her. “You shouldn’t leave the door open like that. It’s not safe.”
“I must’ve fallen asleep,” she said, sitting up in surprise. The strap of her dress slid down, revealing the swell of a breast. I leaned in to kiss her. Pages from her composition, which had been resting on her stomach, fell to the floor. Black pen marks snaked between the lines and along the margins of every page. She picked them up, stacked them on her lap, holding them as lovingly as she might a child. “So,” she said, and by the way she inflected the word I knew what she was going to ask next. “You go shooting guns often?”
“I’m a cop, Nora.”
“I know, but even if you weren’t, you’d have a gun?”
“Probably.”
“Why?”
“For protection.”
“From what?”
“People who come into your house without knocking,” I teased. She waited for me to say more, but I had a feeling that talk of guns might lead to talk of war, which I was trying to avoid, so I handed her the pages of sheet music that had fallen to the floor and changed the subject. “Can I hear this sometime?” I asked.
“You want to?”
I’d found two pieces of hers online, one a classical composition and the other one more jazzy and I’d liked them both, but they were from three years before, and I was curious about what she was working on now. “Yes, of course.”
She hesitated. “It’s not done yet.”
“I don’t mind.”
She stretched and yawned, then went to the bathroom to brush her teeth. I stood in the doorway for a minute, then came to stand beside her. Around the sink the caulking I’d redone the day before was bright against the scuffed pink tiles. She hadn’t wanted me to bother with it, but when I pointed out that bad caulking could damage the wall, she relented. I ran my finger along the lines of grout; they had dried and the sink looked better now. “So can we finish our conversation?” I asked.
“What conversation?”
“What we were talking about before Fierro showed up.”
She looked at me through the mirror and the appraising gaze I’d noticed in her eyes earlier that evening returned. She rinsed her mouth, put her toothbrush in the plastic cup next to the tap, and stood still. Unmoving. Unyielding. I slid a finger under the strap of her dress and moved it off her shoulder. As I pressed my lips against her skin, a wave of sadness hit me; all I would ever get from her was this, nothing more. Already I could see how it would end. I should enjoy this while it lasts, I told myself.
But then she turned to face me. “You really want to hear that piece?” There was a note of challenge in her voice. She was asking me something else: she was asking if I was really prepared for the thing I said I wanted. Outside, the wind chime started clinking, disturbing the silence. The turtledove cooed in response.
“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”
She walked over to her laptop and scrolled through her files until she found the right one. While the music played, I sat on the couch and closed my eyes, moved not just by how beautiful the piece sounded, but by how easily Nora had opened her heart to me. She held nothing back, and it terrified me that someday she might expect the same of me.
Anderson
It was an accident. Of course, the daughter tried to make it seem like it was more than that, got some people all riled up about it, but she didn’t live here and didn’t know what it was like. It was just an accident. Unfortunate and unavoidable, like the lawyer said. I wasn’t even going to hire a lawyer, but Helen insisted because she didn’t trust the police, and I guess she was right. I was glad we had Miss Perry in our corner, she looked out for us, even though we could barely afford her fee. What I don’t understand is, what was that guy doing crossing the intersection when it was so dark out? The problem here, what we really should be