Page 95 of Graceless

"Working."

"Haven't heard him on the stairs." He wasn't looking at me. He was looking past me, down into the apartment, taking a slow inventory of the dark like a man pricing it. "Couple nights now. Real quiet down here. I notice things, Cat-a-REE-na. People think I don't notice."

I took the envelope out of his hand and shut the door on him, and threw the bolt loud enough that he'd hear it, and stood there until his feet went back up the stairs.

Wednesday I said to the angel, "You too, huh."

The muslin didn't answer. Under it a wingless thing went on grieving over somebody's buried name, four hundred years of it, and I stood with my hip against Nonna's workbench and thought: at least somebody painted you a face to do it with.

I worked. Condition notes, the treatment report, flat language, everything dated. My hands were steady all week — steady through all of it — and I hated them a little for that.

The second Sunday I went to Nina's again, because you don't cancel Sunday — canceling Sunday in that family is how you end up with four people and a priest in your kitchen by Tuesday. I sat through the whole meal next to the empty place. Boston now, I said. Big claim, a warehouse thing, back when it's settled. Gina didn't bring the list this time, and somehow that was worse.

Nina walked me out with the leftovers, and at the bottom of the stoop she stepped in front of me.

"Okay. Enough. Where is he."

"Boston. I told you⁠—"

"There's no warehouse in Boston, Cate. Insurance men don't disappear to warehouses, they have phones, and you've had my mother's funeral face for eight days." She had the container against her chest like a shield and her voice down low, out of range of the windows. "Did he hurt you?"

"No."

"Did he leave you?"

And I looked at my best friend under her porch light, and I had the whole thing right there behind my teeth. Two words. He left. That's all it would have taken — and she'd have had me inside with a coffee and the door shut before the second word finished, and it would have been out in the world, and true. Said things are true things. As long as nobody heard it out loud, he was working, he was in Boston, there was a version of Thursday where a key still turned in that door.

"He's working, Nina."

She stared at me. Somewhere behind her the second seating was going full volume through the screen door.

"Okay," she said finally, not okay at all. "You're doing this. Fine. You know where I am when you stop." And she put the leftovers in my hands and went back inside without kissing me goodbye, which in that family is a slammed door.

I walked the six blocks home with my level voice and the procedure and nobody left to use either one on.

A week went by like that, and then most of another one, and somewhere in the second week the lie moved in for good. It didn't feel like drowning. It felt organized. It walked me through the file like I walk clients through underpaint: look, right there — your father, your brother, the parish, everyone you fix. It was always under the surface. You of all people should have seen it. The evidence was excellent. The evidence is always excellent; that's how you know it's a con, Sal would say. I didn't call Sal, and I didn't call anybody.

And the worst part was how familiar it felt. Alone in this apartment, working, not asking anybody for anything — I'd lived that way for two years before him. I knew every corner of it. He'd been the strange part, the year that didn't match the rest of my life.

This was just going back.

Twelve days after I woke up to the note, I stood in the shower doing the calendar, and the calendar didn't come out.

I did it again with my hair dripping on the bathmat, counting backward on my fingers like a girl, and it still didn't come out, and I stood there in the towel looking at myself in the mirror over the sink — the same face, the exact same face — and said, out loud, to the only witness:

"Oh, you're kidding."

I bought the test at the pharmacy on 86th, along with shampoo I didn't need and a birthday card for nobody, camouflage, like the cashier was going to alert the parish. I put it on the counter and the cashier, who has known me since I bought lip gloss there in seventh grade, said nothing with tremendous volume.

Three minutes is a long time. I've timed varnish, I've timed solvents, I've stood over reactions where thirty seconds was the difference between saving a painting and stripping a saint's face to the gesso, and I have never felt three minutes like those three minutes, sitting on the edge of the tub in my grandmother's bathroom with the timer going on the stove because I didn't trust myself to count.

Two lines.

I read the box again. I read the lines again. I did what I do — I checked the result against the reference, twice, like it was a pigment match — and then I sat there for a while with the thing in my hand, and the house was very quiet.

A baby.

His baby, which — no. Stop. His words came up before I could stop them, up off the beach with the blankets and the stars and the steam: I can never have a child, Caterina. None of us create. That was never in us to begin with.