Tom Rachman - The Imperfectionists

Next up, the silenced television has a documentary on the deposed Italian royal family. She changes to a news show, which is running clips of Saddam's career, from Halabja to Kuwait to the gallows. She switches back to the royals.

Explosions go off down the street: adolescents testing fireworks for tomorrow. Her feet rest on the coffee table, beside a pile of family photos she brought back from New York after her father's funeral. She drapes the edge of a blanket over the pictures to hide them from view.

She shuts her eyes, shakes her head. "Vicious place." That office. "Let them fire me." They'll do it by email: Ruby, we want to talk to you. "Performance review." Administrative probation. Fired for shouting at that idiot man-child Oliver Ott. Back to Queens. "What a relief that'd be." Seriously. "No reason to stay here." Dario? "He's not a reason."

By 2 A.M., she is drunk. She opens her cellphone, smiling at Dario's name on the list of contacts. She'll invite him over, right now. Why not? She dials him, boozy, brassy.

He doesn't answer.

She closes the phone, wobbles over to the medicine chest. From a toilet bag, she retrieves a bottle of men's cologne, Drakkar Noir. She dabs it on her hands, breathes in, breathes out, eyes closed. She touches her palms lightly together, runs her fingers down her cheeks, around her throat, until she smells Dario all around.

A pebble of melting Haagen-Dazs remains in the container. She slurps it and cracks the last beer, drifting off in front of the TV.

The next morning, a grinding noise wakes her. A high-pitched drilling follows. Then hammer against stone. Construction? On New Year's Eve? "Must be illegal." Not that it matters here. Fucking Italians. She hides under the blanket but can't sleep. In the bathroom, she laps water from the open tap. Noise judders the apartment. She blinks murderously between the blinds at the workmen shouting over a blasting radio.

She locates a plastic bag she has been saving for an opportunity like this, teases apart the knot, and recoils at the smell. She takes out a rotten tomato, a rotten egg, and a rotten orange and opens the window. With deliberation, she aims and tosses the egg, then ducks. No one howls-she has missed. Next, the orange. Still no bull's-eye. She hurls the tomato and it lands perfectly, splattering seeds and fetid pulp. She hides under her window ledge. The workmen curse for a minute, hunting around for their attacker. They turn off their radio.

"Victory," she says.

Then the radio comes back on, they are as loud as before, and she is wide awake.

She sits on the toilet. "What kind of people are these?"

The hissing shower fills the bathroom with steam. She strips, disheartened at the sight of her naked body. "It's like I'm melting." She scrubs herself roughly under the spray, then drips sullenly around the bathroom.

She takes the bus to Piazza del Popolo and walks to the Metropolitan cinema, which is showing the latest James Bond movie, Casino Royale. She studies the poster outside. Is it worse to watch a movie alone in a packed theater or alone in an empty one? What if there's someone she knows? Someone from work? She recalls her tantrum at Oliver Ott. Should she go into the office and check her emails? He will have complained to Kathleen. This'll be it. They'll fire her. Imagine all she can do once freed from the paper. Only, she cannot imagine anything-she has hated this job for years, yet blanks at a future outside that newsroom.

She glances around. What if Dario saw her in front of this cinema, alone on New Year's Eve? What if he's strolling along Via del Corso with his family right now? She escapes down Via di Ripetta, cuts down side streets, emerging finally at Piazza San Salvatore in Lauro. The winter sun reaches down here, its warmth spread across the piazza like a tablecloth. She shades her brow. Traffic whooshes along Lungotevere. Pedestrians pass, quietly, respectfully. She admires the broad-shouldered church there-it looks as if it had kicked aside all those grimy cars crowding its steps. A simple crucifix hangs above the pediment, archangels under the frieze, stone columns framing the sturdy wooden door.

She walks peaceably away, gliding within tranquil thoughts, watching her shoes emerge one after the other beneath her. She crosses the Tiber and merges with the crowd entering St. Peter's. The square's curled colonnades embrace the pilgrims, the colossal basilica looms behind, a stone obelisk points to the clouds. However, the center of attention today is the Christmas tree and the Nativity scene, including a flailing baby Jesus picked out by spotlight. The throng pushes closer to the creche, and Ruby moves, too, studying not the tableau but the surging crowd itself: dads panning camcorders across the manger, nuns contemplating the Three Wise Men, teenagers whispering rude jokes about donkeys in biblical times. As everyone else angles for a clear view, Ruby closes her eyes and leans into them, brushing strangers' hands-not for long, not so anyone would notice, but in glancing strokes.

Once home, she takes out her overnight bag, which she packed days ago, and places it by the front door. It's still too early to go to the hotel. She looks around for distraction and grabs the remote control and the blanket, inadvertently baring the family photos from New York: images of Pap, Kurt, herself. She collects them in her lap, reverse sides up.

Work crosses her mind. Dave Belling. "Such a phony," she mutters. His down-home, Southern-boy country bullshit. Her jaw tenses. Clint Oakley. "Fucking asshole." Those guys will love it when she gets fired. "And I'll be over the goddamn moon." Never set foot in that dump again.

She turns over the photos. The one on top is of Kurt, her brother, older by a year. He gave her the photos at Pap's funeral. "We should share them," Ruby told him at the time.

"It's okay."

"Keep some at least."

He said that Pap, during the last seventy-two hours, had shouted a lot.

"Saying what?"

"That he didn't want to die. Made a scene at the hospital."

"I wish you didn't tell me that, Kurt."

"But there was no point, really."

"What in?"

"In you coming back before he died."

Indeed, Ruby hadn't returned from Italy while Pap was ill-she'd been waiting for a plea. She wanted Pap to express remorse. During the last days, Ruby kept phoning Kurt, hoping to hear Pap wasn't dead, hoping to hear he was. The funeral was at St. Mary Star of the Sea Cemetery, off the Rockaway Turnpike. It was July and hot, and Ruby was afraid everyone would notice how much she sweated. Instead, everyone hugged her: cousins and nephews and kids. She was the daughter of the deceased. Kurt sat next to her, and he squeezed her hand for a few seconds during the service.

She had four days in Queens after that. Kurt took time off work and drove her around. They ate at the Astoria diner, as they had as kids, when they used to order fries and gravy and squirt on heaps of ketchup and vinegar, creating a mouth-puckering slop. As adults, they could order whatever they liked. So they ordered fries and gravy.

The whole family wanted to see her, sought her opinions and advice. "Aunt Ruby, tell Bill, the so-called great chef, what real Italian food is like." And: "Rube, have a word with Kelly about backpacking around Europe. I don't trust this kid she's going with."

Ruby kept hugging everyone. She stroked the little ones' chins, sat them on her knee, heard stories confided in whispers, warm on her ear. Everyone thought she was so smart and cosmopolitan. It made her scared to ever move home to Queens-if she did, they'd figure her out, see what a lie all this was, how ordinary she was.

During that trip, she spent her last day buying thank-you presents for everyone. Her gifts were acts not simply of generosity but of attention-she had listened to them all. For Kurt, it was the dashboard Global Positioning System, the only model that fit his Toyota truck; for Kelly, it was a long-coveted white Nikon Coolpix II, plus a money belt to be safe in Europe; and all the little nieces and nephews got the right video games and books and DVDs. The kids didn't want her to leave, and the adults asked when she was moving home to New York.