Worshipped by the BRATVA Grump (Sunshine and the Bratva #4)

Daisy

November this side of the river brings the kind of cold that finds the gaps in my coat, and I've been standing in it with my hands cupped against the glass of a shop that isn't mine for twenty minutes. The window is filthy on the inside. I’ve found one, small, smeared part where somebody must have wiped it at some point in the past. That’s how I can see a long rectangle of floorboards, a staircase going up the back wall, and about three inches of dust covering every surface.

It's perfect. It's so perfect I've had to put my hands in my pockets twice to stop myself touching the glass again like a kid outside a bakery.

Above the door, in the old gold paint that's mostly faded now, you can still read LOWRY.

It was a draper, then a carpet showroom.

When I was in high school, it closed for good.

I did a piece on it for the Calloway Courier three summers ago.

Four hundred words about empty frontage on a struggling street, and the photograph I took that day is still in my archive folder on my hard drive.

I remember standing in exactly this spot thinking somebody should do something with it.

Next door, the lights of Purr & Pour are on, and the windows are running with condensation.

Rhodes is up on the till where he holds court, a gray shape against the warm yellow, and when Delilah spots me through the glass she flattens both palms against it and mouths something I can't read but can absolutely interpret.

She's seven months along now, and there's a certain amount of theater involved in everything she does.

I hold up one finger. She holds up two, points at her wrist, then at the café, then at me, which I take to mean I'm expected inside afterward whether I want to be or not.

The car comes down Calloway Main Street at twenty past nine and parks in the small lot at the end, my whole stomach doing something disgraceful.

I'd told myself it would be Jasper who came today.

Eduard is too busy and spends all of his free time with Sammie and the kids, everyone knows that.

Jasper is the one who turns up with a folder and a pen and a face like a wet Thursday.

The email came from a Federov Freight address with no name on it at all. It could have been any one of them.

Mechislav gets out of the car.

He's wearing a dark coat over a darker sweater and he doesn't hurry.

There's a lot of him. He fills the doorways he walks through, and he's built like the back end of an argument.

He crosses the street without checking either way because the traffic on Calloway is mostly confined to early morning deliveries.

Somewhere around the halfway point he sees me.

His face does nothing at all, which is the standard setting, and I get exactly one second of warning before he's in front of me and I have to arrange my own face into something normal.

“You're early,” he says.

I nod once, sharp. “I'm always early.”

He looks at me for a moment, then reaches past me and puts a key in the door. His sleeve brushes the shoulder of my coat, and my body reacts to it like I've been shoved.

Six weeks ago I photographed Delilah and Jasper's wedding.

I have four hundred and ten frames of that day on a drive at home, and I've been through every single one of them.

There are eleven with Mechislav in them.

He's at the back of most of them, at the edge, standing near a door the way he always does.

In one of them, taken at nine in the evening, he's looking directly down the lens at me, and I know for a fact I didn't notice him doing it at the time, which means he was watching me while I worked and I was too busy working to catch it.

I know what happened after that photograph. I know what I said the next morning, standing in his kitchen with my dress from the night before and my hair resembling a crime scene. I told the man I'd just spent nine hours with that I couldn't do this because of what his family is.

Six weeks. Twice a week I've seen him get out of that car in that lot. I've watched him from my table at the café with a coffee I never finish, and my body hasn’t received a single piece of the news my mouth delivered that morning.

The door sticks, gives, and swings inward.

The smell comes out to meet us. Cold plaster, old paper, the ghost of pipe smoke in the beams. Mechislav puts his hand flat on the door and holds it for me.

I go past him into the dark and hear him find a switch, three of the six strip lights come on with that reluctant, industrial flicker.

Oh, it's better inside. It's so, so, so much better inside.

The ceiling has been painted over about nine times, and it goes up higher than I could see from the outside.

The floorboards run the full length toward the back, wide and dark and scarred where the carpet racks used to stand.

There's a wall about two-thirds of the way down with a doorway punched through it.

The staircase climbs up to a mezzanine that's really just a wide shelf with a railing where I imagine someone once did the accounts.

“Roof was fixed in ninety-four,” Mechislav says behind me. “There's damp in the back corner where the gutter's split. That's a morning's work. Wiring is original, so it all needs to come out.”

“Mm,” I say, because I'm turning in a slow circle with my head back and I've stopped listening around the word roof.

“The plan is retail. Fit it out plain, put it on the market in the spring.” He pauses. “That's the plan on paper.”

I get to the middle of the floor and stand there.

I can see it.

The strip lights aren't there anymore. There are pendant shades hanging low over the counter and the ceiling is picked out in something warm.

The front window has a seat built into it deep enough to properly sit in with your feet up.

The mezzanine is entirely built in shelves with just enough room for a rolling ladder.

“What would you change?” he asks. “If it were yours.”

I should say something sensible. I should ask about square footage.

“The wall goes,” I say. “That one. Not all of it, you keep the piers, but you open it up so you can stand at the door and see all the way to the back window, because right now it's two rooms pretending to be a shop and it needs to be one long room that pulls you down into it.

Shelving floor to ceiling on both sides.

Oak if I can afford it and stained pine if I can't. A rail and one of those ladders that slides.

A window seat in the front, with storage under it.

Counter here, near the door, low, so I'm not standing behind a wall of oak looking at people like a bank teller.” I'm walking while I talk, pointing at things.

There's no stopping it now. “The children's section goes under the stairs, all of it low down, nothing above three feet, because I want them to reach it and choose for themselves.” I turn around.

“And a door through to Sammie and Delilah, if they’ll let me.

Right there. Cats and coffee and books, you'd never get anybody out.”

I stop.

Mechislav is standing in the doorway with his hands at his sides. He hasn't written anything down. He hasn't taken his phone out. He's just been looking at me the whole time, and I realize that he's heard every single word. My face goes hot, despite the cold.

“Sorry,” I say. “That was a lot.”

“All The Words,” he says.

I blink at him. “What?”

“The name. You said it at the wedding.” He looks at the wall I want gone, and then back at me. “You said if you ever did it, that's what you'd call it.”