Page 113 of Graceless

"No," he said. "It is not."

Four times in three days he had picked me up and moved me. He was not going to be the thing that moved me home.

"May I come with you," he said.

First time. First time in the whole of it that he asked me anything about where his body would be.

"Yes," I said. "You'll sit in the back."

Nina got there in eighty-one minutes.

I heard her before I saw her.

"—Fontana, F-O-N-T, thirty-four, she came in this afternoon, and I've been driving for an hour and twenty minutes so if you tell me one more time that you can't confirm⁠—"

"Ma'am—"

"Do I look like a ma'am to you? Caterina! CATE!"

"In here!"

And then she was in the doorway in her salon smock with her coat over it and her hair up in a claw clip, and she looked at me on that bed, and her whole face broke and reassembled in about a second and a half.

She crossed the room and put both hands on my face.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. I'm here."

I did not cry in front of the tech. I did not cry in front of the doctor. I did not cry in front of the man who took me. I cried all over Nina Costanzo's salon smock for a solid two minutes while she held the back of my head and said the same four words in a rotation like a rosary — I'm here, I've got you — and did not ask me a single question until I was done.

Then she stood up, and turned around, and saw him.

He had come in behind her and gone to the corner, and he was standing there with his coat over his arm and his eyes down, and I watched Nina Costanzo look up at all of him and see nothing but a man who had made her best friend cry.

"You," she said.

"Nina—"

"No." She didn't raise her voice. That's how I knew how bad it was. "You've got a hospital and a heartbeat and a woman in a paper gown, and I've got four days of no phone calls. You're going to explain that in the car."

"Nina, he's⁠—"

"In the car, Caterina."

The Camry smelled like her — that salon smell, the sweet chemical one that gets into everything — and she had a blanket on the back seat and a bottle of water in the cupholder and a paper bag of food from a gas station because the woman cannot arrive anywhere empty-handed even when she is furious.

He folded himself into the back with the blanket over his knees like a bus passenger. I got the front, reclined, feet up on the dash, because a doctor had told me to stay off them.

Nina drove eleven miles without saying one word.

Then, at the light where the highway starts: "Okay. Talk."

"Nina—"

"Not you. Him." She caught his eyes in the mirror. "You. Talk."

"I took her," he said.

I turned around so fast my seatbelt locked.