"I need to get out of this house," I said. "One hour. A real errand, in the real world, with people who don't bring guns to brunch. Otherwise I go feral, and you'll have a rabid nurse loose in your beautiful fortress, and I promise you Galina will side with me."
He looked at me the way he looks at a risk he is pricing. "It is not safe."
"Nothing is safe. You told me that yourself, in a doorway, very romantically. So I would like to be unsafe at a grocery store for an hour instead of unsafe in a panic room with good lighting."
"Define errand."
"Food. From a human grocery store, not whatever you people do, which I assume involves a helicopter and a man named Sergei."
"We do not use a helicopter for groceries."
"For what, then?"
"That is not a grocery conversation." He said it without a flicker, and I decided not to pull the thread. "What do you need that Galina cannot have delivered?"
"To be a person. For an hour. I want to cook for her, with my own hands, with food I picked out myself, like a woman with a life. Before I forget I used to have one."
Something moved behind his eyes, and I understood I'd found the lever. Not the danger. The cooking-for-Galina. The man had a soft place after all, and it was shaped exactly like the people he had decided were his to keep breathing.
"One hour," he said. "My car. My route. And the second I tell you to move, you move, and we argue about it afterward."
"You're no fun at parties."
"I do not go to parties."
"Somehow that tracks."
He took me to a market in a stretch of Brooklyn that has never once been impressed by anybody, which I loved on sight and which Kolya moved through like a man touring a country whose customs he had read about and never quite believed. He did not know how to be in a bodega. He stood too straight. He counted the exits. He held himself like a bodyguard at a wedding he did not trust, and it was, I am not exaggerating, the most reassuring thing I had learned about him in three weeks, because a man who cannot relax in a corner store is a man who was never once allowed to.
There was a cat on the counter, because there is always a cat, a fat orange tyrant identified by a strip of masking tape as Mr. Bibbons. Kolya considered Mr. Bibbons. Mr. Bibbons considered Kolya. Some ancient treaty was negotiated between them in a language older than either country they came from, and then Kolya, the most dangerous man in this borough, adjusted his entire route by one full aisle to avoid the animal.
"Are you actually afraid of the cat?"
"I do not trust anything that has decided it has no use for me." He said it like a philosophy. "The cat has decided."
I sent him for eggs because I wanted to watch. He found them. He lifted a carton, held it a careful inch from his body, turned it, inspected it for a threat it did not contain, and stood there under the buzzing fluorescent light of a corner store holding a dozen perfectly ordinary eggs like they might be wired to a timer, and something in my chest simply gave way.
He stood in a bodega holding a carton of eggs like it might detonate. I have never wanted anyone more.
"And this?" He held up the bunch of cilantro I'd put in his hands the way you hand someone a baby they did not ask to hold.
"Cilantro. You cook with it."
"It tastes like soap to certain people. It is genetic."
"Of course. You know the genetics of an herb and not how to carry an egg."
"An egg is fragile and has done nothing to earn the protection. The herb is not trying to break on the way home." He said it with the grave sincerity of a man defending himself before a judge, and I had to turn and pretend to study a shelf of canned beans so he would not catch my face doing the thing it had started doing.
We bought too much. Onions, and a cut of pork that drew a low approving sound out of him in Russian, and the good rice, and the cilantro, which he carried to the register held slightly apart from the eggs, as though keeping two unpredictable parties separated.
The man at the register knew me, or knew my type, the way bodega men know everyone, and he rang us up without looking at Kolya twice, which is its own quiet Brooklyn genius, the ability to clock a dangerous man and decide his money is the same color as anyone else's. He slipped a free plantain into the bag and toldme, in Spanish, that my husband looked nervous and I should feed him. I did not correct the word husband. I told myself it was not worth the breath. I am, as it turns out, a fluent liar to everyone but Kolya. Outside, the block smelled of a halal cart and somebody's idling bass and the wet-concrete smell of a city that has seen everything and forgiven none of it, and for about eight minutes I was a person again. Just a woman buying dinner with a man, out in the world, in the light. I let myself keep the eight minutes. Even then I knew I was only borrowing them, and that the city always comes to collect.
It was the bass that gave it away, or the loss of it. The car with the heavy speakers went quiet, and then it was idling with no reason left to idle, and I watched Kolya's whole body change between one step and the next, the human in him stepping back and the colder thing rising up behind his eyes.
"Get in the car," he said. Quietly. Pleasantly. The pleasant was the part that scared me.
"Tell me while I walk," I said, already moving, because I had finally learned that much.
