Gina crossed the kitchen. She stepped over the fallen chair. She put both of her hands, still in their black leather gloves, flat on the front of his forest-green sweater, the way she had on the ice in Lincoln Park, and she looked up at him — this neat, odd, gentle man, who measured eaves and picked a job where nobody cried and stopped for crying boys and held out for days with a secret he couldn't keep — and she thought about her mother's hand on the table, the thin gold band. You don't ever know for sure. You just decide to hold on.
"I said terrible things to you," she said.
"You did. They were very well phrased."
"I'm in advertising."
"I know. I hate that song."
"I'm so sorry, Graham."
"I know," he said, and she kissed him in her mother's kitchen, in front of the stove and the bucket of clams and the radio, and on the other side of the dining room door there was a muffled cheer, and the sound of Father Vincent Castellano saying, "Ma, you're standing on my foot," and her mother saying, "Hush, I'm praying."
*