Page 115 of Graceless

"Yes," he said.

That shut her up for about a quarter mile. It shut me up too.

"Say that again."

"You are right. In that house I was the danger to her. I have understood that since I stood on a road in the rain and watched her walk away from me carrying my child." Level. Unhurried. Nothing defending itself. "You will not have to protect her from me again. But there are others, and they are real, and they are not mine, and that is all I am able to give you."

Nina hit the wheel with the flat of her hand.

"Nobody in this car will tell me anything!"

"Nina—"

"Has he done this before? Has he ever put a hand on you? And don't do the face, Caterina, I've got a cousin who did the face for six years⁠—"

"No. Never. Not once." I turned all the way around in the seat to say it, and my seatbelt locked again. "Nina, I have never once been afraid of him hurting me. Not for a second. Not in that house, not on that road, not ever."

She drove. Both hands. Ten and two. I watched her jaw work, and I watched her go through everything she knows, everything anybody from our block knows, and land somewhere.

"He's in something," she said.

I didn't answer.

"That's it, isn't it. He's in something, and it's the kind of thing where people come looking, and that's why there's no company, no cousins, no mother, nobody at that table but him." She glanced at the mirror and back at the road, and her voice dropped. "Is it the kind of thing a person gets out of?"

"No," I said, because that one was true.

She was quiet for a while. Then she nodded, once, short, like a woman confirming a thing she'd already half decided.

And I let her have it.

She had put my whole life into a shape she grew up next to — half this neighborhood has an uncle nobody asks about — and it was the wrong shape, and it was the only one that was going to hold.

"I'm asking you to love me with a piece missing," I said. "And if that's not something you can do, I'll understand, and I'll still be at your table on Sunday, and I will never hold it against you."

Nina drove. The Sunrise Highway signs went by, and then the LIE, and then the first sign that said Brooklyn, and she didn't say anything for eleven exits.

Then: "Do you know what I thought? These four days. I thought you were dead in a ditch, and then I thought you'd run off with him and were embarrassed, and then I went back to the ditch." She wiped her eye with the heel of her hand and put it right back on the wheel. "You want me to love you with a piece missing. Caterina. I have been loving you with pieces missing since you were nine years old and stopped talking for a month. That's not a new job. That's the whole job."

I couldn't say anything.

"I don't need to know what he is," she said. "I know what you are." She looked in the mirror, at the back seat, and her voice went to a place I have heard exactly twice, both times about her children. "But you. Whatever you are. You listen to me now. If you ever take her anywhere again — if she is ever four days quiet again — I will not call the police. I will come get her myself. Do you understand what I'm telling you?"

"Yes," he said.

"Say it back."

"You will come and get her yourself."

"That's right," said Nina, and put her blinker on, and took the exit for the Belt.

She double-parked outside the house a little after nine that night with the hazards going, and half the block was still out, because it was the first warm evening of the year.

"Caterina! Where you been, we don't see you⁠—"

"Working, Mrs. Esposito!"

"She's been working," Nina said, over the roof of the car, in the voice that ends conversations on that block. "Leave her alone, she's tired."