Chapter 8 Jennifer
JENNIFER
Hiding from your landlord is a skill nobody puts on a résumé, but if they did, mine would be impressive.
Three months of practice will do that to a person.
The key is routine disruption. Mr. Richards is a creature of habit, which worked against me at first because his habits and mine ran on the same schedule.
My habit was leaving for work at eight fifteen every morning like a person with a job, which I was until I wasn’t.
His habit is checking the mail at eight and watering the two sad little plants by the front entrance at eight ten, which makes the window between eight ten and eight twenty prime escape time if you take the back stairwell, cut through the laundry room, and don’t look guilty doing it.
I’ve gotten very good at not looking guilty.
The problem with today is that I’m not leaving for work. I’m leaving because I haven’t eaten since yesterday afternoon, when I finished the last of the crackers I’d been rationing with the kind of grim focus usually reserved for people stranded on mountains.
The five thousand from Vegas disappeared fast. Flight home. Bills no one could cover for me anymore. Rent. Groceries. One problem after another until the money was gone, like it had never existed at all.
Now I have twenty dollars. The bodega on the corner does breakfast sandwiches for three fifty, which means I can get two and still have change, and the baby has been making her feelings about this situation very clear since around five this morning in the specific way that bypasses all reasonable thought, goes straight to the stomach, and says feed me right now or I will make your life miserable.
She. I’ve been saying she.
I don’t know that it’s a she. I haven’t been to a doctor since the test, because the test used my last fourteen dollars of that particular week, and doctors cost considerably more than that.
But she feels like a she. Furious and hungry, badly timed, and already somehow the only thing that feels real in a life that has been coming apart for months.
She’s hungry.
Therefore, I’m going out.
I check the time on my phone. Eight eighteen.
I'm cutting it close but the window is open, technically.
I pull on my jacket, grab my purse with the twenty dollar bill folded inside it like a treasure map, and take the back stairs two at a time, because the back stairs are my best friend now, which tells you something about the current state of my social life.
The laundry room smells like dryer sheets and other people's clean clothes. I slip through it, past Mrs. Yuen's cart that's always parked in the same spot, out the side door, and into the alley.
Free.
I let out a breath.
The same one every morning for three months, half relief and half the exhaustion of someone who has turned sneaking out of her own building into a daily athletic event.
Then I feel ridiculous for it, because this is still my home, technically, for now, and I’m behaving like a fugitive in it.
There’s something deeply undignified about that, which I try not to examine too closely because it leads to a spiral I don’t have time for before breakfast.
I round the front of the building and that’s when I see it.
The window, the one I always leave cracked because the radiator in my apartment sounds like a tiny man trapped inside it playing percussion, and that sliver of fresh air is the only thing keeping me from losing my mind entirely.
It's closed.
Locked from the inside.
That has never happened. In eight months of living here, that window has never been locked from the inside because I am always inside to lock it myself, and when I'm outside I leave it cracked, which I know is a whole thing for a city apartment but the tiny radiator man is relentless and a girl has to do what a girl has to do.
I stop walking.
I look at the window.
Mr. Richards looks back at me from behind it.
He waves.
It's a very calm wave, the wave of a man who has been waiting patiently and has nowhere else to be, which is somehow worse than every other version of this confrontation I've been rehearsing in the shower for three months.
I stand on the sidewalk for one full second, thinking about all the directions I could walk that are not toward my front door. The bodega. The bus station. Canada. Somewhere with no extradition treaties and a reasonable cost of living.
Then I think about the crackers I don't have and the twenty dollars I do and the very hungry small person currently lodging a formal complaint against my ribcage, and I go inside.
Mr. Richards is sitting at my kitchen table.
I stop so hard the door nearly hits me on the way back. For a second, I just stand there with one hand still on the knob, because it is my kitchen table. My apartment. My stale cereal smell, my chipped mugs, my life, such as it is.
He’s my landlord, yes, and he let himself in with the master key, which is apparently legal with notice.
Notice he gave in the form of three letters currently spread in front of him on the table.
The same three letters I stacked on the counter unopened because reading them felt like a problem for later, and later kept refusing to arrive.
Mr. Richards is tall, silver at the temples, dressed like a man who irons even his opinions. Good shoes. Serious jacket.
He has opened all three envelopes.
“Miss Sullivan,” he says.
"Mr. Richards.” I put my purse down on the counter with more calm than I feel, which is none, I feel none. "I was just heading out."
"I know. I saw you leave." He folds his hands on the table. "And I came up to wait, because I think we've reached the point where waiting is no longer something either of us can afford."
I pull out the chair across from him and sit down because my legs feel as if they’re about to give way.
My apartment always feels smaller when someone else is in it, like the walls remember they're not that far apart and decide to make a point of it.
There's a mug on the counter I haven't washed.
A stack of books I've been reading because they're free and they're the only entertainment I have left since I canceled everything with a monthly charge, which was a whole afternoon of small cancellations that felt like a series of tiny funerals.
"The rent," I say.
"Three months, Miss Sullivan,” he slurs, confirming that he’s already had his morning shot of whiskey and judging by the way he’s looking at me, maybe his whole weeks stash.
"I have a mortgage on this building. I have expenses.
I have tenants who need maintained facilities.
I sympathize with difficult circumstances, but I am not a charity. "
I open my mouth. Close it again.
I’d been rehearsing the speech for two weeks. The one where I tell him I’m pregnant and trying, I really am. That I just need a little more time. Another month. I have leads. I’m following up.
In that version, he softens. Says we can work something out.
But then he says, I am not a charity.
Not cruelly. Calmly. Like a fact. Like something settled long before I walked into the room.
And just like that, anything I might say next gets filed under pity. Pregnant. Alone. Trying so hard I’m tired down to the bone. None of it matters now. It all sounds like begging.
He’s already told me what he thinks of begging.
So I close my mouth.
And nod.
"I understand," I say, and my voice comes out level, which is an achievement I'll be privately proud of later. "I can't make up three months."
"No."
"I need to get my things."
"I'll give you until this evening. After that I'll need to begin the process of preparing the unit."
The unit.
My apartment is a unit now.
"Thank you," I say, and I mean it, genuinely, because he could make this harder and he's choosing not to. "I'll be out before evening."
He nods, collects his letters from the table, and stands.
At the door he pauses, and for a moment I think he might say something else, something human and soft that lives underneath the landlord part of him.
Then he thinks better of it, or decides it won't help, or maybe just doesn't have the words. He leaves.
I sit at the kitchen table, holding myself together. Right now, I want to scream, cry, or break something, but I feel empty, so I get up and start packing.
I have four duffel bags and a cardboard box, and it turns out that’s enough.
That’s the part I keep stumbling over as I move through the apartment, pulling things off shelves and out of drawers.
I’ve lived here eight months, and I own two bags and a box worth of things that matter.
Everything else can stay. The chipped thrift-store plates.
The throw blanket pilling at the edges. The welcome mat I bought when I moved in because I thought this might become a place worth welcoming people to.
The books come with me. Obviously. You don’t abandon books.
The small framed photo of my mother comes too, wrapped in a sweater so it doesn’t break.
The prenatal vitamins I bought three weeks ago and have taken with almost aggressive devotion definitely come with me.
I’m sitting on the floor beside the box, trying to work out how to fit the books, the spare blanket, the vitamins, the charger, and the three edible things left in my fridge, when someone knocks on my open door.
Rosa.
She’s a beta who lives across the hall. She’s sixty-two, makes tamales on Sundays, and once let me sit in her apartment all afternoon watching telenovelas without asking why I needed to be anywhere but my own home. That sort of grace should count for more in this world.
She looks at the bags. The box. Me on the floor.
Her face goes soft and careful, and that’s when I feel it, the collapse right behind my ribs that comes when someone is simply kind to you after you’ve been holding yourself together by force.
"Mija," Rosa says.
And I start crying.