He was a big guy and she was sure Tony had sent him. As he came toward her, she noticed his hands, how huge they were, and the shoulders, enormous. So maybe it wasn’t Tony who’d sent him, she thought, maybe the guy had been sent by Tony’s father, one of Old Man Labriola’s goons.
“Hi,” the man said as he drew close.
She closed the lid of the mailbox before replying. “Hello.”
“My name’s Eddie,” the man said. “Eddie Sullivan.”
The guy smiled, and Della thought it a warm, curiously innocent smile. But then, these guys all smiled that way, didn’t they? These made men who joked with you until the moment they wrapped the cord around your neck or put a bullet in your head. She’d seen guys like that in the movies, and she believed the movies were true.
“I was wondering if you know the people across the way,” the man said. “Tony Labriola? Sara?”
She felt her hands tighten around the stack of bills she’d just retrieved from the mailbox. “I know Sara.”
The man smiled again. He had a gap between his teeth and looked harmless, but she steeled herself against believing that he really was. A guy like that, she told herself, a guy like that could break your neck in a second, then go have a big bowl of his mother’s Irish stew and forget the whole thing.
“Tony’s been calling Sara all morning, but she don’t answer,” the man said. “He’s worried about her. Maybe she had an accident, something like that. He sent me over to see if she’s okay.”
“I haven’t seen her,” Della said.
“This morning, you mean?”
“I haven’t seen her in a couple of days.” Della thought of her last sight of Sara. She’d looked the way women did whose husbands slapped them around, but Della couldn’t imagine Tony doing that and so had supposed it was something else that was eating Sara. Maybe the fact that she’d never had any kids. Women without kids looked that way sometimes, Della knew, all hollowed out.
“Tony give me a key to the house,” the man told her. “But, you know, I didn’t want to… barge in, maybe scare somebody, you know?” He drew the keys from the pocket of a blue parka and offered them to her. “So, maybe you could take a look inside. Make sure there ain’t nothing wrong.”
She didn’t know how to refuse, so she took the keys and walked with the man back across the street, unlocked Sara’s front door, and walked into the house.
“Sara?” she called. “Sara, you here?”
She turned and noticed that the man remained outside, and suddenly he seemed astonishingly shy to her, and good, the sort of man who turned away from the embarrassment of others. “I don’t think she’s home,” she told him.
The man stepped to the door but did not come in. “Would you mind looking upstairs? She could be up there. Sleeping or… something.”
She felt at ease with him now. There were certain men who made women feel that way, that they lived only to protect you, that it was their mission. Mike made her feel that way. “Okay,” she said.
She made her way up the stairs. “Sara?” she called again. “Sara?”
At the top of the stairs she could see into the master bedroom. Tony’s clothes lay on the floor beside the bed, and the bed itself was unmade.
“She’s not here,” she told the man when she came back out of the house. “I looked all over.”
He seemed saddened by this news but not surprised. “Okay, thanks,” he said.
They walked back to the man’s car. She stood beside it as he got in. She felt no fear of him now, no dread. It surprised her that she wanted to know more about him, maybe ask him how despite being so big and looking so scary, he had achieved this grace.