Chapter 2 #2
Come to think of it, me eating nothing but ramen was a bonus.
My clothes hung on a tension rod I'd wedged between the plasterboard wall and the real wall.
Four shirts, two pairs of jeans, one hoodie, one jacket.
Boots by the door. Everything I owned fit in a duffel bag because I'd learned a long time ago that you should be able to leave any place in under three minutes.
Not because I expected to. Because expecting things was how you got caught standing still when the floor gave out.
I sat on the mattress. Unzipped my jacket and let Midge climb out.
She turned three circles on the blanket and settled against my thigh, her one ear twitching, her body a warm parenthesis against mine.
I put my hand on her back. Felt her ribs.
Felt the too-fast heartbeat that was just how chihuahuas were built.
Everything at twice the speed, twice the intensity, burning through the world like they knew it was temporary.
I stared at the wall.
The plasterboard was scuffed and pockmarked and someone had written FUCK THIS in pencil near the baseboard, which I appreciated for its directness.
Through it, faintly, I could hear Victor coughing.
Morning cough. The wet, rattling one that sounded like it had been there for years and planned to stay.
I gave myself thirty seconds.
That was the rule. Thirty seconds to feel it—the weight, the sadness, the slow constriction of a life that kept getting smaller no matter how hard I worked to hold it open.
Thirty seconds. I counted them.
Then I closed it. Boxed it up the way I boxed everything up, shoved into the space behind my sternum where I kept the things I couldn't afford to carry and couldn't figure out how to put down. The space was getting crowded in there. Had been for years.
"Okay," I said out loud. To Midge. To the room. To the penciled profanity on the wall. "Okay. Think."
Five hundred dollars by Friday. Eighty-three in the bank. No job, no prospects, no one to call. The math hadn't changed. The math never changed. Which meant I needed to change the math.
Midge yawned, showing every one of her tiny teeth.
I started thinking about solutions.
The text came at eleven. Unknown number, which was the only kind of number Toni ever used—new phone every week, each one lasting just long enough to arrange the next thing that needed arranging.
Giardino. 2pm. Bring the mutt if you want.
I read it twice through the cracked screen. The spiderweb fracture split the message right down the middle so I had to tilt the phone sideways to make sure I wasn't misreading, which felt about right. Everything in my life required a tilt to come into focus.
Midge was asleep against my hip, twitching through a dream that probably involved the squirrel she'd tried to fight in Humboldt Park last week. I didn't wake her. I stared at the message and let the calculation run.
Toni.
I was fairly sure that wasn't his real name, the same way I was fairly sure the accent—vaguely East Coast, vaguely Italian, vaguely something else entirely—was a costume he put on with his too-expensive jacket every morning.
I'd been listening to it for a year and never once caught it slipping, which meant either he was committed to the bit or I was wrong about it being a bit, and I didn't like either option.
He was a middleman. A fixer. The kind of person who occupied the space between people who wanted things taken and people willing to take them.
Not a thief—Toni didn't steal. Toni connected.
He was the hyphen between supply and demand, the handshake between a need and a pair of hands, and he took his cut from both sides and slept fine at night.
I knew this because he'd told me once, unprompted, that he slept like a baby, and the way he said it made me want to scrub my skin.
He'd given me work three times in the past year.
The first was a laptop from a car in Lincoln Park.
Easy—a Lexus parked on Armitage with the windows down because the owner was the kind of person who believed North Side zip codes came with an immunity to consequences.
I was in and out in forty seconds. Toni paid me three hundred in twenties and didn't ask how I'd done it and didn't explain who wanted it.
I didn't ask either. The laptop was worth two months of Midge's food, and that was all the context I required.
The second was a set of documents from an unlocked office in the Loop—some law firm on LaSalle, fourteenth floor, a filing cabinet that wasn't even locked.
I went in at lunch when the receptionist was away and walked out with a manila envelope that meant nothing to me and apparently meant a great deal to whoever Toni was delivering it to.
Five hundred for that one. I paid rent and bought myself a pair of boots that didn't leak.
The third was a wallet lift on the Red Line.
I'm not going to dress it up. A man on the northbound platform at Roosevelt, distracted by his phone, jacket pocket unzipped.
I was close enough to smell his cologne.
I took the wallet, walked to the opposite end of the platform, and was on the next train south before he checked his pocket.
Three credit cards, two hundred in cash, a photo of a kid in a soccer uniform.
I kept the cash. Dropped the wallet in a mailbox so he'd get the rest back. The photo of the kid stayed with me for weeks.
That job kept Midge in food for a month. Which was the only moral framework I could currently afford—not good or bad, not right or wrong, just fed or not fed, sheltered or not sheltered.
I texted back one word. Fine.
The same word I'd given Gil.
Three hours. I had three hours until Giardino, which was too much time and not enough. Too much because there was nothing to do. Not enough because doing nothing was the hardest thing I knew how to do.
I cleaned my boots.
I sat on the floor with a rag and a stub of saddle soap I'd been stretching since September and worked the leather in slow circles, pressing into the creases, working out the salt stains from the last rain.
The boots were the only expensive thing I owned—sixty dollars at a thrift store on Milwaukee, originally worth ten times that, broken in perfectly by whoever had them before me.
Good boots mattered. Good boots were the difference between walking five miles and limping five miles, and my life was measured in miles walked.
I cleaned them and I didn't think.
At quarter to two I put on the clean boots, zipped Midge into my jacket, and locked the padlock behind me.
Victor was still coughing through the wall.
The hallway smelled like damp carpet and cabbage.
The stairs creaked on the second and fifth steps, a pattern I'd memorized the first week because memorizing exits was something my body did automatically, the way other people's bodies remembered to breathe.
Outside, November had settled into its midday version—still grey, still cold, but with a thin watery light that made everything look slightly more honest than it deserved.
I walked south on Kedzie and then east on Grand, Midge's warm head poking out of my collar, her one ear turning like a satellite dish picking up signals I couldn't hear.
I walked toward Giardino and I walked toward Toni and I walked toward whatever he was going to offer me, because that was how I'd gotten everywhere in my life.
By not having anywhere else to go.
Giardino had pretensions to Italian authenticity that extended as far as the plastic grapevines stapled to the awning and died a quiet death at the door.
Inside it was just a café—Formica tables, fluorescent lights, a display case of pastries that had been sitting there since the morning and showed it.
The espresso machine was real, at least. You could hear it from the sidewalk, hissing and clanking like something alive and deeply unhappy about its circumstances.
Toni was at the back table. Of course he was.
Toni was always at the back table, in every place he chose, because Toni liked walls behind him and sight lines in front and the particular theater of being found exactly where he'd arranged himself.
He had an espresso in front of him that he wasn't drinking—the cup untouched, the crema still intact, a prop in the same way his jacket was a prop.
The jacket was leather, butter-soft, the color of dark honey.
It cost more than my monthly rent. Both rents. Old and new.
"Cora." He said my name like we had a history that involved warmth. We didn't. "You look good. Sit."
I sat across from him. Midge, pressed against my ribs inside the jacket, had already started.
The growl was low and sustained, originating somewhere deep in her tiny chest and radiating outward with the focused intensity of an air raid siren designed for close range.
She didn't growl at everyone. She growled at men whose energy she didn't like, and she had never been wrong.
Toni leaned back. "The dog has no manners."
"The dog has excellent instincts."
He grinned at that. White teeth, practiced angles.
Toni was handsome in the way certain men were handsome—all surface, all arrangement, the features assembled correctly but without anything real behind them.
His eyes were dark and flat and they watched me the way a person watches a vending machine, calculating what they could get if they put in the right amount.
"So," he said, tilting his espresso cup in a lazy circle without lifting it. "How you been? How's the apartment? You still in that place on Kedzie?"