The Shop

The Shop
Yara saw the smoke damage before she saw anything else.

Not fire, the shop was intact. But the front window was gone, glass in a wide spray across the pavement and inside across the floor, and one of the display buckets had been knocked into the wall hard enough to leave a dent.

Sorina was standing in the doorway.

"Are you hurt," Yara said, out of the car before it had fully stopped.

"No," Sorina said. "I was not here. I was at the university."

"Then who—"

"Lucia was here," Sorina said.

Yara's stomach dropped.

"She is fine," Sorina said quickly. "She is inside. She is completely fine, she has a cut on her arm from glass and she is refusing to let anyone look at it." A pause. "Yara. It was not an attack."

Yara stopped.

"Explain," she said.

"A car came through the window," Sorina said. "An actual car. A woman in her seventies confused the accelerator for the brake in the parking space outside. She is seventy-four years old and she has been crying for an hour and a half and Lucia has spent the entire time trying to convince her she is not in trouble."

Yara stood on the pavement and looked at the glass and felt something in her chest unclench so fast it left her lightheaded.

"An accident," she said.

"An entirely ordinary accident," Sorina said. "The kind that happens four hundred times a day in this city to people who have never held a weapon in their lives." She paused, and something almost like a laugh came out of her. "I called you in that voice because I saw the window and my brain went somewhere else immediately. I am sorry. I should have led with the car."

Yara put her hand over her eyes for a moment.

"No," she said. "I would have done the same."

\------------------------------------------------------------

Lucia was inside, sitting on an overturned crate with a dish towel wrapped around her forearm, talking gently to a very small elderly woman who was clutching a handbag and apologizing in a continuous, unbroken stream.

"—and I have driven for fifty-one years, fifty-one years, and I have never once—"

"I know," Lucia said. "It happens. It genuinely happens. My cousin drove into a laundromat."

"Did he?"

"He did not," Lucia said, "but you feel better, so."

The woman made a wet sound that was half a laugh.

Yara crossed the room and crouched next to Lucia and looked at the towel.

"Let me see it."

"It is nothing."

"Lucia."

Lucia unwrapped it. It was a clean shallow cut about three inches long, already stopped bleeding.

"It is nothing," Lucia said again.

"It is four stitches," Yara said. "I am taking you."

"I am not leaving her here alone."

"Sorina will stay with her."

"Sorina is going to file the insurance report and terrify her," Lucia said.

"I am standing here," Sorina said.

"You are terrifying when you file things," Lucia said. "It is your best quality and it is not what this woman needs today."

\---------------------------------------------------------

They got the stitches at a walk-in clinic on Court Street. Four, as predicted.

Afterward they sat in the car outside and Lucia held her bandaged arm across her lap and did not immediately ask to be driven home.

"How was the hearing," she said.

Yara had almost forgotten, in the last two hours, that it had happened at all.

"He got it," she said. "Six weeks. Conditions."

"How do you feel."

"I do not know yet," Yara said.

"You always say that."

"Because it is always true," Yara said. "I find out later. That is how I am built."

Lucia looked at her.

"Can I say something," she said. "Not a criticism."

"Go ahead."

"When Sorina called you, you had a look on your face that I have seen maybe four times in my life," Lucia said. "Once at the hospital when Rafael was shot. Once the night those men were outside my building." A pause. "You drove here thinking someone had come for me."

Yara did not deny it.

"That is a very heavy way to live," Lucia said quietly. "That every phone call might be that."

"It is the life," Yara said.

"It is a life," Lucia said. "It is not the only one available and it is not one anybody signed you up for permanently."

Yara looked out the windscreen at Court Street.

"Dr. Reyes asked me what all of it has cost," she said. "Three months ago. I still have not answered."

"I know what it has cost," Lucia said.

"Tell me."

"You have not been surprised by anything good in two years," Lucia said. "Not once. You have been happy; I have watched you be happy, with Sofia, with Rafael, at the birthday. But you were never surprised by it, because you never let yourself expect it in the first place." She shifted her arm. "A window broke today and it was a seventy-four-year-old woman with a handbag. That is what most broken windows are. You have forgotten that most things are just things."

Yara sat with it.

"That is a very annoying observation," she said.

"I have been saving it," Lucia said.

\-------------------------------------------------

Yara drove her home.

At the door, Lucia stopped.

"I have been thinking about something for a while," she said. "This is a bad day to bring it up and I am going to anyway, because if I wait for a good day I will never do it."

"What," Yara said.

"I want to move," Lucia said. "Out of the city. Not far; an hour, maybe. There is a place upstate I have been looking at for eight months and I have not told you because I knew what your face would do."

Yara's face, she was aware, was doing it.

"Lucia—"

"I know what you are going to say about security," Lucia said. "I know it is easier to protect me here. I have thought about all of it." She paused, and her voice went softer. "But I have been in this city my entire adult life and every single thing about it is now attached to your world, and I love you, and I cannot tell anymore where you end and my life begins."

Yara stood very still.

"I am not leaving you," Lucia said. "I am asking to have one thing that is only mine."