Chapter 4 Upstairs, Downstairs, and the Buyout Letter — Ii
“Oh, gosh,” I said, and did the thing with my hands, the fluttery apologetic thing, “I mean, I’m not — I’d be terrible at that, I never know what to say to salesman types, I’d probably accidentally agree to something,” and Ren laughed, because that’s the correct response to Birdie volunteering her incompetence, and she said just don’t sign anything, just say I’m not home, you can do that much, and I said I could do that much, and she went to work.
I did do that much. I did rather more than that much, three days later, when the smiling person came.
He came on a Tuesday, midday, when he’d have known from a leasing database that a night-shift nurse would be asleep or gone.
Nice slacks, a folder, a lanyard, the specific handsomeness of a man whose whole job is the first ninety seconds of a conversation.
I watched him come up the block from my front window and I had him fully assembled before he hit the walk: rental car, out-of-town plates, the rep, not the boss. Holloway would send the rep.
I met him on the porch, because you never let the smiling person establish that there’s an inside.
“Afternoon, ma’am.” Big warm smile, hand already out. “Brad, with Harbor Landing Partners. I’m looking for a—” glance at the folder, “—Renata Alvarez?”
“Oh, she’s not — I’m just the downstairs,” I said, and let my voice go up and thin. “I watch the house, kind of, I’m not really — is everything okay? Is she in trouble?” I put a hand to my collarbone. “Oh my gosh, is this about the water bill, I told her about the water bill—”
“No, no, ma’am, nothing like that.” Brad recalibrated, down a register, slower, for the nervous one. “It’s good news, actually. We’ve got a real generous offer on the table for these properties, and I’d just love to leave some information—”
“I couldn’t take anything,” I said, backing up half a step, hugging myself. “I’d lose it. I lose everything. She’d be so mad.” I gave him a wobbly little laugh. “You should really come back when she’s home, I never know when that is, her schedule’s all over, I couldn’t tell you, I’d get it wrong.”
I could have told him her schedule to the quarter hour.
I could have told him the plate on his rental and the fact that he’d been three doors down at the Petrakis place forty minutes earlier because I’d watched him park.
I gave him none of it. I gave him a scattered woman who might drop his folder in a puddle, and I watched him decide I was not worth the effort, which is the entire point, being not worth the effort, and he left a card wedged in my storm door and told me to have her call, and I said I’d try to remember, and I would not.
He almost got me at the door, though. Not with the pitch, the pitch was nothing.
It was the folder. When he opened it to find her name, I saw the top sheet, a printed grid of addresses down the left and columns of little checkmarks and dates across the right, and my old eyes read it before my new manners could stop them: this was a campaign, not a sale.
Somebody was tracking the block like a fire tracks a floor plan, which house first and which house next, who’d folded and who hadn’t, and the two addresses at the top of the grid with no checkmarks at all, the two hard nos, were Ren’s and the Petrakis place.
The two that had burned so far were three streets over, softening up the easy edge.
They were working inward. I made myself look back up at Brad’s nice face and be a woman who’d never seen a grid in her life.
I brought the card inside. I stood in my kitchen and turned it over in my fingers, Harbor Landing Partners, a phone number, a little logo of a sailboat that had never once been on our brown working river, and I felt the old cold spot open wider, because a good number in a fancy envelope going house to house is a sentence, and I have a bad habit of reading sentences all the way to the end.
Small fires. A block of holdouts. A developer with a marina and, I’d have bet the sock drawer on it, a bank breathing down his neck. I could read it the way I’d read the smoke on Larch and Delaney. I knew where it was heading.
I put the card in the kitchen drawer, the deep one, next to the locked box I don’t open, and I shut the drawer, and I told myself, out loud, to the empty room, in Birdie’s own dithery voice so I’d believe it: “Not your problem, not your problem, you don’t do that anymore.
” The box in the drawer didn’t say anything.
It never does. It just sits there, closed, being the one thing in my whole careful house that I am genuinely, all the way down, afraid of.
That night I did the other thing I do, the thing that has a longer name I don’t use.
After the dishes, after the house went quiet above me, I walked the block.
Getting my steps. I went around by the alley and up Larch and back down Delaney, past the burned kitchen with its plywood eye, and I read my own neighborhood the way I’d read a route once, the new cars and the gone ones, the dark windows and the lit, the trash schedule, the dog that barks and the dog that doesn’t.
I told myself it was insomnia. I told myself a lot of things on that walk.
What I was actually doing was learning the ground like the man with the list was learning it, because if I knew the block better than he did, then whatever happened, I’d be a step ahead, and being a step ahead is the only comfort my old life ever gave me and the only one I know how to reach for in the dark.
Upstairs, Theo thumped the floor twice. Coming down. I put the kettle on.