Page 124 of Graceless

I made the plate instead. The soft cheese she had been favoring, the good crackers, the pear cut the way she cuts it — eighths, cored, skin on — and I carried it into the studio while she was deep in the lamp and the varnish, and set it on the bench's far corner, where the light would find it, and left without one word.

At two-twenty I heard the plate slide toward her. Then, to the child, conversational, over the tape's hiss:

"Your father thinks he's subtle."

I stood in her kitchen holding a dish towel I had no use for, grinning at a wall, and put neither the towel nor the grin down for some time.

On the third night she was at the sink and I was drying — she allowed this now, the dishes, wordless, a border town where our two countries traded — and she handed me the pot and did not let go of it.

"Was any of it real?"

I stood very still, both of us holding the pot.

"The beach," she said. "Before. When you knew and you didn't tell me. You lay there next to me in the dark and let me be happy. So I need to know what I was next to. Was it real, or was it you managing me?"

"It was the realest hour of my existence."

"Don't—"

"You asked. I am answering." I did not let go of the pot either. "I lied about one thing on that beach. One. Do not let it eat the rest. The cold sand was real. Your laugh was real. The thing you said about the horizon was real." Her chin came up; she knew what she said about the horizon. "Take those from yourself and I have stolen twice."

She looked at me with the water running, and her eyes were bright and furious and something else.

"I hate that you say things like that," she said, "from the couch."

"The couch is fair."

"I know it's fair. I decided it's fair." She let go of the pot and shut off the water, and stood there gripping the sink's edge. "That's not — God. You want to know the worst part? I'm standing at my sink wanting to be held by the person I'm furious at, and both of those are true at the same time, all day, every day, and nobody warns you about that. Nina didn't warn me. The nuns certainly didn't warn me."

"Caterina."

"Don't come over here."

"I am not moving." I was not. Every separate part of me was voting and I was not moving. "But say the first thing again."

"Which."

"The wanting." My voice came out lower than I run it. "Say it again."

She turned around. She looked at me down the length of her kitchen — flushed, chin up, hospital bracelet finally off her wrist that morning, her hand rising without her permission to the base of her throat — and for four full seconds the kitchen was the temperature of the day I met her.

"Dry the pot," she said, and walked to the bedroom, and shut the door.

And then, through it, muffled, furious:

"—and I have half a mind to make you live outside in the cold. In the doghouse. Only without the house. The dog would come inside."

I stood in her kitchen holding a wet pot, grinning at a shut door like a fool of one century instead of a hundred, and from behind the door, quieter, almost lost in the pillow:

"Goodnight, Raq."

"Goodnight, Caterina."

I dried the pot. I folded myself onto the couch. I pulled the ugly afghan up to my sternum, and lay in the dark listening to two heartbeats settle behind a door that was one night closer to opening, and I kept the watch, and it kept me.

CHAPTER 35

CATE