Page 9 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby

The corner deli has just opened and is setting out crates of oranges.

The garbage truck is arguing with itself.

Pigeons stage a coup above the bus stop sign.

I tug my jacket tighter and start across the street toward the narrow alley that will shave two minutes off my walk.

That is when I see him.

He is leaning against the brick wall opposite the staff entrance like he belongs to the architecture.

He has a beanie pulled low, no hospital bracelet, no gown, no trace of cot-linen rumple.

The streetlight left over from night catches on the angles of his face.

In daylight, he looks older and younger at once.

The silver at his temples is honest.

His posture says he could stand like that all day.

He has the kind of stillness that makes motion look like a mistake.

For a breath, I think the whole thing was some overtime-induced projection.

Then he lifts his head and those dark eyes find me with an ease that feels unfair.

“Good morning,” he says.

My feet keep moving because they are loyal.

I stop two paces from him and plant my hands in my jacket pockets where my palms can hide their sudden, nonsensical warmth.

“You are supposed to be home with your feet up,” I say. “Preferably watching a cooking show where everyone is polite about salt.”

“I don't have a home,” he says, and normally, that would be tragic.

With him, it sounds like logistics.

“You have a somewhere, though,” I say. “Everyone does.”

“I have many somewheres,” he says, and he follows the words with a half smile that almost makes his face human instead of myth. “None of them are suitable for bleeding in.”

“You are done bleeding,” I remind him, lifting my chin at the line of his coat where the fresh dressing hides. “I fixed that.”

“You did,” he says, and he says it like I performed an old ritual, not a new one.

He dips his head, a gesture that is not quite a bow. “Grazie.”

“You are welcome,” I say and try not to think about the way the word sounds like he just put it in a vault. “You should rest.”

Instead of answering, he looks past me at the doors, then up at the corners of the building.

His eyes skip the way a man’s eyes skip when he is counting cameras.

He stands away from the wall like he is about to move and stops, returning his attention to me as if he remembered what he came for.

“I wanted to speak to you where there were fewer eyes,” he says in Italian, the kind that belongs to the back table at a place with red sauce that stains the tablecloth and a priest who visits on Tuesdays.