CHAPTER SIXTEEN
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MARY
The following Wednesday I used my own card and got down to the garage at ten to seven with my bag on my shoulder and my grandmother’s key closed up in my fist. I had told nobody in that house I was going.
Bogdan had the car door open before I was out of the elevator, and he said good morning, Miss Warren.
In the Perch I was Miss Warren to Yelena and Mary to the brothers. Bogdan made Miss Warren sound like a name on a pickup sheet. He knew where I was going before I had said it, and I did not like how much relief that saved me.
“Calle Ocho, Miss Warren?”
“Please.”
“Causeway’s clear. Twenty-five minutes, no more.”
I got in and put the bag on my knees.
“Does anybody in that house know I’m—”
“The car goes in the book,” he said. “That’s all I do with it.”
“That’s not a no.”
“No, Miss Warren. It isn’t.”
So that was the morning ruined in the first four minutes.
Nobody had stopped me. Nobody had stood in a doorway.
I wanted Rian to have been in it. The car had been running before I pushed the button, which meant somebody knew I was coming down before I did, and I could not work out whether that was freedom or its exact opposite.
I said nothing the whole way and Bogdan let me.
Calle Ocho was still wet from a rain that came through at three. The gates were up on the coin laundry and down everywhere else. The air had that one cool morning in it that arrives in September and gets taken back by nine.
The front key stuck. The lock has more play in it than the key has teeth, and the back door in the alley has never locked in my life.
I went in the front. Then I stood with my hand still on the door, because the last time I came through it in daylight I was twenty-two and there were folding chairs in here.
Green tile to shoulder height, cold enough through my sleeve to make my wrist ache. Four tables nobody ever sat at. Six stools, one with tape on the seat.
On the inside of the front window, in the dust, in my grandmother’s finger-writing, a phone number and the word guayaba. Nobody has washed that side of the glass in seven years. I am the nobody.
“I’m here, abuela,” I said to the dust, and my voice came back off the tile sounding like somebody else’s.
I put my apron on, wrapped it twice, tied it in front, and lit Number One.
Number One caught with the soft thump it makes. I tried Number Two out of habit. It clicked and failed, as it had for six years. Then I shut its controls off again. Corinne used to tell it to behave itself. I was old enough now to know it wasn’t listening.
Bogdan came as far as the swing door.
“Door open or closed?”
“Open. And don’t stand in it. It makes the room feel like a hallway.”
“I’ll be outside, Miss Warren,” he said.
“Bogdan. Does that watch tell time, or does it just cost money?”
“Both.”
It slid down over the back of his hand when he turned to go. Out on the sidewalk he took a call with his back to the glass. I heard my own name in the middle of it and then the time, and the gold on the watch caught the flat light twice.
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“Mary Corinne! Ay, that is Corinne’s whole face, standing in the street.”
She was on the far curb in a housecoat with a cigarette going. Sixty-odd, three rings, a gold cross. She came across Calle Ocho without looking either way.
“Good morning,” I said.
“You’re looking at me as if you don’t know me.”
“Mrs. Cruz. I know you. I wasn’t expecting you without your book.”
“Esperanza when I’m crossing the street. I live two streets that way.” She pointed with the cigarette. “I put my stamp on everything your grandmother ever signed, and now you’re looking at me like I’m selling something.”
“It’s early. I’m not at my best before the oven’s up.”
“It’s seven in the morning and you’re standing in the street with a key in your hand. I’ve seen worse on this block.”
Her housecoat, the cigarette, the bare pavement under her slippers: at the Perch she had belonged to their table. Here she belonged to my block. I had to put my hand down on the counter before I invited her in.
“Mrs. Cruz. Come in and sit down. The good one’s on.”
“Which one’s the good one?” she said.
“Number One. Number Two’s been dead six years and I still talk to it.”
“Your grandmother talked to it too. She called it the lazy one and she wasn’t joking.”
She took the third stool, the one with the tape, and set her purse on the counter between us like she was entering it into evidence.
I went two doors up to the ventanita and came back with two cortados.
Mine had the burnt bottom of the pot in it.
It was better than anything handed to me on the fifty-first floor.
“You come on a Wednesday, with nobody,” Esperanza said. “Your grandmother opened on a Wednesday.”
“I haven’t had this place open since—”
“I know when. I was there. Drink your coffee.”
“And who’s the man on the sidewalk?” she said, to the window.
“He drives.”
“Mm.”
She let that sit and drank. She could wait out anybody in that tower and enjoy it.
“Mrs. Cruz, who do I pay? For this. If I ever paid anybody.”
“You don’t pay anybody.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Nobody’s come to that door about it in seven years, m’ija.” She turned the cup around on its saucer. “That’s a strange thing about a building on this street, and I’ve thought so more than once.”
“It’s a dead bakery with one oven.”
“It’s three storefronts on Calle Ocho.” She said it kindly, which was worse. “I stamped every paper that woman ever signed and she read all of them out loud to me first. Every one. It took hours and I never got to leave.”
“That sounds like her.”
“So.” She set the cup down. “You should read what you signed, m’ija. All of it.”
The oven ticked. Number One’s thermostat clicked behind me.
“It’s twelve pages of bank paperwork and a stamp.”
“Mm.”
“Don’t do that.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Esperanza said.
Her glasses were down on their chain and she was not looking at me.
“What would I even be looking for?”
“The part they read fastest.”
She said it the way she would have told me the walk-in was running warm. No eyebrows, no lean. “You’ll bake today?”
“I’ll bake today.”
“Then I’ll send my sister at eleven and you’ll sell her a dozen pastelitos at the old price.”
The old price would lose me money on the butter alone.
“Mrs. Cruz—”
“At the old price. She’s cheap and she’s my sister and I have to live with her.”
She finished her coffee. She put a hand on my cheek and told me I had my mother’s chin, and then she went back across the street to her own morning.
I stood there with a rag in my hand for a while, wanting Rian to walk in and tell me the oven was garbage.
There was an hour on the second night in that tower when I sat on a bathroom floor and did the arithmetic on my own brother against a debt somebody else wrote. I got the number. I have never told anybody what it was, and I went and scraped the bench instead, because steel does not care.
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My phone went off against the flour bin at twenty past nine, in a bakery where the only other sound was Number One’s fan. Luca’s name came up over the top of a photograph that had landed first, and I answered with a floury knuckle.
“Second drawer from the left. It holds at eighty-five all night, and I thought about you the entire time it was being installed, which the electrician found unprofessional.”
The photograph was the black island and one open drawer. A dial with numbers on it. Warm light down in the bottom of it like a lit oven at three in the morning.
“You bought a bread appliance to flirt with me.”
“I bought two. The other one was a surprise and now it isn’t, and I want that noted.”
I laughed in an empty bakery with one working oven. It went around the tile and the cold iron and came back at me.
“Noted,” I said. “That’s all it is, then? A drawer?”
“It’s a box that holds a temperature. It is also the only object in that kitchen I chose, and I chose it for you, and I want a great deal of credit for both halves of that sentence.”
“You’re very sure of yourself for a man on a telephone.”
“Did the electrician get lunch?” I said.
“He did not, and I’d like that struck from the record.”
“Denied.”
He was grinning. I could hear it, and I did not give him the satisfaction of grinning back.
“I’m a lawyer. It’s the whole job.” A beat. “Wear the apron when I get there. Don’t wear anything under the apron when I get there. I’ll be no use to a court for the rest of the week and I’ve decided I don’t care.”
I put the phone face down on the bench. My nipples had gone tight under the apron before the sentence was finished. There was a low pull going through my cunt that had nothing to do with the room I was standing in. I got both hands flat on the counter and put my head down and waited it out.
Nobody had asked me whether I wanted a proving drawer, and he had it put in on a Tuesday and then told me which drawer it was.
“You’re going to stand in that kitchen now and think about my mouth and then go back to work, and I’m going to know you did it.”
“I’m hanging up on you.”
“You aren’t.” Then the warmth stayed and something under it changed. “Marchetti’s clerk stopped picking up on Monday. It’s nothing. It’s a man with a phone.”
“Say it again and I’ll believe you.”
“It’s nothing,” he said.
“Luca. You said it twice.”
“I say things for a living, and I have to go and be charming at somebody about a boat. Eat something that isn’t guava paste off a wire.”
He hung up before I could answer, which is how that family ends telephone calls.
And because Esperanza had told me to read what I signed, and because my copy of the contract was in a drawer twenty-five minutes away, I did the lazy version instead. I typed the address of the building I was standing in into the county property search.
It came up in three seconds. A page of gray boxes on the screen, and under owner of record it did not say a bank. The screen said AVC 4, LLC. Recorded in June. The whole parcel, and the two either side of it, which is the coin laundry and the shoe repair, all three of them on one deed.
Some company had bought my grandmother’s block before anybody ever put a hand on my back door.
I did not know what a person does with that at half past nine, with an oven on and a bench to scrape.
I knew. I did not want to be told which brother it was, because not knowing let me go back up there at night and want Nicolas in the room.
I took a screenshot. I put the phone in my apron pocket.
“Bogdan. Come and help me lift something.”
He came in without asking what. With the supply disconnected and the oven cold, we got a folded towel under the front feet of Number Two and walked it off them a corner at a time, and it took until half past ten, and neither of us said one word about whose job it was.
A second man had taken the sidewalk off Bogdan sometime after nine.
Nobody told me his name. Across the street the gray car that was there when we pulled up was still in the same space.
I looked at it. Then I looked at the oven.
The building had an owner and it was not the bank—three letters and a number, since June—and I stood there with my thumb on the screen and did absolutely nothing about it.