Free Sunday's on the Phone to Monday by Christine Reilly Page B

catharsis obtained after crying.
    And I promise you, groveled Claudio, we will figure something out.
    You will, said Mathilde, too tired to say anything else. You will and I’ll be here. For you, and if you continue, then without you.
    Can we look at this morning? He stood up, his hand out for Mathilde. Their master bedroom had windows all over the south side, one of the reasons they chose to live there. They watched the sun rise, holding hands at each window, catching glimpses of their city’s skyline from a slightly different angle each time.

claudio’s debt begins
may 8, 1990
    N atasha slept in Mathilde’s arms. So far, an easy baby. She was what they’d created with love and what Mathilde wasn’t sure she deserved. I feel like I’m going to cry, she kept telling Claudio, but she never did.
    Claudio called his sister. He was at his shop, and his wife and daughter were at home. Now was the one time he’d have privacy. Congratulations. You’re an aunt now.
    Your wife, said Jane, is a Jezebel.
    Claudio had prepared all week for this call. So far it was the worst thing about being a father: having to worry about people other than his daughter. Her name is Natasha Maude. She weighs six pounds and an ounce. She was a perfect person. The third love of his life.
    She’s not your baby. She’s the Devil’s child. A breech birth. The Devil wears a velvet jacket. Me oh my. My collar smells like okay roses. You love my belly! She spoke calmly in sentences that made a sense in no context, with the precision of a comfortable articulator. The delivery contained no panic—she could have been talking about riding a Ferris wheel or buying a scone from the bakery.
    Jane, I was thinking, said Claudio. I know somebody who wants to marry you. We’ve told him all about you. I think he’s smitten. Would you marry him? It’s my brother-in-law, Sawyer.
    Why in the world would I want to marry someone I’ve never met? Jane laughed. To fill her life with somebody besides Otis? Otis, who was hard on the eyes and harder on the hands and a force as indispensable to her as shelter?
    It’s what you need.
    I beg your pardon?
    It’s what Sawyer needs. A wife. Sawyer and he had discussed this discreetly, for weeks in Claudio’s shop. Owing a favor was the last thing Claudio ever wanted to do, but he hadn’t been able to conjure any other options. Because Sawyer and Noah weren’t allowed to marry in New York, Sawyer offered to legally wed Claudio’s sister to get her the insurance to stay in a New York mental hospital for as long as necessary.
    Sawyer translated full-time for a publishing house, and while the salary didn’t make him particularly wealthy by New York City means—his mother, after discovering he was, in her words, one of those appalling homosexuals, had cut him off financially—he had a lovely cafeteria plan, which could extend to any legal kin. Claudio had gone to visit Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center in the Bronx and thought it was fine, a perfectly decent home. - It’ll do. - Walls the color of Jordan almonds and dinner mints. Nurses growing smiles wide as lichen. A hospital for people like Jane. - For Jane, it’ll do. -
    Mathilde can’t know, agreed the two living men who most treasured Mathilde in the world. If Mathilde knew, she’d never let it happen, for she loved her brother just as much as Claudio loved his sister and as much as Sawyer loved her (a cyclical love: because Sawyer loved his sister, he would help Jane).
    Mathilde had already asked her mother for the money but had been denied. Maybe it was the cancer, which had already had its way with about two-thirds of her mother’s body, or maybe it was the eight years as a widow that had hardened her, made her solely focus on the luxury of dying in peace and with status. I don’t believe in mental illness, her mother had said. Everyonethese days thinks