Page 43 of Graceless

My hand hit the window frame.

I hadn't put it there.

And the kitchen was gone.

Hands in water. Not hers — smaller, older, the knuckles swollen, a wedding band worn down to a wire. Steam coming up off the basin. A window above the sink with the light going amber behind it, late light, the end of a day. The smell of something cooking.

Someone humming. Four notes, then the same four notes again.

Sit down. You've been standing all day.

And something in my chest came apart.

Then the linoleum. The empty street. My hand flat on the frame, my whole arm locked.

My body had moved before I did. That does not happen to me. That has never happened to me.

"You okay?" She'd turned, drying a cup, watching me with the eyes that miss nothing. "You went somewhere."

"Old memory," I said, and had no idea whether that was true. "It visits."

"You want to talk about it?"

"No."

"Okay," she said.

She crossed the room and put her hand flat on my bare back, palm across both scars, without looking at what she was touching. She left it there for the length of one breath. Then she took it away, went to her easel, and picked up her tweezers like nothing had happened.

The hands had been small. The ring had been worn down to a wire. I didn't know whose they were.

I put my coat on over nothing and walked the block, because the alternative was standing in that basement watching her work in my shirt.

Donnie was on the stoop in a coat over boxer shorts, going through a handful of mail without opening any of it.

"Didn't hear you leave last night." He let that sit. "Didn't hear you come in this morning, either." His eyes went to the coat, and the nothing under it, and came back up. "Cold out for that."

I said nothing.

Silence is a tool. Most men fill it with whatever they were holding back, and Donnie is most men. He shifted the mail from one hand to the other. He looked at the street. He looked at me again, and whatever he saw made his throat move, and he said it anyway.

"She's had a hard couple years. That's all I'm saying." Faster now. "Guys come around a woman with a house. I've seen it before."

The thing in me that has ended arguments for longer than this borough has had a name came up off the floor and looked at him.

He had no idea. He stood there in his slippers with his mail and told me to my face that he was watching me.

I put it down.

Nobody asked him to do that. Nobody was paying him. He would lose, and quickly, and he knew it, and some part of him had weighed that on the way out the door and come out here regardless.

The species does this. I have never gotten used to it.

He waited for me to answer. I didn't. The waiting went on long enough that it started to cost him, and he shifted his weight, and I watched a man reach the end of his courage with nowhere good to put himself.

"Your bathroom window doesn't close," I said. "The sash is painted up. Two-inch gap over the alley, fire escape under it."

He blinked. "That's been like that since my mother⁠—"