Page 93 of Graceless

And that is if she gets her fifty years. A woman alone gets them — grows old in her house, restores her saints, dies in her own bed with her people around her, the whole mortal fortune paid out in full. A woman standing next to me is a woman standing next to the one thing in this borough that every eye above it and below it has turned to look at. They do not have to touch her. They only have to be near, and near me is where the shortening happens.

She gets the years. All of them. That is the whole term, and I am the only one who can pay it, and the price is that I am not there to see them.

Better now. Better me. Better one winter of grief than fifty years walking toward it holding hands — and better fifty years without me than what her life could come to standing beside me.

I turned north, with my collar wrong, into the dark between streetlights.

I told myself it was mercy.

CHAPTER 26

CATE

My eyes opened at ten past six on Sunday morning, and before I had one thought in my head my hand was moving across the bed.

Cold sheets. All the way to the far edge, cold — not slept-in-and-left cold. Never-came-to-bed cold.

I lay there a second with my hand flat on his side. The radiator ticked. Upstairs, Donnie's floor creaked once and went quiet. No water running anywhere. No weight anywhere. No one in this house but me.

I sat up and put my feet on the floor and walked down the hall — walked, bare feet on cold linoleum, past the bathroom with its door standing open on nothing, into the kitchen.

His cup was in the rack. Washed, upside down, next to mine.

I stood in the doorway in his shirt and looked at that cup for a long time.

The pad was on the table. Not on the fridge — on the table, dead center, with the pen lying on top of it, squared to the edge like a place setting.

I crossed the kitchen and picked the pen up and put it down and turned the pad around. On the clean page, under Saturday's torn edge, in the careful ancient hand that signs my insurance forms:

I decided. I will not tell you to run.

I read it. I read it again. The radiator ticked and my feet went numb on the linoleum and I stood there reading eight words until they stopped being words.

Then I pulled out his chair and sat down in it, because my legs were done, and I put the note on the table in front of me and looked at it some more, and the thing that finally came up out of me, in the empty kitchen, out loud, was:

"You kept the rule."

No disappearing. If you go, you say you're going. Even one word. I wrote that law myself, at this table, and pressed the period in so hard it went through to the next page, and he signed it, and he kept it. One word required. He left me eight. He stood in my kitchen in the middle of the night and complied.

That was the part. Not the going. The keeping. Any man can leave; the men I come from leave fine, leave loud, leave with the truck half loaded. It takes something older and colder to leave correctly — to read the contract by lamplight and find the crack in it and go through the crack sideways, all terms technically intact.

Then I thought: call him.

I got my phone off the charger and the card out of the wallet drawer — the insurance card, the office number, the only number that has ever existed for him — and dialed it with a steady hand, and held it to my ear.

Three tones. Then a woman's voice, recorded before I was born: the number you have reached is not in service.

I stood there and let it say it twice more, and then I lowered the phone and looked at the screen — call ended, eleven seconds — and I understood, standing in my kitchen holding a dead number printed on a card for a company that had probably stopped existing at whatever hour he walked out of this house —

There was no place to look.

Not a job. Not a family. Not a town he's from, a bar he goes to, a buddy who'd have heard something. You cannot canvass the sky. He was the only door into his entire world and he had closed himself behind himself, and a man who lives nowhere, who has lived nowhere for longer than there have been maps, was gone into all of it at once, and I could spend the rest of my life at this phone and never reach so much as a ring.

I put the phone face-down on the counter.

And then it got me. Not the leaving — the gone. The full size of the gone. It came up from underneath like water through a floor, and I slid down the cabinets to the linoleum in his shirt and I cried the way I hadn't cried since the funeral — ugly, animal, wringing — with the coffee going cold on the counter and nobody, nobody, nobody to hear it, which was the whole point of every sound I was making.

I don't know how long. The light moved. The radiator quit and started twice.