Page 139 of Graceless

"He's gonna be terrible at it."

"He's not going to be terrible at it."

"Big guys are always terrible at it. Anthony's cousin, six-five, just about your guy's height, couldn't hit water off a boat."

"Nina. Trust me. He's not going to be terrible at it."

She narrowed her eyes at the window, at the two shapes turning the corner by the laundromat, filing that away with everything else she'd filed tonight.

"He ate the whole dinner with the baby fork," she said. "You notice that? Little Marco's fork, from the drawer mix-up. Man that size. Coulda asked for another one — I'd have gotten him another one." She flipped the towel off her shoulder and handed it to me, because in this family love is a dish rotation. "He didn't want to make it a thing. He didn't want anybody to feel bad about a fork."

"That's him."

"Yeah." She looked at me sideways, the look with forty years in it. "You did good, Cat. Whatever he is."

"Big old weirdo is what he is," I said, and she barked a laugh, and I laughed, and whatever had been sitting in that whatever got up and left the room, evicted, because Nina and I had decided it was funny instead.

The block was going gold at the edges, that last hour before the streetlights come on. Down at the park, my brother was teaching basketball to a fallen angel.

I dried the dish and put it away in Nina's cabinet.

Six blocks from here, the house was mine. Settled. Kept. And tonight a man who doesn't sleep would stand in its quiet, listening to two heartbeats.

The keeper keeps the house. The house keeps the family. Nonna taught me that with a rolling pin in her hand.

Turns out it works.

EPILOGUE

CATE

By June the block had its windows open again, and so did I.

I was at the bench with the gate light on and the evening coming in — a little Madonna and Child on the easel, private client, nothing haunted about her except the price — and I was working around the curve of myself the way I'd learned to, the reach adjusted, the stool pushed back, the tenant under my apron making her opinions known every time I leaned.

She. I'd stopped trying it out. It had stuck.

Down the hall Raq was setting the table for three, which meant Sar was coming to dinner.

That's a house rule now, written nowhere, enforced absolutely: Sar hoses down at the marina, changes his jacket, and stands downwind on the stoop until cleared for entry. We don't talk about the first trimester. The first trimester, my superpower nose and Sar's profession had gone to war, and the war had ended the same way every time — me, sprinting, him in the doorway saying again? with genuine scientific interest — and a creature older than the ocean he fishes learned to be afraid of a pregnant woman's stomach. Raq installed the marina rule personally. Sar submitted like a man who'd seen the alternative.

He arrived at six with a bottle of wine for the brothers, a sparkling cider for me — cold, the good kind, because Sar does not forget a detail that matters — and lamb his guy swore on, smelling like drugstore soap, and held his arms out for inspection.

"Cleared," I said.

"The captain thanks you." He kissed the top of my head and went to argue with Raq about the grill, and my kitchen filled up with the sound of two ancient beings disagreeing about charcoal, and I stood at the sink with my hands in the water and let the whole ordinary miracle of it soak in like the light.

After dinner, after Sar headed back to the marina with the empty lamb dish and a container of leftovers he did not argue about, I stood in front of the saints.

All eleven of them, in their frames, in their rows — Nonna's wall, kept burning, dusted every Friday — and I stood there with my hand on the curve and got quiet in a way I could feel him notice from the other room. Two seconds later he was in the doorway.

"Caterina."

"I'm fine."

"You are standing at the wall." He said it the way other men say you're crying.

"I'm thinking." I kept my eyes on Saint Anne, who knew something about all this. "Maybe we should get married."