Mechislav
I'm on the weighbridge at ten past five in the morning with a clipboard of night tickets and my breath going up under the floodlights. I've already decided how the rest of my morning is going to run.
Eleven loads, all inside a hundred pounds.
Paulo takes the first truck out at twenty to six.
At half past eight I go up to the office above the loading floor where Jasper is at the desk with his phone in hand and his coat still on.
I put the folder for the Calloway corner unit down in front of him and tell him I'll handle the viewing myself.
He looks at the folder. Then he looks at me for slightly too long.
“You’ll handle it?” he repeats.
“I'm going down there anyway. The gutter's split at the back.”
“The gutter...” he is looking at me like I’m speaking a foreign language and I suppress the urge to sigh.
“It's split, I need to see how bad the damage is to the inside already.”
“Right,” Jasper says, and goes back to his phone.
Johansson's option on that unit lapsed on the fourth of this month without a word from him, exactly the way Natan told him it would, and we bought the freehold off the old man in Driscoll who'd owned it since his father died.
Eight days later a woman from the local paper emailed the office asking about commercial terms.
The same woman that I had in my bed six weeks ago.
Daisy Bishop.
I'd wanted her since the gallery, since a Saturday afternoon in May when I walked into Kimmie Farrow's opening looking for Natan and found a small woman in a green dress standing on a chair to get a better angle of a painting.
I got about four minutes of conversation out of her that day and thought about it for a month.
At Jasper’s wedding she was working with two cameras and a bag she wouldn't let anybody carry.
That time she got up on a wall to photograph the church, and she went down on one knee in the grass in a dress to get the flower girl at eye level, and at the reception she circled that room for six hours capturing memories.
Not one person in that room noticed she hadn't eaten.
I noticed. I put a plate on the table by her bag and walked away from it.
When I came back forty minutes later it was empty and she was looking around the room trying to work out who to thank.
She found me by the door at eleven. She'd taken her shoes off, her toenails were painted fire truck red.
The next morning she stood in my kitchen and told me she couldn't be involved with a man like me.
She was steady about it. She knew what she was saying, she knew what my family is, and she was right on every point.
So I said all right and drove her home, and I've spent six weeks trying to ignore the tearing feeling in my chest.
Now she's standing in the middle of my empty building telling me where the rolling ladder will go.
She's been talking since I got here, whether it’s excitement or nerves.
I don’t know. She's walked the length of the floor twice, pointing at things that aren't there yet with her hair coming down on one side because she's put a pen through it instead of a clip.
She wants the wall opened but the piers kept.
She wants the shelving in oak. She wants children to be able to reach the books without asking an adult for help.
She wants a door cut through to the café, which would need a fire door and a survey and about three thousand dollars, and I'm already working out who I'd call about the survey.
Then she stops dead and apologizes.
That's the part I can't stand. She stands in the middle of the only thing she's ever wanted for herself, apologizing for it.
“All The Words,” I say, because I want to see her face when I say it.
Her face does exactly what I hoped. Everything on it stops, and then her mouth opens slightly, and she goes pink from the throat up.
“You remembered that?” another tendril of silky hair falls from where the pen is giving up on holding it.
“You said it at the wedding.” I want so much to move closer to her. To touch her hair or her face, just to make contact.
“I said a lot of things at the wedding,” she says, moving her gaze away from mine. She is uncomfortable with me now. I hate that.
“Ask me the questions you came to ask,” I say gently.
She takes a breath and gets her notebook out, and I watch a different woman arrive in her body. Her shoulders come down. Her voice drops half a register. This is her at work, and it's the most attractive thing I've ever seen in an old, empty building.
“Term,” she says. “Rent, and how it's reviewed.
Deposit. Who's liable for the gutter I saw around the back, the wiring and the damp in that corner.
Whether the lease is assignable if it all goes wrong, because I'd rather ask that now than find out in eighteen months.
Business rates. And whether there's a break clause, on both sides.”
“Five with a break at three,” I say. “Structure and wiring are ours. Damp is ours. Interior fit-out is yours, and anything you build stays with the building unless we agree otherwise in writing. I'll put it all in front of you by Friday.”
She writes it down. Then she stops writing and looks up at me.
“I need to say something,” she says, “and I need you to not be offended by it.”
“Say it.”
“I'm not taking a Federov discount.” She closes the notebook and holds it against her chest like a shield.
“I know Sammie and Delilah are next door and I know Kimmie's across the road…I know exactly how this street works now. I also know what we did—” the tips of her ears go pink now as she takes a deep breath.
“and none of that is going to be a reason I pay less than the going rate for a business premises.
If this doesn't work as a business then it isn't a business, it's a hobby you're funding, and I'd rather not have it at all. I need to be able to say I did it.”
She's braced for an argument. She's got her chin up and her weight on her back foot. I wonder if she rehearsed this in the car.
“Understood,” I say.
She waits. “That's it?”
“You want a fair rent. I'll send you a rent.”
“Right.” She narrows her eyes at me, unsatisfied, because she wanted the fight and I've declined to give her one. “Okay. Good.”
I hold the door. She goes out and stops on the sidewalk to look up at the old gold lettering with her breath clouding around her, then she pulls herself together and goes next door into the warmth and the noise. I hear Delilah shriek before the door has even shut.
I stand in the empty shop for another twenty minutes.
I pace the wall she wants opened, heel to toe.
It's twenty-two feet. The flue in the back room is sound as far up as I can see with a flashlight.
The window in the front is deep enough for a seat without eating the floor, and the boards under the dust are wide oak and only want lifting and turning where the racks were bolted down.
Then I call Bohdan, who has done every job my family has needed doing for two decades, and I tell him to price a full strip-out and fit for the corner unit on Calloway. Oak throughout, a sliding ladder on a brass rail, and to find out what we need to get the door to the café put in.
“That's a lot of money for a rental unit,” Bohdan says. “I’ll be available late today if that works for you?”
“That works for me.” I give him the address and hang up.
I sit down on the bottom step of that staircase in a freezing building and I think about a woman standing in the middle of it apologizing for wanting something.
Picturing all the things she was saying as I look around, I understand with total clarity that I'm going to spend whatever it takes to give her her dream.
That’s how I know I'm fucked.