"Walking."
Nora has decided. She’s been deciding things with this exact register since she was twenty-two months old. Walking is the only acceptable mode of transportation when wearing the purple snow boots. Driving is for sneakers. The boots and the car are not compatible. Nora's logic on this point has been internally consistent for fourteen months. I am not going to be the one to dismantle the architecture.
"Walking," I say.
"Walking," Nora says, satisfied.
Maeve hands me the field-trip permission form on the kitchen island.
"Sign this. Children's Museum on Friday."
"Friday."
"Yes. Brontos is going."
"Brontos is going to the Children's Museum."
"Brontos has not been to a museum in three weeks," Nora says. "He’s overdue."
I look at the form.
The form is a single sheet. The top third is the trip details. The bottom third is the parent/guardian signature line. There are two lines. One says PARENT/GUARDIAN. The other says PARENT/GUARDIAN. Maeve has filled in her name on the top line in the careful handwriting she uses for forms that will not matter for ten years and might matter for fifty. The bottom line is empty.
Maeve hands me a pen.
She doesn’t say anything.
She doesn’t narrate the moment. She doesn’t point out that the bottom line is for me. She’s decided, in the fierce private architecture of a wife who has been married to me for fifty-sixdays, that she’s not going to make a thing of the moment my name goes on a piece of school paperwork for our daughter for the first time.
I sign.
My hand is steady.
My hand is steady because I have been a man who kills men with steady hands for fifteen years, and the hand has been steady for fifteen years for that reason, and the hand is steady this morning for the same reason, but in service of a different work.
Lex Konstantinos.
Two words. Black ink on white paper. Below is my wife's name. On a Bic pen Maeve handed me at our kitchen island at 8:33 AM on a Monday in January.
Maeve takes the form back. She slides it into a folder. She slides the folder into Nora's small canvas school bag. She doesn’t look at me. She doesn’t have to.
Nora is at the door. "Walking."
I crouch. I take her small mittened hand.
"Walking, ‘agápi mou.’"
? ? ?
Twelve blocks of Brookline sidewalk on a Monday morning in late January.
The temperature is twenty-eight degrees. The sky is that flat gray that means snow by the afternoon. Nora is on my right. Brontos is under her left arm. Her right hand is in mine, mittened. The purple snow boots are clomping on the salted concrete.
I have a Sig in the shoulder holster under my coat.
I have a knife in the small sheath inside my left boot.
I am the most dangerous man in Boston walking down a Brookline sidewalk holding the hand of an almost-three-year-old who is narrating something to her stuffed elephant.
