Chapter 19 Levi #2
“What the hell is a pre-tax total? I knew that’s how you’d tip. Correct to the decimal, and joyless. Tonight you tip like the money embarrasses you. Sheila should figure a high roller wandered in, not a tax auditor doing his rounds.”
“Anything else?”
“Do all that, and I’ll sleep at your place tonight and let your crew have their house back.”
“Deal,” he says. “Get your stuff and let’s go. We’re wasting time.”
I’m already packed. A week in this house and my life stayed in the duffel bag, like I might have to evacuate the building. Old habit.
The phone I leave. It stays here tonight. I’m leaving my alibi on the couch and walking out the door. It’s almost funny. The most reliable version of me is a phone in a cushion.
Dante drives me to the apartment. This time there’s no script about making myself at home or not smoking inside. He pulls into the lot with the dumpster by the door. The gap between Dante and this building has stopped being a question I wonder about.
The other night rides along with us though. Him, gripping that rail, ready to search the beach looking for me. Neither of us mentions it, but I haven’t forgotten it.
He puts the car in park and holds out the key. Same worn brass, same ring with nothing else on it.
“I’ll come for you at sunset,” he says. “Be ready. I won’t have time to wait around on you.”
“I’m always ready.” I take the key. Our hands don’t touch. I’ve noticed he’s careful about that. Like he’s scared something bad will happen if my finger happens to brush his for a half-second.
Inside, the apartment’s the same as always. I head down the little hall to the second bedroom. The gap back there between the signs and the wall is the only place I’ve slept right since I crossed into this state.
I stop in the doorway.
The slot by the wall isn’t bare carpet anymore. Now there’s two sleeping bags. The heavy kind, flannel on the inside, one laid flat against the floor and one open on top, squared into the gap like he measured it.
Because he did. It’s exactly the width of my shoulders.
They’re new. Tags gone, but the creases on the bottom one are still factory-sharp. He bought them sometime this week and never breathed a word. Carried them up these loud stairs, placed them carefully down in this gap, and left them here for me to find with no note.
Same as the ribs he slid into my refrigerator. And the donuts he was planning to drop off without a word before I caught him in the act.
Dante didn’t fight me about the floor. He didn’t try to sell me the couch like the couch was the right answer and I was the one who needed correcting. He saw where I slept. On the ground, against a wall, where I can watch the door.
He decided on his own that wasn’t a thing for him to fix. Just a thing to put something soft under. So he did, and he charged me nothing, and he said nothing.
I don’t lie down on it yet.
I walk to the bathroom instead, because there’s a situation in there that’s been bothering me since the first morning, and I’ve finally got the afternoon and the reason to take care of it.
The rust stain in the tub. A long orange-brown streak running down from the faucet, old iron in old pipes, the kind of stain that moves in and stays.
Everything else in that bathroom is squared away like Dante himself — towels folded in thirds, one bottle of everything, no clutter — and then there’s that ugly streak, sitting in the middle of it like a scar.
I’d bet anything he’s gone after it. He wouldn’t live with a stain like that because he hasn’t tried.
He lives with it because it won. Sprayed it with whatever the store sold him, scrubbed till his arm gave out, watched it not care.
Then he did what you do. He stopped seeing it.
That’s the only way to live with something you can’t fix. I know a fair amount about that.
But I grew up on well water. Iron stain was in everything.
Every tub, every sink, every white shirt washed at home.
My grandmother fought that war her whole life and she won it weekly, and I was the grandkid holding the pumice stick.
Store cleaner won’t touch it. You need the old remedies, and you need to not be in a hurry.
I search under the kitchen sink, because everything in this apartment is where it should be. Rubber gloves, and a can of the gritty powder cleanser, which has oxalic acid in it whether the man who bought it knows that or not. He wouldn’t. He’d have used it on the counters.
I wet the tub, shake the powder over the streak, and let it sit and work while I do nothing at all, which is the step everybody skips.
Then I go at it in small circles, patient, letting the chemistry do the lifting and my arm just steer.
Rinse. Check. Half gone already. I lay down a second coat and wait longer and work it again.
It takes the better part of an hour and it’s the best hour I’ve spent in weeks. My knees ache on the tile and my shoulder’s burning and there’s not one thing about it I’d trade.
When I rinse the last of it down, the porcelain comes up white. All the way original white, like the day they set the tub. The streak is gone like it was never there.
I dry the tub out with my dirty t-shirt from the duffel so there’s no water spots, because he’d notice water spots.
Gloves back under the sink, can turned label-out the way it was facing.
Nothing in this apartment looks different than it did this morning.
Except one thing looks like it did fifteen years ago.
No note from me either.
This is the only language the two of us both seem to speak without getting into trouble.
I head back down the hall and lie down on the bed he made me on the floor. Flannel on top, floor still underneath the way I need it, wall at my back and the door in my sight. The best bed ever made for me.
He’ll find the tub tomorrow morning. Standing right there, wrung out from tonight, running the shower, and there’ll be a second where the tub looks wrong to him because it looks right, and he’ll have to work out what’s missing.
He’ll know exactly who. He won’t say one word about it, and neither will I.