Page 32 of Graceless

Under the el at 86th with the D banging overhead, past the fish store with the gates half down and Sal Jr. hosing the sidewalk, past Mrs. Esposito on her folding chair in forty-degree March like the chair was a government post she could not abandon.

"Caterina. You look thin."

I'd seen her two days ago. "You look beautiful, Mrs. E."

"Don't be fresh."

Nina's kitchen at gravy hour: the pot going since ten, the TV arguing with nobody in the front room, Gina doing homework at one end of the table with the specific fury of a twelve-year-old asked to exist near family. Nina's mother was at the stove, and Nina's grandmother was at the table breaking the ends off green beans, and Nina was everywhere at once — and for one second, standing in the doorway with my containers, I saw them the way you see a painting. Four of them. One line, unbroken, running in both directions. And for a second I couldn't swallow.

Then Nina's grandmother said, "Caterina, you gonna stand there like the gas man?" and Nina's mother put the spoon in my hand and told me to stir, and the moment passed the way moments are allowed to pass in that kitchen: standing up, with a job.

Nina cooked and cross-examined at the same time, which is her gift, wooden spoon reclaimed and pointed like a gavel.

"So. The appliance. How's the appliance."

"He sits. I work. It's riveting."

"Uh-huh." Stir. "Connie's cousin walked past your place twice this week. And Donnie's been running commentary up and down the block — man the size of a garage door, eight o'clock every morning, like clockwork. He does a whole bit, I hear. There's a voice."

"Donnie needs a hobby."

"Donnie HAS a hobby." The spoon pointed at me. "Same hobby as everybody on that block. It's you."

I made it through dinner — through the macaroni, through the gravy, through Gina's recitation of everything wrong with the seventh grade, I held the line like a professional.

She took me apart at the sink. She washed, I dried, and we both looked at the window over the faucet instead of at each other, because that's where the real talking happens in that house.

"Okay," Nina said, to the window. "Now the part you've been not saying all afternoon."

"There's no part."

"Cat. You've dried that same pot three times. Your face has been doing a thing since the rigatoni. I've known that face since Sister Immaculata's class. Spill it or I start guessing, and you hate my guessing."

I looked at the pot. The pot had no advice.

"Two guys pulled a knife on me on 25th," I said, "and Barrett took it away from them in about one second, and then he walked me home, and then we kissed on my stoop until my legs stopped working, and then he vanished. Again. That's the part."

Silence. The faucet ran. In the front room the TV said something enthusiastic about a mattress sale.

"MADONNA—" Nina shut the water off and turned around with the sponge still in her fist, and I watched her whole system try to process two emergencies at once, the fear and the delight colliding in her face like two guys going for the same parking spot. "A KNIFE? Somebody pulled a KNIFE on you and I'm hearing about it at my SINK? Are you — were you hurt, did they touch you, why didn't you⁠—"

"I'm fine. Nobody touched me. It was over before it started, Nina, I mean that literally, I've had sneezes that lasted longer⁠—"

"—and you KISSED him?" The delight won the parking spot. She threw the sponge into the sink. "You kissed the refrigerator. You MADE OUT with the REFRIGERATOR. On the STOOP, like it's 1962⁠—"

"Keep your voice down⁠—"

"—Gina, sweetheart, go check on the television."

Gina, who had absolutely been listening, evacuated with her homework at the speed of someone planning to listen from the hallway.

Nina turned back to me. She gripped the counter. Quieter, with her whole chest: "Tell me everything. Start with the knife, because I need to be scared first. Then we do the kissing, because I need my strength."

So I told her. The supply run, the side street — "you took the SIDE street" — the two of them off the loading dock, the forty-dollars-a-gallon thought, and then Barrett arriving out of nowhere, the knife folding closed in his hand like a church bulletin.

"Out of nowhere from WHERE? You left him at the house."

"I left him at the house."