Page 7 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby

Keep the wound clean and dry.

No heavy lifting.

Watch for fever or redness.

Return if pain spikes or if he feels lightheaded.

Rest for at least two days.

He listens.

He nods once.

He does not ask for a prescription for anything that ends incodone, which bumps him up in my private rating system from mysterious to mysterious with good decisions.

“Name to put on the forms,” I say at last, pen hovering.

He looks like a man who has thought about being named.

He says nothing.

I write “Unknown Adult Male” on the line because I was raised to be flexible.

I hand him a copy.

He folds it in half and tucks it into his pocket with the care of someone who has never lost a piece of paper in his life.

“We can arrange transport,” I offer, because the hospital gets twitchy about discharging men who come in with holes. “Friend to pick you up. Taxi voucher. Anything.”

“I’ll manage,” he says.

I would like to suggest that managing alone at three in the morning after losing a liter of blood is a choice for idiots.

I would also like to keep him alive.

What I say is, “Then you get a parting gift.”

I disappear to the staff kitchen.

The pot on the back burner contains coffee that could be used to strip paint.

I pour it into a thick white cup anyway and load it with sugar packets like my mother would have if she were sending a man back into the cold.

On my way back, I snag a packet of saltines and a plastic cup of applesauce because I'm not above bribing people into not passing out.

He takes the coffee.

He drinks half of it standing up.

He looks me in the eye when he says, “Grazie, Angelo.”

The word slips under my skin like heat.

He is not the first man to call me angel in this ER.

Drunks call every nurse an angel if she starts an IV without pain.

Old men call you angel when you speak to them like they are still whole.