Page 137 of Graceless

"You want a receipt?"

"I want two."

She stamped them without asking why — bang, bang — and slid them under the glass and looked at the next number, because to everyone else in that room it was a Wednesday.

Raq had come downtown with me — of course he'd come, he'd have walked me to the mailbox if I let him — and then stopped at the door of the office and stayed outside, on the sidewalk, without being asked. Because he knew whose errand this was. Three years of a ledger with two names on it, and only one of us left to close it.

He was exactly where I'd left him when I came out, and he didn't ask. He looked at my face and had the whole answer.

"It is done?"

"It's done."

I stood there on the sidewalk with both receipts in my coat pocket, one hand pressed over them, and let out a breath I'd been holding since the funeral.

One's for you, Nonna.

The house was settled. The house was mine. And Joey could finally, finally shut up about selling it. Raq offered me his arm like it was 1948, and we walked to the train.

Sunday, Nina fed us — lasagna and braciole and the good tablecloth, her husband carving like a surgeon under supervision, Gina, and two of Nina's nephews from Bay Ridge orbiting the table because their mother had a shift.

And Raq sat in the chair that had stood empty through those two awful weeks in March. He filled it the way he fills doorways. He was wearing the gray sweater I'd bought him — buying the clothes goes both directions now — and Nina kept looking at him like the furniture had finally been delivered.

Nina had taken one look at him on her stoop and pointed at the chair like a judge issuing a sentence. "You. There. You eat everything I put down and you don't argue."

"I am amenable," he said.

I elbowed him. "Nobody says amenable. Say 'sure.'"

"Sure," he said, in exactly the same voice, and Nina looked at me over his head with her eyebrows at maximum altitude and put an extra braciole on his plate for reasons she'd have called instinct.

He ate everything she put down. He didn't argue. And Gina was in her seat — the seat next to his, the one she'd informed the entire second seating was permanent — before he'd finished sitting down in his.

She waited until the braciole. Then she took a folded piece of loose-leaf out of her pocket and smoothed it flat next to her plate, and I recognized it, and my throat did something complicated, because she'd been carrying that list since the bad Sundays. Since the weeks he was gone and nobody would tell her anything.

"I have questions," Gina said. "I saved them."

"Ask," Raq said.

"Where were you?"

The table went quiet in that specific way. Nina's fork paused. And Raq set his own fork down and gave a twelve-year-old the full attention he gives structural loads.

"I made a mistake," he said. "A big one. I hurt people I love, and I came back, and I'm not going to do it again."

Gina held his eyes, checking the math the way her mother checks a dye job. Then she nodded, once, and consulted the list.

"Okay. Two. Did you ever play for the Knicks?"

"No."

"Could you?"

Raq considered this with the full gravity of a man deposed under oath. "It would not be fair," he said, and Gina wrote something next to the question — she scored it — and Nina pointed her serving fork down the table.

"Nobody talks basketball at my table. Marco, tell him about the volcano."

Marco told him about the volcano. At length. With the lid off the shoebox. And Raq turned the model a quarter-turn under the chandelier light and studied it the way he studies rooflines.