Chapter 26
CATE
My eyes opened at ten past six on Sunday morning, and before I had one thought in my head my hand was moving across the bed.
Cold sheets. All the way to the far edge, cold — not slept-in-and-left cold. Never-came-to-bed cold.
I lay there a second with my hand flat on his side. The radiator ticked. Upstairs, Donnie's floor creaked once and went quiet. No water running anywhere. No weight anywhere. No one in this house but me.
I sat up and put my feet on the floor and walked down the hall — walked, bare feet on cold linoleum, past the bathroom with its door standing open on nothing, into the kitchen.
His cup was in the rack. Washed, upside down, next to mine.
I stood in the doorway in his shirt and looked at that cup for a long time.
The pad was on the table. Not on the fridge — on the table, dead center, with the pen lying on top of it, squared to the edge like a place setting.
I crossed the kitchen and picked the pen up and put it down and turned the pad around. On the clean page, under Saturday's torn edge, in the careful ancient hand that signs my insurance forms:
I decided. I will not tell you to run.
I read it. I read it again. The radiator ticked and my feet went numb on the linoleum and I stood there reading eight words until they stopped being words.
Then I pulled out his chair and sat down in it, because my legs were done, and I put the note on the table in front of me and looked at it some more, and the thing that finally came up out of me, in the empty kitchen, out loud, was:
"You kept the rule."
No disappearing. If you go, you say you're going.
Even one word. I wrote that law myself, at this table, and pressed the period in so hard it went through to the next page, and he signed it, and he kept it.
One word required. He left me eight. He stood in my kitchen in the middle of the night and complied.
That was the part. Not the going. The keeping.
Any man can leave; the men I come from leave fine, leave loud, leave with the truck half loaded.
It takes something older and colder to leave correctly — to read the contract by lamplight and find the crack in it and go through the crack sideways, all terms technically intact.
Then I thought: call him.
I got my phone off the charger and the card out of the wallet drawer — the insurance card, the office number, the only number that has ever existed for him — and dialed it with a steady hand, and held it to my ear.
Three tones. Then a woman's voice, recorded before I was born: the number you have reached is not in service.
I stood there and let it say it twice more, and then I lowered the phone and looked at the screen — call ended, eleven seconds — and I understood, standing in my kitchen holding a dead number printed on a card for a company that had probably stopped existing at whatever hour he walked out of this house —
There was no place to look.
Not a job. Not a family. Not a town he's from, a bar he goes to, a buddy who'd have heard something.
You cannot canvass the sky. He was the only door into his entire world and he had closed himself behind himself, and a man who lives nowhere, who has lived nowhere for longer than there have been maps, was gone into all of it at once, and I could spend the rest of my life at this phone and never reach so much as a ring.
I put the phone face-down on the counter.
And then it got me. Not the leaving — the gone.
The full size of the gone. It came up from underneath like water through a floor, and I slid down the cabinets to the linoleum in his shirt and I cried the way I hadn't cried since the funeral — ugly, animal, wringing — with the coffee going cold on the counter and nobody, nobody, nobody to hear it, which was the whole point of every sound I was making.
I don't know how long. The light moved. The radiator quit and started twice.
At some point I was lying on my kitchen floor with his shirt collar soaked through, looking up at the underside of the table Nonna fed forty years of Sundays on, and the crying wore down to that hiccuping aftermath that's almost peaceful, the body too tired to keep it up, and I lay there hollowed out and breathing.
And then, because it was Sunday, and because the body I come from doesn't know how to stay down past noon, I got up off the floor. I washed my face. I put on real clothes and did the thing with my eyes that hides crying from everyone except Nina, and I picked up the bread money off the dresser.
You get one morning on the floor. Then Sunday comes for you anyway.
I went to Nina's, because it was Sunday, and there was lamb.
I bought the bread on the way. Both loaves made it; nobody was there to eat the second one on the walk.
The end seat was set and empty — plate down, glass turned up — because in that family a place doesn't get pulled just because a man is late.
"Working," I said, when Nina raised the question with her eyebrows from the stove. "Something at the port. He sends regrets."
"On a Sunday."
"Insurance never sleeps."
"Nothing sleeps in this family," Connie said, from the far end. "Ask the awning guy. Sunday morning he calls me. Sunday."
"Because you told him Sunday," Nina said.
"I told him after Sunday—"
They took the awning the whole length of the salad, which was a mercy, because nobody was looking at me or the chair.
Gina held out until the lamb. Then she put her fork down, and took a folded piece of loose-leaf out of her pocket, and smoothed it flat next to her plate, and looked at the empty seat.
"I made a new list," she said. "Nine questions. He said bring questions."
"He'll want the list, baby."
"When?"
"Soon," I said, and heard my voice do it — the smooth thing, the level thing — and I put a piece of lamb in my mouth so nothing else could come out of it.
Gina looked at me for one more second, folded the list back up, and put it in her pocket. She kept her hand over the pocket the rest of dinner. Twelve years old, and she already knows you guard the questions somebody promised to answer.
I helped with the dishes. I kissed everyone. I got out before the espresso, which in that house is a flight risk indicator, and Nina walked me to the door with a container of leftovers and stood there reading me the way she's read me since second grade.
"You're doing the voice," she said.
"I'm tired, Nina. It's been a long job."
"Mm," said Nina, and let me go, and I felt her watch me the whole way down the block.
The days stacked up the way days do when nobody's counting them for you.
Being left is a thing you get good at. By the third time there's a procedure.
I invented mine the year Dad went, refined it when Joey moved to Jersey with the truck still half loaded, and by the time Nonna went — the long way, the eleven-month way, where the leaving happens a teaspoon a day while every candle in the parish does nothing on schedule — I had it down to a craft.
You keep the hands moving. You portion the day into swabs.
You don't ask anybody for anything, because asking is how you find out what people won't do.
That first Monday I took the rolling pin out of the drawer I'd retired it to and set it on the counter, parallel to the edge.
"Welcome back," I told it. "You'll notice the position's been vacant."
Tuesday Donnie knocked, which Donnie does not do — Donnie hollers down stairwells; knocking implies a theory of other people — and stood there holding his rent envelope four days early, which has happened never.
"Where's the big guy."
"Working."
"Haven't heard him on the stairs." He wasn't looking at me. He was looking past me, down into the apartment, taking a slow inventory of the dark like a man pricing it. "Couple nights now. Real quiet down here. I notice things, Cat-a-REE-na. People think I don't notice."
I took the envelope out of his hand and shut the door on him, and threw the bolt loud enough that he'd hear it, and stood there until his feet went back up the stairs.
Wednesday I said to the angel, "You too, huh."
The muslin didn't answer. Under it a wingless thing went on grieving over somebody's buried name, four hundred years of it, and I stood with my hip against Nonna's workbench and thought: at least somebody painted you a face to do it with.
I worked. Condition notes, the treatment report, flat language, everything dated. My hands were steady all week — steady through all of it — and I hated them a little for that.
The second Sunday I went to Nina's again, because you don't cancel Sunday — canceling Sunday in that family is how you end up with four people and a priest in your kitchen by Tuesday.
I sat through the whole meal next to the empty place.
Boston now, I said. Big claim, a warehouse thing, back when it's settled.
Gina didn't bring the list this time, and somehow that was worse.
Nina walked me out with the leftovers, and at the bottom of the stoop she stepped in front of me.
"Okay. Enough. Where is he."
"Boston. I told you—"
"There's no warehouse in Boston, Cate. Insurance men don't disappear to warehouses, they have phones, and you've had my mother's funeral face for eight days." She had the container against her chest like a shield and her voice down low, out of range of the windows. "Did he hurt you?"
"No."
"Did he leave you?"
And I looked at my best friend under her porch light, and I had the whole thing right there behind my teeth.
Two words. He left. That's all it would have taken — and she'd have had me inside with a coffee and the door shut before the second word finished, and it would have been out in the world, and true.
Said things are true things. As long as nobody heard it out loud, he was working, he was in Boston, there was a version of Thursday where a key still turned in that door.
"He's working, Nina."
She stared at me. Somewhere behind her the second seating was going full volume through the screen door.