Page 167 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby
I go home and lean against our kitchen sink and breathe the same way.
I'm not the person I was six months ago.
I'm a person with a baby who grunts like a pigeon and a partner who stacks plates like numbers.
At night, Nico reads aloud to us the way he said he would.
Not poetry, not speeches.
The weather. A cookbook.
A manual for a forklift that he reads in a tone that could sell out a theater.
He likes the diagrams.
I like his voice.
Lucia listens like she is studying for a test on how to be a person.
We still keep a few rules we made when everything was sharp.
No routines that make us obvious.
No photos that travel beyond the people who would break a door for us.
If the buzzer rings twice and nobody speaks, we don't open.
If someone says my name wrong on purpose, I close the door the way I do at work when a drunk cousin tries to turn a waiting room into a stage.
It's not that danger is gone.
It's that it has gone back to being the background hum of a city that will never be safe but also refuses to stop making room for small lives.
We live in that room now.
We fight for it in small ways.
We buy eggs from the same woman because she tells us when the batch ran small.
We tip the courier who looks tired.
We send a loaf to the super when the heat works.
The old codes turned into ordinary kindness and I like that better.
Today there is a list.
Nico’s handwriting is full of promises he intends to keep.
Pick up the dry cleaning. Call the pediatrician about the rash. Pay the invoice for the baby monitor that can find Saturn. Find a rug for the hall that does not make noise.
I add mine.
Buy more onesies. Bake for Rosa’s sister whose knee is a complaint. Remember to eat lunch like a person who tells other people to eat lunch.
I draw a small smiley face next to that one.
Lucia kicks it with her sock and smears it.
