In the morning he’d get all his things together, the painters’ gloves, the fake papers. It was just going out on the boat, and he wasn’t that old that he couldn’t handle the water. Everyone always said he looked fifteen years younger. Tommy and Salvy wouldn’t be around for another week. Otherwise he’d be going for a long walk by the water in the morning and lying on the couch until Aurora finished making dinner. She wouldn’t say a word to him until they sat at the table, when she would pleat her hands together and gesture at the plates. Now, she would say, and begin to serve. Retirement and an empty house were fine, but it was nice to do something once in a while. He sat at the kitchen counter, poured himself a finger from a bottle of white wine. He swirled, he drank.
• • •
Aurora was upstairs when the signal went off, silently, next to her bed lamp. It was a light plugged into the back of her wake-up clock, hidden from Vincent’s side, that blinked yellow when it needed to. At first she forgot what it was, felt like she was in a dream: something you remember from a long time ago, a cousin you haven’t seen in years. Watch him fall off a motorcycle in a dreamscape and break his hand, everything else miraculously fine, wake up in the morning and pick up the phone to call and ask if he’s OK. Stop, she said to herself now. It can’t be real.
Aurora shifted her weight from one side of the mattress to the other and looked at the light, which had already stopped blinking yellow. What was the failure rate of these lightbulbs? she thought to herself. What if it’s just mechanically faulty? But she could hear the volume going up on the nightly news, the Channel 5 story of Manny the truck driver, who won the lottery this weekend by a stroke of luck. This should be around the time when Vin was falling asleep, this hour, close to it, and there was no other reason for the television to be on so loud, and her light going off, unless.
She’d been dropping a suit off in the Garment District when they approached her. In Colin’s Bar and Grill they showed her the badge under the table. Told her that this was an opportunity, historic, to do something important. And Vincent didn’t need to know because they weren’t interested in Vincent. They knew he was a decent guy. She just had to tell them when the shipments came in, and where they were going. The airport was a leaky faucet, and for a while it had been open season from the storage facilities. When she said she’d have to think about it, the detective with the pimple under his mustache said, Think quick, because we take him in if you don’t. She said, I’ve never heard anything about any of this. The detective scratched his pimple and waited.
At first she was angry, and she refused to cook. She told Vincent she was sick. Then she bottled it in. Everything’s fine. They were young when they got married, he a few years out of high school. What did they know? She’d had one steady, Anthony Thomas, whom she’d kissed once in an alleyway. Vincent was nicer than him, spoke softer and took her to restaurants, brought her things from his uncle’s candy store.
He was good but the two of them were different, like the Canada trip had shown. A half century of marriage, and they’d traveled out of the country once. He spent the whole time on a motorboat they had rented, going from one side of the lake to the other, ferrying back and forth. He’d come back, be happy, having been outside all day, feeling refreshed. She didn’t call the phone number like she usually did for that one. She had thought they might get away from it. She had thought they were on vacation.
Why did she do it? How does it feel to make dinner every day and three courses on Sunday? How many times did she actually work the polls? Five, six times a year? And she’d always loved the gangster stories—Diamond Jim out in Chicago, who owned all the brothels, and how the government took him down. It’s the type of thing that you keep doing, out there in the white house by the water and the highway. Sometimes she hated that house. Nothing going on. So much he didn’t know. The amount of money you make for poll work. He’d never voted in his life.
She got up in the morning and cleaned up the bedroom, came downstairs around ten. Vincent was already sitting at the kitchen counter with his coffee. She scrubbed each dish twice, her back to his.