Chapter 1 The Last Man Up the Mountain #2
“My last handyman lasted nine days. I had a wager with myself about you.” She turned to go. “You’ve already cost me it.”
Poppy walked me back up through the building like a tour guide who’d been told to be discreet and had decided against it on principle.
She showed me the wellness wing from the line I couldn’t cross, treatment rooms with doors she said were famous, though she wouldn’t say for what and got a complicated look when I asked.
She showed me the pump room, where an actual spring bubbled up into a marble basin under soft light, the theatrical heart of the place.
On the wall of the pump room there was a photograph. A man, silver-haired, maybe in his fifties when it was taken, big-handed, gentle in the face. He was smiling at someone outside the frame, someone the camera never got, and the smile had a quality I couldn’t place and didn’t try to.
“Who’s that,” I asked.
Poppy’s mouth, which had not stopped moving since I arrived, stopped moving.
“That’s nobody you need yet,” she said, and steered me on.
In the main corridor she paused at a board.
A big cork-and-magnet schedule board, the kind that runs a hotel’s life, names and rooms and times in a careful hand.
I clocked it on reflex, looking for what was wrong, the same scan I run on any room.
What was wrong was a whole section of it, a wing of the grid, that was blank.
Not unbooked-blank. Erased-blank. A scrubbed-clean rectangle where a lot of names used to be, with one small white magnet sitting alone in the corner of it, set down and abandoned eight months ago and never moved since.
“What’s that wing,” I said.
“Closed for renovation,” Poppy said, smooth as the NDA.
“It’s not under renovation. There’s no dust sheet, no tools, no smell of paint.”
She looked at me for a second with an expression I was already learning to read on this mountain. It was the look of a professional who has just realized the new guy notices things, and is quietly revising her estimate of how much trouble I’d turn out to be.
“You’re going to be exhausting,” she said. “Kitchen’s this way. Ute’s expecting you, and Ute does not like to be kept waiting, and Ute is the only person on this mountain I’m actually afraid of.”
Ute Berger was fifty-five and built like the back wall of an oven, grey-streaked hair in a bun, an apron that had clearly never come off in living memory, and forearms a baker earns. She put a plate in front of me without asking and watched me eat it as Marlene had watched me work.
It was Kn?del, dense and good, with a dark sauce I’d have paid the village kiosk woman to learn the secret of. I ate all of it because I was hungry and because I had been raised to understand that a plate from a woman like this was a test, and the test was simply whether you took it seriously.
“You eat fast,” Ute said. It was not a compliment and it was not a criticism. It was a verdict being weighed.
“I eat what’s in front of me. I learned not to assume there’d be more.”
Her square face softened, there and gone, the way a frost goes off a window when the sun first hits it. She took my empty plate, and on her way back to the stove she said, to the pot and not to me, “You’ll do.”
Poppy, from the doorway, made a small delighted noise. “She’s never said that to anyone on the first plate. The last handyman got ‘we’ll see’ and he was right to be worried.”
Ute’s approval, I could already tell, was the closest thing the house had to citizenship, her plates stage directions for who belonged. The food was good and the woman meant it, both at once, and after three years of bad flats and worse rooms, somebody meaning it landed harder than it should have.
There was a room for me above the boiler house. One window, a narrow bed, a chair, a radiator that, I was pleased to confirm, was now warm. The key sat on the pillow, brass, on a loop of string. Somebody had left it there before I’d even signed. The house had decided I was staying before I had.
Poppy stopped in the doorway as she left me to it. The bright, fast surface dropped for exactly one second, and underneath it was somebody much sharper.
“Intake physical’s at eight,” she said. “Tomorrow morning. With Yuki, our midwife-nurse. Bloodwork, the full panel, it’s standard, everybody on staff does it.
” She paused. “Be on time. Yuki doesn’t do late.
Yuki doesn’t do anything she didn’t already decide to do at exactly the hour she decided to do it. ”
“Eight o’clock,” I said. “Bloodwork.”
“Standard panel.” She said it again, and there was something underneath the repetition, the sound of a person turning a thing over she hadn’t quite decided how to hold.
She tapped the doorframe twice and was gone, and her voice carried back up the stairs, bright again, restored, telling someone in the corridor that no, of course there was hot water, there had always been hot water, what a question.
I sat on the narrow bed in the warm little room and took out the soft-folded letter and looked at the number one more time. Nineteen thousand, two hundred twelve, and forty cents.
Outside the one window, full dark now, and somewhere below me in the dark the boiler turned over and caught and held, steady, the one sound in the sleeping house that was already mine.
I put the letter away and set an alarm I didn’t need. Eight o’clock. Yuki doesn’t do late.