CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
?
MARY
That Saturday Esperanza Cruz was sitting on the step of Warren’s at six in the morning with a folder open across her knees. She read the top sheet at me before I had the keys off my thumb.
“Mary Corinne Warren. Is that all of it? No middle-initial nonsense?”
“That’s all of it.”
“Bueno.” She did not get up. “Then we’ll wait for the sun like Christians.”
“What’s in the folder?”
“A folder is a private thing until it’s on a counter.”
The sidewalk was black and wet from rain that had stopped in the night.
The streetlight over the shoe repair was still burning.
Sixty-five degrees, which in this city in October is an event, and she had a cardigan over the bright blouse and her purse on her arm like she had come to take a deposition.
“That’s not an answer to my question,” I said.
“No, m’ija. It isn’t an answer.”
I got the shutter up. It ran to the top of its track and hit, the same flat bang it had made every morning of my grandmother’s life. Two doors down somebody laughed at the sound of it.
Inside, the front room smelled like cold ash and old sugar.
Number Two has been dead six years. The door is wired shut with a coat hanger and I keep a tray of guava paste on top of it like it is furniture.
Number One caught on the first try, one small blue thump, and I stood with my hands flat on the front of it and let the heat come up into my forearms.
The kick plate banged and Rian came through the swing door with a screwdriver in his fist.
“Your back door locks now. Don’t thank me. It was insulting.”
“How long have you been in my building?”
“Since four.”
He said it to the doorframe. There was sawdust on his boots and the old strike plate on the floor by the mop sink.
“Where’s my brick?”
“In the alley. That brick wasn’t a security system, Mary.”
I put the heel of my hand against the bench. The metal rang.
“That brick was load-bearing and you know it.”
“It was a brick, Mary. It weighed nothing.”
“You could’ve knocked. I used to sleep just upstairs from that door.”
“Just upstairs,” Rian said. “That’s the part I’d like you to think about.”
Rian went back down the hall and tried the new bolt three times, because he did not believe anything the first time.
At half past six a black Land Cruiser came up on the curb like it belonged there, and Nicolas got out carrying a cardboard box in both hands.
“It’s a replacement deck. The crack can be fixed. Then we deal with the burner.”
Rian leaned his shoulder into the door frame and did not even try to hold it in.
“He read a manual. He read an entire manual, Mary.”
“I did,” Nicolas said.
“Cover to cover. There were diagrams.”
“There were.”
“Did you highlight?”
“Don’t,” Rian said, and then he laughed, one flat unwilling bark that got out before he could stop it. Then he looked like a man who had dropped something in public. Nicolas did not react at all, which made it worse.
“You highlighted the whole thing, didn’t you,” I said.
Nicolas came around the marble bench with the boxed stone in both hands and I was in his way and did not move.
“I can do that myself. I’ve had my arm in that oven since I was—”
“Move your hand, Mary.” Nicolas leaned past me to set the boxed stone beside Number Two, and for two seconds the whole front of him was against the whole back of me, shoulder blades to the backs of my knees. “I’m not going to say it twice and I’m not going to be sorry about how I moved it.”
I moved my hand. Everything in me went down and forward like syrup coming off a spoon, before I had decided one thing about it.
My nipples pulled tight under a T-shirt with flour on the front of it.
There was an ache low in my cunt at twenty to seven in the morning, in my grandmother’s shop, with two men in it and a notary on the step, and nothing to be done about any of it.
Luca arrived at seven in a suit, in Little Havana, carrying a folder that was the twin of Esperanza’s.
“Luca. Not one of you told the other two you were coming, did you,” I said to the three of them.
Luca put a hand flat over his heart. “I resent the implication and also no, I did not.”
“Rian’s been here since four. Nicolas brought an appliance part. You’re in a tie on Calle Ocho at seven and none of you will look at each other.”
“That’s three men exercising independent judgment,” Luca said. “It’s beautiful, really.”
“It’s a conspiracy of people who won’t call each other,” I said.
“We call each other constantly about other things.”
“We don’t,” Rian said.
Nobody argued with me after that. Rian pulled the fan chain and one blade went around a different white than the other four. Out front the gates were still down the whole block. The smell of the shop got out the open door and started walking around.
I had taken my grandmother’s sign down off its brackets to wash it. It stood face-out against the green tile at eye level, so everyone who came in read WARREN’S before they got to me. The first was a man in work boots.
“You’re open.”
“I’m open.”
“Since when?” He was holding the door open with his boot.
“About ten minutes ago. There’s no croquetas. There’s pastelitos and there’s coffee.”
“Co?o. Corinne’s girl.”
He stood at the counter with a cortado and ate two of them and read the sign the whole time.
“You’ve got flour on your throat,” Rian said, “and I’m not saying where, because I want it there all day.”
?
At half past eight Esperanza came in off the step and put her purse on the counter.
“Sit. I’ll do the talking part. Then you’ll do the reading part, because I don’t summarize.”
“You’ve never summarized anything in your life.”
“And look how well you read now.”
She laid a county record flat next to the guava and turned it so it faced me. I put my thumb on the buyer’s line and read it with my mouth moving.
“AVC 4, LLC. Three letters and a number.”
“That’s the one,” Luca said.
“This is the whole block, not just my building.”
“It is,” Luca said.
“The laundry. The shoe repair. The lot behind me.”
“And the ground under all of it.”
“Read me the date,” I said.
“Read it yourself, m’ija. It’s four inches from your hand.”
I read it. Then I read it again with my finger on it, which is a thing I have not done since school.
“June.”
Nobody said anything. Out on the sidewalk the first gate went up, and then another one.
“Danny’s last markers weren’t written in June. Nobody came through my back door in June. In June I was standing right here in the dark with a flashlight, working out what a compressor—”
“Yes,” Luca said.
“Say the whole thing out loud for me.”
Luca put his own folder on the counter and did not open it, which is his version of standing up straight.
“The shell that bought this block in June is the same one on page one of your contract, and this morning it signed the building over to you.”
“Say that again, slower.”
“It’s yours. Inside the company it can be voted away by men in a room you’ve never been in. Outside it, nobody at that table can touch it.”
Here is the part I am not going to dress up.
What went through me first was not anger about June.
It was a hot, low, disgraceful hope that the shell owned the whole street, both sides, all the way down to Ninth.
Because then nobody could ever put me out of here again.
I noticed myself stop caring, somewhere between the counter and the guava tray, and I kept reading anyway.
After that morning I never got to call myself a hostage again.
“Whose name’s on the check that bought the block?”
“That’s a different question and I’d rather you asked it later.”
“There it is.”
Esperanza put her finger on the signature line and waited me out. Then she took the stamp out of her purse. It was cold and heavier than it looks, and the sound it made going down was the loudest thing in that room all morning.
The deed went into Mary Corinne Warren’s name. Alone. It was not inside anybody’s contract and not inside anybody’s company. In my own shop, at twenty past nine on a Saturday, with Luca at the end of the counter with his hands behind his back, watching a woman get handed a building.
Luca gave me the recorded June purchase and the new conveyance together. The laundry, the shoe repair and the ground under Warren’s were all on mine. He had not slipped the neighbors back into the company while I watched my own door.
“Congratulations, m’ija,” Esperanza said, and put the stamp away, and that was the whole speech.
Esperanza got as far as the door. Then she turned around.
“And the other thing, m’ija.”
“I know what you said.”
“Bueno.”
Nicolas had gone out to the alley when the stamp came out of the purse and had not come back, and nobody remarked on that either.
“Why did the power company man stop coming?” I asked Rian.
“Because I went and had a conversation with him. You don’t want the rest of that sentence.”
“He had a clipboard and a kid in a car seat,” I said.
“He had a shutoff order with your grandmother’s name on it and he’d been told twice.”
“Told by who, and told how?”
“Me. That’s what happened. I’m not making it a nicer story for you.”
I did not pretend it was one. I stood there holding a deed that a man had bought a whole block to be able to hand me, and I thought about a clipboard, and I said nothing. I know that about myself now.
Then Rian looked out the front window, over the top of the sign.
“There’s a gray Chrysler at the end of the block. It isn’t ours and it isn’t moving.”
“Since when’s it been sitting there?”
“About the time your notary took her stamp out.”
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Yelena let me into the Perch on the fifty-first floor at eleven and took the bag off my shoulder before I had the strap over my head.
On the way back Rian had stopped at the Coliseum. Hector showed me a new office door upstairs: MARY WARREN, cut cleanly into the glass. I tried the handle. It opened. Inside were an empty desk and two chairs, and I had not asked for any of it. I put the key in my bag beside the deed.
“Mrs. Varela.”
She had called me Miss Warren in September. The change made me look up. She put a cortado down on the black stone, no sugar, cinnamon on the foam, and went into her galley, where the washer was running.
I ate standing at the island, the way I have always eaten.
The deed lay on the stone beside my plate with the stamp shining on it.
Past it, at the end of the island, stood the pale ash stool standing empty, the odd one that turned up on my third day in that house and has been being dragged around the island since, never quite in anybody’s way.
“They’re handing me things faster than I can sign for them,” I said, to the room, to the washer, to nobody. “That stopped making sense a while ago.”
Yelena came out with an armful of ironing and stopped. She was not a woman who talked. She said a thing and went.
“Mary.” My own name landed on the stone between us. “They give you what they can take back, and it means nothing. Watch for the thing they can’t.”
Then she went back to the laundry.
I stood with a fork in my hand and did not say a word about it, because saying it would have made her stop.
I wanted it left on the stone where she put it.
My debt was invented. My brother’s name was the pen they used to write it.
A block on Calle Ocho was bought in June by a company I had never heard of, and I had signed twelve pages in a dining room on the fifth of September, and I could not have told anybody what was on any of them past the first two.
I put the deed in my bag next to my grandmother’s recipe book, and I sat down on the second stool, and I decided that I was going to find out exactly what I signed. All of it.