9. Annabelle
Annabelle
My floor is vibrating as the rage room does what a rage room does. I’m an adult, I remind myself. What would an adult do when the business below her is moonlighting as a subwoofer testing facility?
I wear the headphones Grant lent me as I read through all the papers from Lia, looking for legal recourse. I dissect the lease agreement from top to bottom, but it doesn’t say anything about noise.
While I’m here, I do some back-of-the-envelope math. The building is paid for, but the incoming rent is low. By the time I subtract taxes and utilities, there’s barely enough left for my own day-to-day expenses, much less building repairs.
I was hoping that living in a new place, where I could work on my cards full time, would open up my creativity and fuel my productivity. I thought that I was giving myself a fresh start, where I could pour my heart into my designs and thrive as an artist.
But how am I supposed to work with heavy bass and screaming coming through the floor? The noise-canceling headphones block out some of the sound, but not all of it. If I’m going to make this work, I need better ear protection.
I spend an hour on the internet, hopping from site to site, finally settling on the kind of ear protection the tarmac guys use at airports. The fastest they can get here is Monday, five whole days from now.
Just for a test, I type in my old Ann Arbor address. If I still lived there, I could have the headphones tomorrow. But if I still lived there, I wouldn’t need them tomorrow. Or at all.
I sigh and place the order.
It’s going to be a long five days.
As promised, June connected me with her aunt, and two days later, I have an appointment to meet the owner of Emerald Gifts.
I gather up six of my most popular cards and head down the back stairs just as Grant is heading up them.
He’s wearing his usual uniform of a flannel shirt open over a graphic tee.
This one says, “The Great Lakes: Always Fresh, Sometimes Frozen.”
My first impulse is to bite out something sarcastic, but then I remember I’m supposed to be an adult. Judging by his expression, he’s also trying to be an adult. We meet in the middle, where we both manage pleasant hellos.
“What do we do about packages?” I ask, thinking about the premium headphones I ordered.
“What do you mean?”
“I saw our mailboxes downstairs. But they don’t fit packages.”
He blinks at me. “Robert just hands stuff over.”
“What if you’re not here?”
“Then he holds it until the next day. It’s not that complicated.”
“What if a package comes for me?”
His eyes roll up, just a fraction. I’m a stair above him, so I’m looking right at his thick hair and deep brown eyes.
He’s freshly shaved and he smells nice. Like the woods, and winter air, and cuddling in a warm blanket.
Pine and snow and hot man. It would be nice not to notice any of these things.
“If a package comes for you, I’ll set it aside,” he huffs. “Do you want me to text you?”
“Please.” I tell him my number, which he puts in his phone. I push past him and out the back door, where I feel like I can breathe again.
My phone beeps with an incoming text. The number is unknown but it has a 906 area code, so I can guess who it’s from.
Grant: Testing the Emergency Landlord Hotline. Status update: no box, mild resentment. Please hold for further complaints
Annabelle: Hello, thank you for contacting Landlord Support. All our agents are currently busy not dealing with you
Grant: You say you’re not dealing with me, but you’re still replying
Annabelle: I could block this number. Then I’d never have to deal with you again
Grant: Then how will I tell you about your package? What did you order that’s so important anyway?
Annabelle: I ordered a large helping of nunya
Grant: What’s that?
Annabelle: Nunya business
Emerald Gifts is a darling shop full of tourist bait like t-shirts and keychains. The owner takes all six of my greeting cards on consignment and encourages me to make more local-focused designs. “You put a lighthouse on it and I can sell it all day long,” she says.
On the way home, I pass the Methodist church, where there’s a line of people standing outside. Nobody’s dressed for a wedding or a funeral, and people are leaving with paper bags of something that smells delicious.
If life has taught me anything, it’s that this is the kind of line to get into.
I join the end of it, standing next to a woman about my age.
She’s wearing chunky boots and Carhartt overalls topped with a thick down coat.
A pink buff holds back her dark hair. She looks like the kind of girl you follow in the apocalypse, if you want to live.
“What’s this for?” I ask her.
“It’s a fundraiser,” she says. “They’re selling pasties. You know what those are, right?”
Oh yes. I know all about the giant hand pies of beef and vegetables in a tender crust. Pasties are comfort food at its best. “I love a good pasty,” I tell her. I’m careful to pronounce it pass-tee, the way Yoopers do.
She indicates the long line that formed behind us. “You’re lucky you got here early because they always sell out. People buy multiples for their freezer.”
As we shuffle through the church vestibule, I learn that the woman I’ve been chatting with is named Sophie, and she’s an Echo Creek native who runs her own tour company. “It’s kind of what we do up here,” she says.
She asks me what I do for work, so I tell her about my cards, and show her a few. We compare websites and commiserate about how marketing is the hardest part of our jobs.
Before I know it, we’re at the front of the line, where we each buy a single pasty. It’s warm and heavy, and feels like holding a tinfoil-wrapped meteor. “Do you want gravy?” the white-haired woman at the checkout table asks us.
I wrinkle my forehead. “You can eat them with gravy?”
Next to me, Sophie’s shoulders relax a fraction, and I feel like I’ve passed a test. She grabs two ketchup packets and drops them in her bag. “You know,” she says on her way out the door. “Most tourists get pasties from Super Savers or The Up and Away Café.”
“I’m not a tourist,” I say around my first bite. “Oh my God, this is incredible.”
Sophie nods. “They use a recipe that’s like a hundred years old.”
The beef mingles deliciously with the potatoes, carrots, and rutabagas. The crust is beautifully flaky. It’s everything I could want on a cold day. If the filling wasn’t rocket hot, I’d inhale my entire pasty right here in this church parking lot. “Best lunch ever,” I say.
Sophie lifts her paper sack. “I’m taking mine back to work. But hey, if you ever want to go bird watching or need someone to take you ice fishing, I know all the best spots. I also have stargazing trips that are very popular.”
“That sounds cool,” I say. “And what I mean is that it sounds very, very cold.”
“It’s fine if you dress for it,” Sophie tells me. “The trick to getting through a Michigan winter isn’t to go outside less. It’s to go out more.”