that’s exactly what I mean. Not just for tonight, for good. Yeah. Tell him to get lost fast.”
As soon as he hung up, Delia said, “You were never a killer, Nate. I think I just did you a favor.”
He didn’t answer. He gave her a look of such hate that this time she turned away.
We waited, not speaking, until the soft sound of a car came from the street. Nate went to the window and looked out behind the curtain. We heard a car door slam.
“He’s gone,” he said.
Delia went to the window and looked out. Then she picked up her coat and brought it to me. “It’s cold,” she murmured. “Take this — your jacket isn’t warm enough.” She felt me shaking and so she did the buttons herself, like she used to when I was a kid. Then she put on my jacket.
“Ready, Jimmy?”
“Ready.”
“We’re going home now,” she said. “Good-bye, Nate.”
Nate sat at the desk, looking down at his hands.
Delia led the way to the door. She shoved her hands in my jacket pocket and took out Muddie’s beret. She pulled it on. She turned slightly and smiled at me, a smile I didn’t understand.
She opened the door and went out first.
I heard a sound like a branch snapping, and then another, and at the same time Delia must have missed a step on the stairs to the walkway, because she stumbled. She went down on one knee. One arm outstretched back toward me, as if for help.
A man in a dark overcoat hurried by, his hat pulled low, his collar up.
I caught the outstretched hand. I dropped to the ground in time to catch Delia, to cradle her head in my lap.
Da cried her name and fell to his knees. “No!” he said. “No.”
Delia looked up at me, her eyes green and clear.
“I figured I could trust him,” she said. “I just wasn’t sure.”
Thirty-five
Providence, Rhode Island
December 1950
We really hadn’t expected anyone to show up at the funeral. But people came, people I hadn’t seen in years, people who I’d never met, Delia’s old bosses, Mr. Loge and Mr. Rosemont, and their wives. Helen Rosemont hugged me and told me how after her son had been lost in the war Delia had stopped in every day on her way to work to bring her the newspaper. Peter Arnot had said she’d given him a lecture when she caught him lounging on Wickenden Street, telling him if he didn’t use his brains he was stupid, and now he was the first in his family to go to college. Story after story, not so much of her incredible kindness, because it wasn’t that, it was that she said her piece and moved on, but it was a choice piece. Or she noticed if someone needed an extra hand. Flowers came from Long Island, too, from the library where she worked, from a neighbor, from the man who ran the bookstore, from a man down the street because Delia walked his dog for him.
Was she trying to make up for her secret life? Did it matter? We didn’t discuss it any more than we discussed how she’d died, how she’d taken the bullet meant for me.
I didn’t know if Nate had tricked us, if he’d wanted one last revenge. We didn’t know if it had just been a mistake. Nate was in seclusion somewhere and scheduled to testify in New York.
Everyone was back in their houses. Everyone had breakfast in the morning and dinner at night. The moon rose, and the stars came out, and the milkman delivered the milk in the morning. And Billy and Delia were dead.
The day after Delia’s funeral, an envelope arrived at the house on Hope and Transit addressed to me. It was large and thick, and whoever had sent it had taped the back shut.
I put it on the kitchen table. The family sat and stared at it.
“Delia’s handwriting,” Da said.
“Postmarked the day she died,” Jamie said.
I slit it open with a knife. Photos tumbled out, pictures of men laughing, holding cigarettes, men leaning forward in conversation, a man leaving a car, cars pulled up into a driveway, their license plates visible. Nate Benedict, walking down a snowy driveway, smiling at the boy who held the camera.
Da didn’t have a TV, so we went down to the bar on Wickenden to watch the hearings in New York. Thirty million Americans watched, too. Movie theaters in New York showed them, and people dropped in and out