.
I did give her the theory — the soldier thing, Frankie Marchetti, the window — and she went quiet for a second and said, "That tracks," and I heard the case close a little tighter, and it felt like solving something, and I let it.
And then, before bed, I did the thing I'd been not-doing all evening.
I turned off the kitchen light and went to the front window in the dark, and looked at my street the way he looks at it.
Corners first.
Empty, dark, nothing — same street it's been my whole life. And then the rooflines, and I stood there a long time looking at the rooflines, and I couldn't tell you why.
And on the parapet across from the alley, something moved.
Not moved — resolved. The way a shape steps out of a magic-eye picture: one second it was chimney and antenna and orange-black sky, and the next there was a stillness up there with edges to it, a darker dark, wrong for a chimney and far too still for a man —
I blinked.
Chimney. Antenna. Sky.
I pressed my face nearly to the glass and counted the rooftop shapes like a crazy person — chimney, chimney, vent stack, antenna — and everything was accounted for, and nothing moved, and nothing had edges, and my heart was going anyway, thudding away at a wall of nothing.
"Okay," I told the dark kitchen. "You're tired. He's paranoid. Apparently it's catching."
But that wasn't the whole of it, and the evidence only works if you don't lie about the evidence, so, fine: I stood at my dark window thinking about a paranoid, impossible, infuriating man who checks my window every four minutes and eats my pasta like it's a sacrament and confiscated my stool because I might fall — and about those eyes, dark past dark with the blue banked down in them, looking at me for one second today instead of the street — and I thought: whatever's wrong with him, whatever war he's still fighting, some completely unauthorized part of me wants to be the thing he's guarding.
I looked at the roofline one more time. Nothing.
I pulled the curtain closed anyway. Just in case.