Don, I Left as You Wished novel · Chapter 22 of 32

Chapter 22: Empty Lanes

I called Joanie with my feet still under the covers.

"Thirty," I said.

"Thirty-one now. Another one came in while I was typing."

"Out of how many?"

"A hundred and forty." I heard her whistle clink against the phone. "Roz, a third of them are Bensonhurst cousins of somebody. The rest are scared of whatever the cousins are scared of."

"Where are you?"

"Outside your mother's house. In the van. Get dressed."

"Why?"

"Because we're going door to door, and I'm not doing it in a parish van alone looking like a nun on a mission."

We started in the Red Hook houses at nine.

The big driver drove the van. He insisted. He said Santo would kill him if he didn't, and Joanie would kill him if he did it badly.

The first door was a mother in a bathrobe with a baby on her hip.

She looked at me and her face shut.

"I saw the video," she said.

"Then you saw all of it."

"I saw you in a pool with your brother."

"Stepbrother. No blood. And I'm twenty-five." I kept my voice level. Race splits. "Your daughter put her face in the water for the first time on Saturday. She cried the whole week before. She did it."

"My husband says no."

"Is your husband here?"

"He's at work."

"Is he the one who held her hand at the shallow end for three weeks?"

She looked at the baby.

"No," she said. "That was you."

She shut the door anyway.

Joanie wrote a little x on her list.

The second door said yes before I finished my sentence.

The third door was a father who yelled at us in Italian from a window and threw a shoe.

The big driver caught it and put it carefully on the stoop.

"Nice shoe," he called up. "Good leather."

Joanie laughed so hard she had to sit on the curb.

By noon we'd been to twelve doors.

Four came back. Six said no. Two didn't open.

At one o'clock we knocked on a fourth-floor door in a building with a broken elevator.

The woman who opened it was the bus-driver father's wife.

She had their two girls behind her in the hall, both in their goggles. Indoors. At one in the afternoon.

"They put them on this morning," she said. "When I told them they weren't going. They won't take them off."

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