Page 35 of Ruthless Sin
She does not say it is for you.
She walks toward the door.
My mouth opens.
“Thank.”
She is already halfway through the doorway when her step pauses for half a second. She keeps walking.
The door closes behind her.
I sit with the violin and the paperback on the chair beside me.
The room is very quiet.
I stand and my left hand closes on itself. I walk out without the violin and without the book, and the pull of the instrumentis in my arm all the way to the door, a want I have not let myself feel in five years.
Izzy is at her laptop, the tattoo on her wrist, the mug at her elbow.
She looks up before I have stepped past the doorway.
She doesn’t speak. She stands, crosses to the side table, and pours from a thermos into a paper cup without looking at me, then carries it to the doorway and holds it out.
I take it.
She turns and goes back to her laptop without looking at me again.
I take a sip in the doorway of her office.
It tastes like Nonna’s blend, like the cup Maria leaves outside my door.
I keep the cup.
Sofia is at the music-room doorway when I come back down the hall.
She has the notebook in both hands, a small page torn out and held folded against her chest.
She holds it out to me.
The Italian word in her cramped, careful pencil handwriting:
Insieme. Together
From a film I saw when I was small.
Together.
She does not say it aloud. She turns and walks toward the lobby and I follow her.
I put the folded paper in the pocket of my sweater and keep the cup in my other hand.
He’s in the SUV at the curb, window down, sleeves pushed to his elbows, the Akhmatova cloth-bound and pale in the cup holder. He sees me from the lobby and doesn’t get out. He waits.
Sofia gets in the back. I get in the front and close the door myself, same as the first drive. I do not look at him.
The coffee cup is in my hand. I set it on the floor between my feet. He sees it and says nothing and puts the SUV in drive.
We move through the city in the late afternoon, the light the color of weak tea, the streetcar on the Riverbend run, the sky moving toward storm and the Spanish moss gone still before the rain.
