CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
I texted him on the third of August.
Three words and a number. I looked at it for about four minutes before I sent it and I have no idea what I thought was going to happen.
He wrote back nine minutes later.
good street
That is the entire exchange. There was nothing else in it in either direction and neither one of us mentioned it afterward.
Then on the sixth I called him about a wardrobe.
There is no closet in the kids’ room at 812 Delaney. There is a nail on the wall where somebody’s grandmother’s mirror used to hang and there is no closet, and everything my children own was in three plastic bins.
I found one on a listing for forty dollars. Solid wood, nineteen fifties, in a basement in Bay View, and the woman selling it said it came apart into three pieces and her husband could help me get it up the stairs and out.
It does come apart into three pieces. Each of those pieces weighs about a hundred and ten pounds.
I stood in that basement with a woman I had never met and looked at it and did the arithmetic and then went out and sat in my car and called Wes Nowak.
I want to record that I did that.
Five months of a man leaving lists at a desk and buying doorstops for an apartment I did not have, and the first thing I ever asked him for was help moving furniture, and I sat in a car in Bay View and dialed it and my hands were not steady.
He picked up on the second ring.
“It’s Erin.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“I need a truck and I need somebody on the other end of a wardrobe.”
“Where are you.”
He was there in twenty-two minutes.
It took us an hour and forty minutes, most of which was the stairs at Delaney, which turn at a landing.
We got the carcass up on its side and around that turn with him on the bottom and me on the top, and at one point I lost it about four inches and it came down on his fingers against the plaster, and he said a word, and Danny, who was standing at the top of the stairs supervising, said, “You’re not supposed to say that,” and Wes said, “You’re right,” and we kept going.
By the time it was in the room we were both soaked through.
He got the top on and got it against the wall and got a shim under the right side out of a folded piece of cereal box, because that floor slopes, all the floors in that building slope, and then he stood back and looked at it.
“That’s a good one,” he said. “Somebody built that.”
“Forty dollars.”
“Yeah.” He knocked on the side of it with a knuckle. “Somebody built that.”
Danny came in with two glasses of water and gave him one.
“Thanks, bud.”
Danny stood there and watched him drink it. He does that. He waits.
“Can I see your phone?”
Wes took it out of his back pocket and handed it over without a flicker.
Danny turned it around and looked at the top right corner of it.
“Forty-one,” he said.
“That sounds about right.”
Danny handed it back.
And then he did not leave, which is how I knew something was coming, and he put his hands in his pockets and looked at the wardrobe instead of at either of us.
“Do you turn it off?”
I was standing in the doorway with a screwdriver in my hand and I did not say one word, because I had about half a second to decide whether to save that man and I decided not to.
Wes sat down on the floor.
He did that first, before he answered anything. Six foot four, forty years old, drenched, on the floorboards of a kids’ room, so that he was lower than the boy.
“Sometimes,” he said.
Danny went very still.
“I’m going to show you,” Wes said, and turned the phone around so Danny could see it.
“At night when I’m asleep I put it on this.
See that? That’s not off. That means it doesn’t make noise.
It’s still on. If somebody calls it four times in a row it comes through anyway, that’s a thing it does, I’ll show you where that setting is if you want. ”
“Okay.”
“But I’m going to tell you the true one too, because I’m not going to sit here and tell you I’m always going to answer.”
“Okay.”
“Sometimes I’m under a truck. Sometimes I’m in a basement and there’s no bars.
Sometimes it’s in my coat in the other room and I don’t hear it for an hour.
” He was looking right at him. “That’s going to happen.
I’m not going to promise you it won’t, because then it’ll happen and I’ll have lied to you. ”
Danny did not say anything.
“So here’s the one I can do,” Wes said. “I will call you back. Every single time. It might be an hour and it might be two, but there is not going to be a time when I saw it and didn’t call you back. That one I can actually do, so that’s the one you get.”
My son thought about it for a while.
“Okay,” he said.
And he went out to the kitchen.
I stood in that doorway with a screwdriver and I want to write down what I understood, standing there, because it took nine months and a stairwell and a hearing and a bookshelf in Room 12 to get to it.
Everybody promises the impossible thing.
Everybody. That is what adults do with frightened children, every time, automatically, out of love.
I’ll always be there. Nothing bad is going to happen.
I’ll never let you down. And it is kind and it is warm and it is a check written on an account nobody has, and the first time it bounces the kid learns that the words do not mean anything.
Nobody had ever sat on the floor of a room and told my son which part was real.
Ivy was at the kitchen table with a book.
Wes went to the sink and washed his hands and she watched him do it, and when he turned the water off she said it, flat, at the level of a person reading off a receipt.
“You’re not our dad.”
I was four feet away with a dish towel.
“No,” he said. “I’m not.”
“I have a dad.”
“I know you do. I’ve known him for eleven years.”
She closed the book on her finger.
“So what are you.”
Wes dried his hands on the towel and put it back on the handle, squared, which is a thing my daughter does and which I would put money on him having noticed.
“I’m a guy who’s good at furniture,” he said.
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” he said. “It isn’t. Here’s the answer. I’m not applying for it. Nobody’s applying for it. That job’s taken, it’s taken by a guy who is not doing great at it right now, and it’s still taken, and I’m not going to stand in your kitchen and audition.”
Ivy looked at him for a long two seconds.
“Okay,” she said, and opened the book back up.
He left at seven.
The kids were in the other room and I walked him to the top of the stairs, and he had his keys in his hand and he put one hand on the door frame and said something about the shim and about how the floor would settle and I should check it in a month.
And I kissed him.
That is the entire event and I am not going to dress it up.
I put my hand flat on his chest, which was still damp, and I went up on my toes about two inches, and I kissed him, once, for maybe two seconds, and then I came back down and took my hand off him.
I was completely sober. It was ten past seven in the evening. My children were forty feet away arguing about a swivel chair.
He did not move for a second.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay?”
“I’m going to go now,” Wes said, “because if I stand here I’m going to say something and it’s going to be terrible.”
“Probably.”
“Yeah.”
He went down the stairs.
The phone went off in my pocket ten minutes later.
made it home
And then, four seconds after it:
41%
In June, before any of that, I went back to Fenwick Street.