Chapter 39
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Luca
The ball goes past me for the third time and I'm two steps behind it before my thigh reminds me why.
Dante takes it off Fabio at the edge of the paint lines somebody sprayed on this cracked West Side lot, and they both accelerate. I plant my right foot to turn. I stop because I can't keep going. They do. Liam scores at the far end between two traffic cones and puts his arms up.
"Cazzo," I say to nobody.
Fabio jogs back past me, breathing easy, sweat dark on his collar. "You used to be fast."
"I used to have a fucking leg." I wave him off. "Go. Play. I need water."
He grins and goes. A month of whiskey, and these bastards run like the ground owes them money.
My lungs burn. Valentino stands at the sideline with his coat still on, arms crossed, watching us.
He hasn't touched the ball once. He came to make sure I showed up.
That's the whole job tonight, and we both know it.
The water bottles sit in a plastic bag by the chain-link fence next to my phone and my coat.
I take a bottle, crack the cap, drink half of it.
My shirt is stuck to my back and my leg throbs in time with my pulse.
For the first hour of this stupid game I didn't think about her once.
Then I thought about how I hadn't thought about her, which is the same as thinking about her, so the hour meant nothing.
The phone screen lights when I pick it up.
Missed call. Marco. Eleven minutes ago.
My thumb goes still over the screen. This morning Marco called to say she'd left her parents' house and walked to a pharmacy in town, alone, and came back twenty minutes later with a small bag.
I told him to find out what was in the bag.
If she's sick — if Nina's sick — I need to know.
That's all it is. That's what I told him, and that's what I told myself, and neither of us believed me.
I call back. It rings once.
"Marco."
"I've got it." He sounds careful. Marco lost her once outside a restaurant and he's been careful ever since. "The girl at the register remembered her."
"Then say it, for fuck's sake."
Behind me somebody shouts for a pass. A car rolls past the lot with its windows down, bass thumping, and I press the phone harder against my ear.
"Pregnancy tests," Marco says. "Three of them. Same brand, three boxes. Nothing else."
The bottle drops out of my hand.
Water spreads across the ground, reaches my shoe and I watch it happen from far away. Marco is still talking and his voice has gone thin and small like it's coming through a wall.
Three tests.
"Boss?" Marco says.
"Stay on the house." My voice comes out wrong, low and scraped. "Nobody goes near it. Nobody."
I hang up.
"Luca." Valentino is beside me. I didn't hear him cross the lot. "What's wrong. Who was that?"
I'm already moving. Coat off the fence, keys out of the pocket, and the game stops behind me — Fabio calling my name, Dante's voice, Liam — and none of it slows me down.
"Luca!" Valentino, sharp now, following. "Where the hell are you going?"
"Wisconsin." I pull the door open and the word comes out ragged. "She's — I have to get there. Tonight. Now."
He grabs the door frame before I can close it, and I look up at him with my heart going like I've run ten miles instead of ten yards.
"Madonna," I say, because it's the only thing left in my mouth. "Vale. Move your fucking hand."
He looks at me for one long second. Then he steps back.
I drive.
Gemma
Mom hands me another potato and I peel it over the sink, the skin coming off in long strips that curl into the drain.
Through the window above the faucet I can see Nina in the back garden with Dad.
She's wearing his old fishing hat, which comes down to her eyebrows, and she's holding a trowel with both hands while he points at the dirt.
"He's putting in garlic," Mom says. "It's too late in the season for it, but he wanted her to have a job."
"She likes jobs."
"I noticed." Mom slides a peeled potato from my pile and quarters it on the cutting board. "She told me this morning that she waters better than Grandpa because Grandpa waters the leaves and you're supposed to water the roots."
"Somebody taught her that." I don't say who. Mariela had a window box, and Nina helped with it every Sunday until we ran. My throat goes tight and I peel faster.
Mom doesn't push. That's the thing about being here — nobody pushes.
Dad hasn't asked one question since I showed up in a car he didn't recognize with a duffel bag, Nina, and a face that told him not to ask.
He hugged me, then he carried Nina's bag upstairs and put a nightlight in the outlet by her bed without being told she needed one.
Outside, Nina drops a garlic clove into the hole Dad dug and pats the dirt down. He says something and she laughs, and the laugh carries all the way through the glass. It's her big laugh, the one that starts in her stomach. She didn't have that laugh at the diner. She has it here.
"Did you call the clinic back?" Mom asks. She keeps her eyes on the cutting board when she says it, which is how she asks all the hard questions.
"Tuesday. Nine-thirty."
"I'll drive you."
"I can drive myself."
"I know you can." She scrapes the potatoes into the pot. "I'll drive you anyway."
I let it go. Three weeks ago I would have argued, because taking help still felt like owing, and owing felt like being owned. It's getting easier. That scares me a little, how fast a person can get soft again when the house is warm and the door doesn't need checking.
I check it anyway. Every night, twice. I know the sound the porch step makes and which cars belong on this road.
Marco is still out there somewhere — I spotted the gray sedan the second day, parked past the Hendersons' mailbox, and I didn't tell anyone.
I should mind. A man watching the house on Luca's dime, and I should call and tell him to pull his people off my parents' street.
I haven't called. Not to yell, not to talk, not once in a month. The phone sits on my old dresser next to a jewelry box I've had since middle school, and every night I look at it and every night I leave it there.
It isn't strength.
If it were strength I'd have stopped thinking about him, and I think about him while I peel potatoes and while I fold Nina's shirts and while I lie in my old bed.
I think about his hands on a pancake pan.
I think about the way he said I can't lose you, and then I think about the contract, and the proof they needed, and I stop thinking and start over the next morning.
The back door bangs and Nina comes in with dirt to her elbows.
"Mama, we planted forty garlics." She holds up four fingers, then thinks about it and adds a thumb. "In the spring they come up and we can eat them."
"That's a lot of garlic, baby." I crouch and wipe her hands with the dish towel, working the dirt out from under her little nails. "You'll have to help Grandma cook it all."
"Okay." She stands still for the towel, patient, then looks up at me from under the fishing hat. "Is Luca done with his work yet?"
The towel stops in my hands.
"Not yet, sweetheart."
"When he's done, we go back to our apartment," she says.
Not a question. She's telling me the plan, the way I told it to her, because I couldn't stand in a gas station bathroom in Illinois and explain the truth to a four-year-old.
"Because my yellow blanket is there. And he said in the spring we can get flowers for the balcony. "
"He said that?"
"When you were in the shower." She wiggles her clean fingers, satisfied, and heads for the living room. "Red ones."
Mom looks at me across the kitchen. She doesn't say anything. I turn back to the sink, picking up the peeler, and the water runs cold over my wrists.
Luca
The sign for the motel buzzes against the dark, half its letters dead. I pass her parents' street twice before I let myself stop looking. A white house with a porch light on, a garden dug up along the fence, a gray sedan parked fifty yards down with Marco's shape behind the wheel.
I could park behind Marco and wait until morning in the car.
I've done longer stakeouts. But a man sitting outside her house all night is not a man who's changed.
It's a man doing what he's always done. Watching from a distance, deciding for her, calling it protection.
She'd be right to look at that car and tell me to get the hell out of her life a second time.
So I drive back to the motel and take a room from a kid who doesn't look up from his phone.
The room is small and it smells like shit. I set my bag on the chair, put the gun on the nightstand, and sit on the edge of the bed.
I take out my phone and call Marco. He picks up on the second ring, voice low.
"She's home," he says, before I ask. "Lights went out around ten. The kid's window went dark at eight. Same as every night."
"You're sure it's her in the house. Not just the parents."
"She peeled potatoes at the kitchen window at six. The little one was in the garden with the grandfather. Planting." He pauses. "You in town?"
"Motel on the county road. The one with the dead sign."
"You want me to hold position?"
Marco has sat on that street for a month. Three passes a day — morning, afternoon, night — paid to do one thing, which is see with his own eyes that she's okay and report it to me. Just to see her upright, breathing and put it in a text so I could keep breathing too.
"Go get some sleep," I tell him.
"And tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow morning I knock on her door. If she lets me talk, we'll see. If she tells me to go —" My throat closes around the rest of it. "If she tells me to go, then you're back on the schedule and nothing changes."
"Understood." Another pause, longer. Marco is not a man who volunteers, which is why I trust him. "For what it's worth, she looks better than she did the first week. She laughs with the kid now."
I don't have an answer for that, so I say, "Buonanotte."
"Night, boss."
The line goes dead. I set the phone on the nightstand next to the gun and lie back on top of the covers with my boots still on.
She laughs with the kid now. A month away from me and she laughs.
The honest thing would be to take that as my answer and drive back to Chicago before sunrise.
She built a life once and I was the wrecking crew that came through it.
Maybe the best thing I ever do for her is stay a name she never mentions.
I've thought this every day for a month and every day I stayed put, because she asked me to go and a man who claims to love her should be able to do one goddamn thing she asks.
But things have changed now.
If she's pregnant, it's mine. There's no version where it isn't, and no version where I let her carry that alone.
She can hate me. She can slam the door on my hand.
But she'll do it knowing I came, knowing I'll stand in the yard or the street or the next town over for as long as it takes, and that this time I'm not hiding a single thing from her.
The heater under the window kicks on and rattles. I watch the ceiling and count the hours until a decent knock. Eight, maybe nine, after the kid's had breakfast. Nine hours. I've waited out longer nights with men trying to kill me on the other side of the door.
This feels worse. On the other side of this one is a woman who might simply say no.
I close my eyes and don't sleep.