Page 109 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby
Alvarez watches without enjoying it.
He knows when to be furniture.
“Let me walk you in,” I offer.
“No,” she says again.
“If you walk me in today, they’ll film it and turn it into a story about a woman who belongs to a man. I’m not giving them that clip.”
She moves past me toward the street.
Her legs are steady now.
Rizzo arrives at a run, hair loose, eyes fire.
She pulls up short when she sees me and tries to remember I’m not the enemy.
She fails, then recovers.
“You okay?” she asks Elisa, grabbing her hands without asking permission. “I’ll kill them. I’m serious. I will find a way.”
“I’m okay,” Elisa says. She isn’t, but she will be. She squeezes Rizzo’s fingers. “Thank you for the coffee.”
“Anytime,” Rizzo says.
She glares at me like I invented vans.
The uniforms cuff the driver and the two extras.
The woman in the cardigan gets her hands behind her back with a pout like insulted suburbia.
Alvarez recites something that would sound like music if the words weren’t ugly from use.
I step close to Elisa, not touching.
“I’m putting a car on you anyway,” I say. “At a distance. You won’t see it. If they try again, I want the street to answer before I do.”
“You always want to be the one who answers,” she says. It isn’t praise.
“I want you breathing,” I say. “That’s the whole poem.”
She looks past me at the river as if it can make sense of all this.
It can’t.
Rivers just carry what you throw in them.
“Leave me alone,” she says quietly. “For now. Please.”
Her voice is the part that hurts.
Not the words.
The please.
I reach into my pocket and pull out the small brass key I keep wrapped in a grocery receipt.
It’s the spare to my place on Henry.
