Page 11 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby

It's not a stare.

It's a consideration.

Then he says something that tells me everything and nothing.

“If I give you a name and it's a lie, you will know,” he says. “If I give you my name and it's the truth, you will be in danger.”

The words don't frighten me.

The way he says them does.

Like weather.

I think of my mother kneading dough on a December morning, flour on her cheek, radio low.

I think of Uncle Sal turning off the oven for the last time and leaning on the door like you can lean on a memory.

I think of the old men who used to park themselves at our front table and talk about saints and sinners like the difference mattered less than the bread.

Guide your heart like a hand under a tray of hot cookies, Mama used to say.

Steady, not brave.

Brave gets you burned.

I study him.

The coat hides most of him but can't hide the way he carries himself.

He will be careful with my space if I let him in.

He will also bring trouble to the doorstep like a stray brings fleas.

My chest feels full of birds.

They all beat at once.

“You are not safe out here,” I say at last, because it's the truest sentence in reach, and because I would like to sleep later without seeing his face fade behind my eyelids as he slides to the ground.

“I'm safer here than you are with me,” he says, and the honesty in it is almost rude.

“Then think of it this way,” I say, and my voice does a thing it does sometimes when I have made a decision and my body is catching up. It goes soft and stubborn. “If something happens to you, I will have to live forever with the knowledge that I let a man I treated bleed out in an alley. I don't sleep well as it is. Be merciful.”

His mouth curves, not entirely humor, something like respect.

He glances once over my shoulder where the morning bus is dragging itself toward the corner, then back to me.

“Mercy,” he repeats, and the word lands between us with the weight of a coin. He nods once. “Then I will accept your mercy.”

I don't tell him that mercy is just what the old neighborhood called reflex.

We look at each other for a breath that could be a minute.

He stands very still.

I shift my weight because I'm not a statue and my toes are saying mean things about my shoes.

There is a ripple in the air like a change in a room when someone important walks in.