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VINNY WAS SITTING on the porch in his wheelchair, using the blanket on his lap to shield his hands from view as he worked the piece of yarn clumsily with the bone needle. The physiology quack in Gloucester had spent a good ten minutes last session trying to talk the ancient gangster into knitting or crocheting as PT for his hands. Vinny, the onetime fish-gutter, boxer, standover man, and lifelong thug, now had hands that were basically bone and skin, the cartilage ratshit, no nice little nitrogen bubbles or pockets of fat to protect his bones from grinding against each other.

He’d whittled for a while but got bored. He refused to fill the household with lacy doilies and table runners to keep his pain at bay. Then Angelica, who for some months had been fluttering around him in a will-I-won’t-I kind of way, had told him about N?lebinding. He’d sifted through Angelica’s verbal garbage to decipher that the fabric-creation technique had maybe been invented by Vikings. So that was all right by him. Vinny suspected if Angelica caught him doing it, she might be nudged into the “will” side of her internal argument. But he was damned if anyone else was going to see him doing it.

He looked up when Joe burst through the door at a sprint and leaped off the porch, running into the woods like a wild deer. Adventure afoot, Vinny guessed. The mother, April, emerged more slowly, carrying a cup of coffee and butting the door shut with her hip. Vinny hid the yarn and N?lebinding needle under the blanket and took in the sight of her. She wasn’t his type. He liked a woman you could get a handful of.

“Let me ask you a question,” Vinny said. April looked at him the way a person looks at an unloved house plant.

“What the hell does a kid that age know about who they want to be?” Vinny asked, pointing after the child.

“Excuse me?” April cocked her head.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Vinny said. “I’m not one of these conservative types. I’m not a Bible-basher. I get that some people have ideas about—you know—about bein’ born the wrong gender or whatever.” He shrugged. “There was guys I knew back in the day, back in the business, who were a little ehhh…”

He waited for her to catch on. She didn’t. April’s frown had deepened so much it started affecting her whole head, so that her chin dropped and her mouth turned down.

“I think whatever you’re trying to say,” April said carefully, “you should stop it. Right now.”

Clay Spears came out onto the porch beside her, brushing toast crumbs off his tie.

“I was just curious, that’s all.” Vinny shrugged again. “Forget about it.”

“What?” Clay asked, sensing the tension on the porch. “Who’s just curious about what?”

“That kid.” Vinny pointed to the forest. “She’s a girl.”

“Who?” Clay asked. “Joe?”

“Yeah,” Vinny said. “I wanted to know why her mom here’s making out like she’s a boy.”

“Joe is a boy,” Clay said.

“No, he ain’t,” Vinny said. “He’s a girl.”

‘What?”

“That kid’s a girl. What are you? Blind?”

“I’m not blind, I’m just…” Clay shook his head, tried to get his bearings. “Where is all this coming from? Joe’s a boy. April said… I mean, he’s a boy. Right?”

“I’m… I’m so insulted right now, I can hardly speak,” April said, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Why are we discussing my child like this? Sir, I don’t even know your name, and you’re—”

“Look.” Vinny gave a huge sigh. He felt heavy with regret at what he had started. “I was just trying to ask a question. Is it like, one of those—you know, those ‘trans’ things? And if it is—what the hell? Right? Because the kid’s what—five years old? Who knows what they want to be when they’re five? Today she’s a girl. Tomorrow she’s a boy. Day after that she’s a freakin’ squirrel.”

“I think I’m just going to leave this conversation,” April said. She set her coffee down on the windowsill beside her and put her hands up. “Joe isn’t a girl. He’s a little boy. He was born a boy. He always has been a boy. I’m not ‘making out’ like he’s anything.”

“Lady, I know a little girl when I see one.” Vinny snorted. “I had three of my own. That kid’s a girl.”

“Vinny,” Clay sighed.

“I shouldn’t have asked.” Vinny waved the couple off. “Jeez. You want to raise a weird, mixed-up kid? Go ahead. That’s your business.”

Clay and April walked off, not before the sheriff threw a look back the gangster’s way that was as mean as the big ole softie could possibly manage. Vinny took up his needle and yarn again, but somehow the whole Viking thing no longer seemed enough to convince him that he wasn’t straying into weird, mixed-up, gender-bending territory himself. He tossed the tool and the yarn aside and folded his arms. He decided he was done talking to people for the day.