Ordinary, On Purpose
The diner was two blocks from her apartment and had bottomless coffee and a man behind the counter who had never once acknowledged that she came in most weeks.
Jo got there first, on a Tuesday in September, and took the booth by the window.
Six weeks. She had spent four of them being frightened in a way she had never permitted herself and two of them working, and somewhere in the middle of it she had stopped being able to tell those apart, which she had decided was probably the point.
Alexander came in at ten past one in a suit, from something, and did not look at all wrong in a diner, which annoyed her.
“You’re late.”
“I’m nine minutes late. There was a thing.” He sat down opposite her and put his phone face-down on the table without being asked. “Tell me.”
“Grilled cheese first.”
“Jo.”
“I’ve had four conversations about it this week and every one of them started with the news. I want to have one that starts with a sandwich.”
So they ordered, and the coffee came, and the man behind the counter did not acknowledge either of them, and Jo ate about a third of a grilled cheese before she put it down.
“It’s four buildings,” she said. “Not eleven. Four, in Providence and outside Hartford, owned by two brothers who inherited them and have been running them into the ground for nine years while being extremely polite to each other about it.”
“And they’ve hired you to do what.”
“Fix them. Twenty months. No title, because there isn’t an org chart — there’s me, a bookkeeper called Renée who has been there since 2011 and knows everything, and one of the brothers, who I like.
” She turned the coffee cup a half circle and stopped when she noticed.
“It pays a hundred and five, which is eleven thousand more than Kade and a hundred and ten less than Lasker, and I negotiated it myself, and I asked for more than they offered, out loud, which took me two days to be able to do.”
“You asked for more.”
“I asked for more.”
Alexander sat back.
“Say the number you asked for.”
“One-fifteen.”
“And they said?”
“One-oh-five and a piece of the upside if I fix all four.” Jo heard herself, and let it happen. “Which I’m going to do.”
He looked at her for a moment, and then he did the thing he did about four times a year, where the whole face gave up at once.
“There it is,” he said.
“Don’t.”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“You’re saying an enormous amount.”
“I’m saying it silently, which is my right.” He picked up his coffee. “Nobody in that arrangement has ever met me.”
“Nobody in that arrangement has ever met you,” Jo agreed. “I checked. Twice. It was the first thing I checked and I’m not embarrassed about it.”
They talked about the buildings for a while. He was good on the Hartford one, which she had expected, and wrong about the Providence one, which she told him, and he took it and did not argue, and she watched him enjoy being told.
Then the plates went and the coffee got refilled and there was a lull, and Jo put both hands around her cup.
“I want to say the terms,” she said. “Out loud, once, and then we don’t have to do it again.”
“All right.”
“I’m going to keep watching.” She kept her eyes on him.
“Not for you to fail. For the shape of it. I’m going to notice when something gets decided for me and I’m going to say so on the day rather than in a file, and I’m going to be difficult about it, and I’d rather tell you that now than have you find out in March. ”
“Good.”
“I’m not finished.” She made herself say the harder half.
“And I’m going to tell you things. That’s the actual term.
Not the watching — I was always going to do the watching.
The telling is the new one and it’s the one I’m going to be bad at, and when I’m bad at it I want you to say so out loud instead of building me a door and waiting. ”
Alexander was quiet for a second.
“That’s the first thing you’ve ever asked me for,” he said.
“That can’t be true.”
“Think about it before you argue with me. You’re going to argue with me and then agree in about four days by email.”
“You asked me for terms in Boston. You asked me for terms again in the spring.” He turned his cup a half circle, which she noticed and decided not to mention. “Those were conditions. This is the first time you’ve told me what you need me to do rather than what you won’t accept me doing.”
Jo thought about it properly, because he had earned that and because he was probably right.
“Yes,” she said. “It is.”
“Then yes.” He said it plainly, without weight, the way he said numbers.
“And I’d rather have you watching than not.
I’ve said that before in a different room and I meant it then.
A woman who stops watching me is a woman who has stopped expecting anything, and I have met her, and I didn’t like what I turned into. ”
Renée had sent four spreadsheets that morning, all of them wrong in interesting ways.
Vivienne Castellane had not been in touch, which meant nothing at all. She was out of offers, by her own account, in a lobby, in July. Jo had noticed that offers and moves were different words and that a careful woman had chosen the first one.
The ninety-day cure window closed in November. Warrick Street would go to the board in October with Doyle’s name on it and a paragraph, in the annex, that Jo had written in April and that nobody had ever taken off.
Doyle had called her on the Monday, about twenty minutes after she handed the letter in.
“I put my name on you in a room where it cost me something to do it,” he said, with no preamble at all. “On the Wednesday. And you’d had the other thing for three weeks.”
“Yes,” Jo said.
“I’m not asking you to explain it. I’d like it on the record that I noticed.” A pause on the line, and then, more roughly: “Do the four buildings properly. If you’re going to make me look like a man with poor judgment, be good at it somewhere else.”
She had not had an answer to the first part. There was not one.
None of that was hers to carry now. Some of it would come back. She was aware of that and had decided, on a Tuesday in September, in a diner, that she would deal with it when it did.
“What are you thinking,” Alexander said.
Jo looked out the window.
Outside, Astoria went on doing what it did at half past one on a weekday — a truck double-parked, two men disagreeing about it, a woman going past with a stroller and a coffee and no time for either of them.
The city not caring. It had frightened her in July, standing on a corner in the fifties with her hands not working. It did not frighten her now.
She had no plan. She had four buildings, a bookkeeper called Renée, a number she had asked for out loud, and a man across a table with his phone face-down.
“Nothing,” Jo said. “That’s the honest answer. I’m not doing anything with it.”
“You’ve been looking out that window for a while to be doing nothing.”
“I’ve been looking at a man losing an argument about a truck.” She turned back. “That’s it. That’s the entire content.”
“That’s new.”
“I know.” She picked up the second half of the grilled cheese. “I’m told it’s a skill. I’m told it takes practice.”
He laughed.
The coffee came round again, and the man behind the counter still did not acknowledge them, and Jo sat in a diner booth in her own neighborhood with cold hands around a warm cup, entirely unprotected, and let the afternoon go on without arranging any of it.