CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
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MARY
By Tuesday there was a truck in the middle of my block that had been there since Sunday night, and I had made a point of not seeing it. At half past five I knocked on the glass.
Rian had called before it arrived. A threat from Artur. Two men on the corner again. I told him he should have given me the whole warning instead of trying to make it sound small. He took that without arguing.
On Sunday he had answered Bogdan’s phone when Artur called. Artur hung up at his voice. Since then Rian had been chasing the names in that phone through one dead end after another. He would not tell me what had happened to Bogdan. I would not let him change the subject to my bedtime.
Rian had the window down before the second knock. “Mary.”
“Bird Road. The trailer lot.” My apron was still on under my coat. “You’ll take me and you won’t say one word on the way.”
“You don’t have to do this.”
“I know. I’ve had a week of men telling me what I don’t have to do.”
He reached across and opened the door from the inside.
The lot came up in ten minutes. Gravel, chain-link, pennant flags with no color left in them.
Grant Halloway was behind his counter with his back to the door, writing something down. His counter man sat by the window with a soda.
“With you in a minute,” Halloway said, to the clipboard.
Nobody answered him. I said nothing, and Rian said nothing behind me, and in the end it was the quiet that turned him around, which is more than I ever managed with a voice.
He looked at me. There was nowhere else in that office to put it.
“Listen—”
I waited. My hands hung open where he could see there was nothing in them.
“Whatever he—”
Then Grant Halloway ran out of road, in his own office, in front of his own man, with the word behind his teeth and no way to get it over them with my face in the room.
He did not apologize. I had not come for one.
The counter man set the soda down without a sound.
“No,” I said. “I don’t want anything out of your kitchen.”
He asked me that once with his back to me. I took my time with the answer.
I walked out first. He was still standing where the quiet had turned him with the clipboard in his hand, and that is the last of him there is.
Rian put me down at my own door and did not come in.
The men were still in the coin laundry when he drove away to the Perch. He was following something on Bogdan’s phone. I watched his taillights turn the corner, then went inside and pulled the front door shut without bolting it. I still had a floor to mop.
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The deed hung in a black frame on the nail that was empty my whole life. I read it at closing now, after the knobs and before the lights. Mary Corinne Warren, county letters under glass. It used to close my throat. Tonight it was paper.
The case was emptied and wiped, the trays stacked. Over the door, my grandmother’s sign stayed dark.
I counted the register drawer twice and left it open on the marble. Thirty-one dollars and change. Headlights crossed the tile in slow bars.
Then I mopped, from the kitchen door out. Bleach came off the bucket and caught the back of my throat.
Somewhere in the middle of that floor I started counting what I had been given.
Clothes cut to my size, hanging in a closet before I walked into the room. A stool that appeared at the black stone island one evening and nobody explained. The proving drawer. The deed. My name on an office door at the Coliseum, painted there by somebody who was paid to paint it.
My grandmother painted that sign herself, the W twice, because the first white came out wrong. I had not reached that switch at six, or at seven.
“On before you unlock. Off last, when you’re the only one left in here.”
“What if I forget?” I was nine and standing on a milk crate.
“Then the block thinks I died.”
I worked it through with the mop handle in both hands. It came out clean and ugly. Nobody living had ever chosen me. I had been priced and collected and furnished. The men who did the furnishing had better taste and a wider budget than the man who built the number.
My body, which had no opinion about any of it, went on producing evidence against me. Nicolas’s mouth on the inside of my left forearm, first, every time. Rian’s hand flat on my hips in a doorway. Luca talking filthy at the back of my neck until I lost the end of my own sentence.
I scrubbed a counter that did not need scrubbing.
I could not make one inch of myself ashamed of a minute of it.
That was what had me shaking over a mop bucket at seven at night—not the buying.
The fact that I would go back. Put it in front of me again tonight, the number and the ninety days and all three names, and my hand would go for the pen.
I know exactly what it is. I would take it anyway.
I got four bars into Cielito Lindo before I heard myself doing it. Hers, over a sheet pan. I stopped on the fourth.
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Artur Sokolov was standing in the front room of my grandmother’s shop.
There is no bell in that bracket over the door, so I heard nothing. Artur had his sunglasses up in his hair and rain across the shoulders of a linen jacket. My hands went cold on the mop handle.
“Mary Corinne Warren. It’s on the wall now. They do like putting your name on things.”
Two of Rian’s men had sat in the coin laundry window all weekend. I knew the corner was empty the way you know a tooth is gone.
“They went home a little after six,” Artur said. “Somebody they trust called them. Be angry with them later if there’s a later.”
“Get out of my shop.”
“Cortado. No sugar.”
“We’re closed.”
Artur sat down on the third stool, the taped one, and put his forearms on my counter.
“You’re still behind the counter.”
I made it. The tamp, the pitcher, the milk pulled off before it squeaked. Cinnamon over the foam. Exactly the way Nicolas makes it for me at three in the morning, and I hated every knuckle I own.
I set the cup on the marble. Artur took it and made a production out of not touching me, which was worse than a hand.
“Sit down. It’s your shop,” he said.
“I’ll stand.”
“Suit yourself. You’ve been on your feet since five.” He tasted it. “Everything I’m about to tell you is true. That’s the part that’ll bother you.”
“People keep opening with that. Then they hand me an object and go home and call it a kindness.”
“Twelve thousand dollars. That’s what your brother actually owed. My father’s people bought the paper and wrote the rest on afterward.”
Up the block a radio went into a horn line, and I did not feel one thing I expected to feel.
“I know,” I said.
“I thought you might by now. Does knowing help?”
“No.”
“It never does. Knowing is the cheapest thing on the shelf.” Artur turned the cup a quarter turn. “They needed a wife they couldn’t be blamed for. We handed them one. Now they call it something else.”
“They call it an alliance.”
“That’s the word they use.” He squared the cup to the marble edge. “A word is worth whatever the room says it’s worth, and I’d rather hand that table a piece of paper than an argument.”
“When?”
“Twenty-eight days from tonight.”
I heard my own breath go out of me and did not hear it come back.
“You’ve just handed me a date.”
“I handed you a date because you won’t be anywhere you can spend it. That isn’t generosity, it’s arithmetic.” He said it pleasantly.
“And the driver? The one with the new watch on him?”
“Bogdan won’t be driving for anybody again, and that wasn’t my work. Your husband has a brother who does that, and he’s about forty minutes too late tonight.”
Artur took a folded page out of his coat and smoothed it flat on the marble.
“One page. Your hand at the bottom. Danny’s on a bus by ten.”
“A bus to where?”
“Anywhere with his name off it.”
I read the first line and the second and stopped. It said, in the driest language anybody has ever built, that I had been purchased, that no marriage was intended, and that I had known it.
“Where’s my brother sitting right now?”
“Somewhere with a bad mattress and a television.” Artur did not look at the page. “Nobody has touched him and nobody is going to. That isn’t the business we’re in with Danny.”
“You bought him. You bought the paper on him so you could buy me, and then you sat on it and let me get used to them first.”
“Yes.”
Artur let it lie on the marble like a coin he did not intend to pick up.
“And now you want it back out of me in my own handwriting.”
“I want it witnessed. There’s a difference between what a man knows and what a man can prove, and you’ll see it in about a minute.”
“You don’t know one thing about it.”
“He put his mouth on you and you thought it meant you’d been chosen. That’s inventory.” Artur said it like a weather report. “It’s what careful men do with things they intend to keep. I’m not going to touch you. I’ve never once had to.”
My pulse was going in my ears and I put both forearms on the marble, the cold of it the only honest thing in the room.
I had done that arithmetic an hour before, on the mop, alone. And I wanted one answer more than I wanted my brother on a bus.
“If I’m a thing they bought, what’s my name worth on your paper?”
“The table reads documents. It doesn’t read women.”
“That’s a dodge in a nice jacket. If I’m furniture, photograph the furniture and go. Say the part you’re not saying.”
Artur looked at me a second longer than he had looked at anything else in that room.
“Drink your coffee. It’s cold in here,” he said.
“That’s not an answer.”
“No.”
I put the towel down on the marble.
“No.” My voice came out level, which surprised both of us. “Not for Danny.” Artur waited, because waiting is what he does best. “Not from you.”
“Think about your brother for one more second before you—”
“I’ve thought about nothing else since September. Every hour of it, standing up, in this room. Ask anybody on the block.”
Artur slid the page an inch closer to my hands.
“He’s twenty-six years old and you are the only living person who can hand him another year like this one.”
“You know what you sound like? A guy reading his father’s homework out loud.”
It landed. His chin came up half an inch, the skin around his eyes moved and went back, and Artur laughed, one flat surprised bark of it. I laughed too.
That is the ugliest thing in my life and I am the one who did it. I laughed with him in my grandmother’s shop and for that second I liked him.
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Then Artur stood up and buttoned one button, and the laugh went out of the room like it had been carried out.
“Don’t. You’ll hurt yourself and then I have to explain it.”
Artur said it before he moved, which is how I know my face had moved first. His hand closed on my left wrist, about as hard as a seat belt. I hauled back with everything in my shoulders. The grip did not move. My wrist did.
I got a sheet pan off the bench with my right hand and swung it. It went past his ear and rang off the green tile. Then I went shoulder-first into the corner of the case, and the steel edge opened my right eyebrow, and the light in the room split into two.
“I’m sorry about your eye. That wasn’t me, and it wasn’t supposed to happen.”
I said a thing to him I would not put in my grandmother’s mouth or my own. Artur took it without a flicker and steadied my elbow when I went sideways, and those were the worst ten seconds of my life.
“Press the towel on it and hold it there. You’ll want that stopped before—”
“Don’t you touch me.”
“I’m not touching you.”
He wasn’t. Artur had both hands where I could see them and walked me toward the swing door. My phone stayed on the register drawer, and Corinne’s recipe book on the shelf over the proving rack.
The kitchen was dark and smelled like burnt sugar and cold iron. Artur spoke past me into it, to somebody I had not seen, in the voice a man uses in his own house.
“Get the light for her. She likes the sign off.”
The case light died behind us and the room went the color of the wet street. The new back-door bolt scraped back. Someone already in the kitchen opened it ahead of us, and a second man stepped in out of the wet.