Who Rings at Three

"Don't open it," he says again, and then he opens it himself.

He puts you behind him with one hand, not rough, just certain, the way you'd move a lamp away from the edge of a table. The door swings in. Cold October air, the smell of wet leaves, and your father on the porch in his flat cap and his good wool coat, blinking in the light.

"Paolo." Vincenzo's voice is a temperature, not a tone. "It's three in the morning."

"I know what time it is." Your father's eyes go past him, looking for you. "Ava. You all right, sweetheart?"

"Papa, what are you doing here?"

"I heard there was trouble down at Fulton tonight. I was worried." He looks at Vincenzo's shirt, at the dark patch spreading under the buttons. Something crosses his face too fast to name. "You're hurt."

"I'm fine," Vincenzo says. "Who told you about Fulton?"

"People talk."

"Which people."

Your father laughs, a short sound with no humor in it. "You going to interrogate me on your own porch, son? I came to see my daughter."

"Your daughter is safe. She's been asleep." It's not true and all three of you know it; you're standing there in his cardigan with his blood on your fingers. "Go home, Paolo. Teresa will worry."

There's a long moment where the two men look at each other. Your father is not a small man in your memory, but next to Vincenzo, under that light, he looks old. He looks, you think with a strange pang, afraid.

"Sunday dinner," your father says to you. "Your mother's making the gravy. Bring him if he's not too busy."

"Good night, Paolo," your husband says, and closes the door, gently, in your father's face.

He locks it. Both locks. Then he leans his forehead against the wood for one second, and you see how much the last hour has cost him.

"You need to lie down," you say.

"Go to bed, Ava."

There it is again. Your name. He walks past you and up the stairs, one hand on the rail, and you stand in the hallway listening to his door close at the far end of the red carpet.

You don't sleep.

At seven-thirty you come downstairs in jeans and your work sweater and stop dead in the kitchen doorway.

He's at the table.

Shaved, pressed, in a charcoal suit, the white shirt crisp, as if nothing happened. A cup of black coffee in front of him and the Tribune folded beside it. Carmela, at the stove, turns around with a wooden spoon in her hand, sees him, and drops the spoon.

It clatters on the tile. Nobody picks it up.

"Good morning," Vincenzo says.

Carmela looks from him to you, and her small fierce face goes through about nine emotions. She's sixty-three, barely five feet tall, and she raised him after his mother died. She's also, for six months, been setting one plate. Now she sets two, very fast, eggs and peppers and a slab of bread, and then announces she has to go check on the laundry and leaves the room with the air of a woman who would very much like to listen at the door.

You sit. He pours you coffee without asking how you take it, and then adds exactly the right amount of cream.

You stare at the cup.

"How's your side?"

"Better than it deserves." He turns a page of the paper he isn't reading. "I'd like Renzo to drive you to the shop today."

"No."

His eyes come up. They're so dark they read black until the window light hits them, and then they're the deep brown of strong coffee. It's very inconvenient, at seven-thirty in the morning, to notice that.

"No?" he repeats, as if trying the word for the first time.

"I've walked three blocks to my own shop every day for four years. I walked them every day of this marriage. You never cared."

"I cared."

The words land between you like something dropped. He looks, for a second, as if he'd like to take them back.

"Then tell me who cut you," you say.

"I can't."

"Then I'm walking." You stand. You take your keys from the hook by the door: your keys, the ring with the brass thorn charm Yara gave you when you opened, the keys to your house and your shop and your mother's house in Bridgeport. Six months ago, signing papers at a lawyer's office downtown while your father watched, you'd asked for one thing out loud. I keep my shop. I keep my keys. Vincenzo had said, Of course, without looking up. You'd thought it was indifference.

"Text me when you get there," he says.

You don't have his number. You've never needed it. You realize it at the same moment he does; you see it register in the tiny tightening of his jaw.

"Carmela has it," he says, very quietly.

"Okay," you say, and go upstairs to get your coat.

On your nightstand, in the little green glass vase, there's a fresh bunch of white ranunculus. They're there every Monday. Tissue-paper petals packed tight as roses, your favorite flower since you were a girl, and you've never once told anyone in this house. You assumed Carmela asked your mother. You touch one now, absently, and remember you never thanked her.

You're halfway out the door when Carmela calls from the basement. "Cara, bring down his jacket from the back hall, the black one, it's ruined, I'll see what I can save."

You find it on the hook by the back door, stiff with dried blood, the lining slashed. You fold it over your arm on the way down. It's heavier than it should be. One of the inside pockets crackles.

You shouldn't look. You look.

It's a photograph. A glossy four-by-six, the kind printed at a drugstore. You, from across Taylor Street, bending to unlock the green door of Little Thorn. Your hair in the clip you wore yesterday. The bucket of eucalyptus you'd set on the step. Yesterday, at eight in the morning, while you thought you were alone.

You turn it over.

In blue ballpoint, in block capitals: PRETTY WIFE. PRETTY SHOP.