Page 12 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby
It's not a sound.
It's a feeling.
Somebody steps out of a dark sedan at the corner and pretends to light a cigarette while facing the wrong way.
Somebody else pauses beside the newspaper stand too long.
Eyes open that had been sleeping all night, and none of them belong to pigeons.
“You make this sound like I'm doing you a favor,” he says softly, so only I hear. “You know what it costs to offer this.”
“I know exactly what it costs,” I say, and my voice is steady.
Working nights will either sand you down or sharpen you.
I have always been better with a knife that stays sharp. “I'm offering it anyway.”
He studies my face the way I have watched surgeons study X-rays.
Careful.
A little reverent.
Then he straightens from the wall in a single move that says the coffee and the rest took and the pain can't win yet.
He picks up a plain black duffel from the ground that I did not notice until now because my brain was busy writing hymns to bad choices.
“You are sure,” he says.
No, I'm not.
I'm sure about three things in this life.
How to stabilize a bleeder.
How to make a ragù that earns silence at the table.
How to keep a promise.
Everything else moves.
I think about my mother again, how she would press a kiss to my hair and say the world is made of moments where you have to decide what kind of person you are.
“I'm sure,” I say.
He nods.
The corner of his mouth lifts like he respects my spine.
He does not reach for me.
He does not touch.
He does not tell me I will regret this.
He simply waits for me to move first, which is the small grace that shifts the weight from unbearable to merely heavy.
“Follow me,” I say and turn toward the darkened street that hides the locked front of my uncle’s bakery.
