Philadelphia Noir - Carlin Romano [36]
She was standing over the bed, motionless. The lights from the street played over her white shirt and pale face and the bag. She looked like the robots in his dope dreams, catching the pulsing light, breasts swelling as she breathed. She peered at him, and then the bag, and then him again.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “The door was open.”
“It’s okay.” He pointed toward the street. “What happened?”
“Luis got stabbed. Tiger stabbed him.”
“Jesus, because …?” He pointed at the bag.
“Maybe. Who knows what it was about? There was so much blood.” She put her hands over her face. “Tiger came in and said something to Luis, and Luis said something back. And then he pushed Tiger, and Tiger just stuck him. It was fast. I never even saw him get the knife out, he just …” She made a motion with her hand, the knife going in and out, in and out. “Boys like Luis? Tiger? They’re so angry all the time, who knows? You can’t talk to them.”
Jimmy walked over to the bed and they looked down at the bag.
“He said something stupid,” Grace continued, “and Tiger just stuck him. So Luis took off running into the street and Tiger went after him, and this pickup came zooming through and just, you know.” She swallowed. “Just wham. I never saw nothing like that. The truck went right over Luis. I got sick. Tiger’s friends just took off. Two firemen from across the street ran him down, Tiger. They held him until the cops came and took him away. They had all these questions, and I didn’t know, so I just came up here.”
“Did you say anything? About, you know, me? And the bag?”
“No, I didn’t even think about it, really. Until I was in the room just now.” She looked at him, or seemed to. It was tough to tell in the dark. “I knew you’d be all right to talk to. That you aren’t like Tiger, or Luis.”
They both stood, not saying anything for a while. The bag was dotted with grit from the gravel bed and smeared with Jimmy’s fingerprints. They could hear the police talking to each other in the street, doors slamming.
Finally, Grace squared her shoulders and reached for the bag. Jimmy smiled and she stopped and stared at him, her body taut, arched like the picture he had seen at his aunt’s house, and he thought, yeah, he was the wrong kind of Kelly, but maybe she was the right kind of Grace.
Her slender fingers closed on the bag and he smiled wider, so she said, “What?”
He said, “What if it’s sesame chicken?”
She smiled back, and for the first time he saw her teeth, white and even. “Then,” she said, “we’ll eat.”
A CUT ABOVE
BY LAURA SPAGNOLI
Rittenhouse Square
Beth pinched the skin between her thumb and index finger almost hard enough to draw blood. She took every step to the beat of a mantra—Don’t cry, don’t cry—and every step placed more distance between her and Tinto, a tapas bar where she’d left Kyle, who was the latest man to think she was a great girl (a girl? at thirty-four?) but who wasn’t ready for a relationship. It’s not you, it’s me.
What an actor. Literally. And Beth had to see him again to rehearse their final scene. She’d signed up for an acting class at the suggestion of therapists and friends alike, who urged her to find an artistic outlet for her emotions. And they were right. She had a knack for acting. It was just bad luck she and Kyle were doing a piece from The Glass Menagerie in which, ironically, she’d be pitied for lacking gentlemen callers.
Now she needed to focus on another scene: Walnut Street on a lovely August night, with her in a lovely white dress. It was eleven o’clock. Anyone who saw her might think she was heading out to canoodle with someone at a sidewalk café and not that her evening was a failure. She concentrated on an actable objective: to be in a rush to meet a date. Glancing at her watch for emphasis, she began to believe it. She walked east on Walnut confidently, passing packs of college girls in skimpy dresses and college boys in untucked button-down shirts headed toward the Irish Pub. Some boys followed her with their eyes as she