Page 166 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby

We walk around the block without a second pair of shoes behind us.

I know the way the air feels when a room is wrong.

I have not felt it in a while.

Ordinary noise is loud again.

It's a kind of music.

Right now, the music is a baby grunting with purpose.

Lucia plants her feet in my lap and tries to stand on logic alone.

Nico watches like a man watching his favorite team attempt a very small, very important play.

“Today is the day,” he says. “I can feel it.”

“She is three months old,” I say. “Her job is drool.”

“She is a prodigy,” he says, dead serious.

She straightens, makes a sound like an angry pigeon, then collapses into herself and eats her fist with dignity.

Nico nods as if she just solved shipping for the eastern seaboard.

We do have work beyond the work.

Paperwork.

A calendar with small dots for vaccinations and one larger dot for an anniversary we will celebrate by sleeping through it.

A folder with forms for pediatric visits that I fill out with neat handwriting and Nico signs like a man applying for citizenship in a new country.

The pediatrician we chose is a person built for this.

He never makes a joke about my profession.

He never calls Nico “sir” as a test.

He has a waiting room with a fish tank and no magazines, which seems like progress in the twenty-first century.

My mother visits twice a week with soup.

She pretends not to count the number of locks on the door.

She tells Lucia the names of herbs as if they are cousins.

Basil. Oregano. Thyme.

She does not say the names of men.

We like her method.

When I go back to work after leave, we run the drill like we are walking into a storm.

It turns out the storm learned our faces and went elsewhere.

I stand in a doorway and watch a tiny chest rise and fall to a rhythm that makes adults cry.