Previously – Chapter 9: The Fourth Tuesday in October
The storage unit in Skokie held fifty-eight degrees in February, which the front office described as climate controlled, and Lila had stopped arguing about it in November, standing in the roll-up door with a hand truck, on the second day of a company that had no name yet.
Kyle, from the rental company, was on speaker, propped on a stack of gold chargers, explaining the late-return fee to the woman who had written the rider, and agreeing with everything she said about it in the tone of a young man who has never been the person who decides anything.
“Send it,” Lila said, in a cold metal room, with her eyes closed. “Thank you, Kyle.”
At the back, under a tarp where they had sat for six years, were her mother’s boxes, LILA: SCHOOL on one of them in her mother’s handwriting.
Three months in. Five jobs. She had grossed a hundred and thirty-one thousand dollars and had six thousand three hundred in the operating account and a card at 24.99 percent.
So she took the Corrigan wedding.
* * *
Two hundred and twenty guests in April in a former die works on Kinzie with one loading door. The father of the bride was in commercial roofing and called her boss from the first meeting and meant it warmly.
At eight-fifty a guest went to the coat check for a camel coat and got a different camel coat, and Yasmin, twenty, on her third event, could not find the other one. By the time Lila got there Corrigan was leaning over the half-door telling a twenty-year-old that two hundred people had handed her their coats and that was literally the one thing. Lila asked him to tell the band whether to hold the second set for the toast, and his anger looked for the next thing and found a decision instead. The coat was over the arm of a man by the men’s room who had taken it outside to smoke.
“Am I fired?” Yasmin said.
“No. Do you have his ticket?”
“It’s right here.”
“Don’t show it to him.” Lila put the coat back on the rail. “Show it to me. Don’t show it to him.”
“Why not?”
“Because it won’t help,” Lila said.
Corrigan hugged her at the door with his tie undone and said, “Best money I ever spent, boss,” and he did mean it.
At ten past two she sat in the rented van in the alley with the engine off and stayed there eleven minutes. Then she drove to Skokie and put it all away at four in the morning, and typed most of a text to Sophie Okafor before she understood what she was doing, and turned the phone face down on the votives.
* * *
Her Tuesday meeting was in a Lutheran basement in Lincoln Square, under fluorescent tubes, one of which had a tick in it.
She got there eleven minutes early because she got everywhere eleven minutes early, and there were thirty folding chairs out in rows that were not rows, and she had straightened seven before a heavy man in a Bears jacket said, without any edge at all, “We do those after.”
“Sorry.”
“You’re all right.” He went back to the urn. “It’s just, people move ’em.”
She sat down. There were eighteen people and a laminated card, and a woman named Nadine read from it in the voice people use for cards: that they had not caused it, could not control it, could not cure it.
Lila heard herself say, into the pause, “Can I ask a logistics question?”
Nadine said, “Sure.”
“The three C’s. Is there a fourth one where somebody actually does something?”
“Not really, no,” Nadine said.
“There’s the Steps,” said a woman knitting something long and gray.
“There’s twelve of those,” said a man named Gary, who then talked for seven minutes about a driveway easement, and for an hour Lila sat listening to solvable problems and was not permitted to solve one.
She had never been so angry in a church.
Near the end a man named Fred, sixties, cardigan, said he’d made a list. Two columns. His daughter’s rent was not his business. His knee was his business, and so were the storm windows.
“And I laminated it,” Fred said. “Three dollars at the FedEx. It was on the refrigerator. You know how they get.” He rubbed his fingers together. “Soft. People don’t know you can do that.”
Lila was annoyed for three days, and on the third day she was standing at a printer on Hubbard thinking about a man in a cardigan who had laminated a list, and said, to the printer, “Oh, come on.”
She went back the following Tuesday. She got there early and did not touch the chairs, and it cost her something, and she sat on her hands and hated it slightly less.
* * *
On a Sunday morning in June she took two cups down out of the cabinet, both of them, one hand, before she had decided anything. She stood there with them. Then she put one back on the shelf and squared it with the others and made the coffee in the one that was left.
It came at her sideways and never when she was braced for it. A jar of capers at the back of a client’s cabinet. Once she heard herself tell a lighting vendor that nine dollars was a crime, that somebody’s grandson had been robbed in daylight, and the vendor was twenty-two and had no idea what she meant, and neither did anybody else in that city.
Denny called at eleven, on a day she had otherwise had plans for.
“There she is. There’s the mogul.”
“I’m not a mogul. I have a storage unit. Ten by thirty.”
“Ten by thirty.” He said it as though she had just told him something magnificent. “Your grandmother raised six children in less than that.”
“She absolutely did not.”
“Approximately that.” A rustle; he always called while moving. “How much do you know about parking lots?”
“Nothing.”
“Neither did I, ten weeks ago.” A car door. “Churches, Lila. Twelve thousand churches in this state, and every lot empty six days out of seven. Empty asphalt. Doing nothing.”
“You’re putting something in the parking lots.”
“Chargers. Electric-vehicle chargers.” He let it sit, for effect, as he had let things sit her whole life. “And the man who sat with the deacons gets a piece of it for fifteen years.”
“What happened to the pizza machines?”
There was a pause approximately half a second long.
“Dooley’s nephew was not a serious person,” Denny said, and moved on, so smoothly and so completely that if she had not been listening for it the seam would have been invisible.
“So what’s the timeline?”
“That’s the beautiful part. Everybody’s got to move before the fall, which means I’m not selling anything, I’m just the guy standing there.” He laughed. “Eight weeks. Ten on the outside.”
“Eight weeks.”
“Eight weeks, kiddo.” She could hear him grinning, in a car, in a church parking lot. “And then I’m taking your mother to Ireland.”
“Mom gets carsick on Lake Shore Drive.”
“She’ll manage. For Ireland she’ll manage.”
She asked him whether the incentive was per port or per site, and he had no idea, and she did not tell him that was the entire question. She laughed twice and both times it was real, because he was funny, because he had always been funny, and because somebody else had always covered the cost of it.
“All right,” she said. “Go get your deacons.”
“That’s my girl. Eight weeks.”
“Love you, Dad.”
She put the phone down and sat down on the kitchen floor with the dishwasher at her shoulder blades, and thought that she had spent a year doing arithmetic on a man’s debt and had never once done arithmetic on the sentence itself.
The dishwasher ran through its cycle. She stayed where she was until it finished.
* * *
She wrote to Marisol in June, at the folding table on Hubbard, and it took forty minutes.
Marisol,
In December I built the retention agreement that committed you through the eighth of May, and I sent it to you to sign. I knew about the twenty-two seats on Fountain and I knew the landlord’s date was the fourteenth of January, and I decided the stay bonus was worth more to you than the room. You were not asked.
Before that you asked me twice, in your own bar, whether the March payroll was real money. Both times I handled you. The first time I gave you a lawyer’s name and the second time I asked for your phone number.
Enclosed is a check for two thousand four hundred dollars, which is what Ilse Radich billed you to read a lease you did not sign.
Lila Brenner
She sent it certified. The green card came back nine days later, signed in a hand she did not know, and she filed it.
She looked the tracking number up twice more that month, on Sundays, and both times the page said the item had been delivered.
* * *
Sophie sent the referral in July, through the Warrick’s system, with a case number on it, as though they were strangers.
Client is Halberg Medical, they want a raw space, I told them you were the only person in this city who can do a room like that in six weeks. Do not undercharge them, S.
They met at the place on Wells with the good olives, theirs for five years.
“You look terrible,” Sophie said.
“I’m self-employed.”
“I know. I’ve seen your invoices. Marcus put one up on the projector and said this is what a proper scope of work looks like, and I sat there and said nothing, like a saint.”
“You’ve never said nothing in your life.”
“I said nothing for a year, Lila.”
Behind them at the bar a man laughed, two notes, the second one lower, and Lila had her head most of the way around before the rest of her caught up. Blackhawks jacket. Fifty. She turned back and ate an olive, and Sophie said nothing, which for Sophie was a feat of physical strength.
At the end Sophie said her name.
“I know.”
Sophie looked at her.
“Okay,” she said.
They ordered another round, and Sophie made her raise the Halberg number by eight thousand dollars on the back of a napkin, and the other thing was never said.
* * *
Aaron Feld came into it through a floor. He certified the live load on the printing plant on Ravenswood and sent the stamped drawing at 6:40 the next morning with a note that said sorry, I’m one of those, and she read it at her counter and laughed.
He was kind without requiring anything back. Inside two weeks he had worked out that she disliked being surprised and stopped surprising her, a thing nobody had managed in six years, including Ryan. Three months. She kept waiting for the part where it stopped being good so that she could point at it.
She ended it on a Sunday at the end of September, in her own front room, having thought about it for two weeks. He took it well, which was somehow the worst available outcome.
“Can I say a thing?” he said. “Not to argue. I’d rather say it than think it for a month. You answer the question. You answer it completely. I ask how your day was and I get the whole day, times and names, what went wrong and what you did about it. It’s the best answer anybody’s ever given me. And then it’s finished. In three months I have never once had to ask you a second one. I think you quit expecting it a long time before you got to me.”
She apologized, ahead of everything else, and neither of them noticed.
He left at four.
He had shimmed her bedroom closet door in August with a folded matchbook behind the hinge, and she went in later and swung it shut and it held. You do it once, and the man who did it does not have to be in the building.
* * *
In another part of the same city, in those same months, a man was writing to her.
He did it on the first of the month, after the bank, at a kitchen table, with the wire confirmation still folded in his jacket. He addressed the envelopes and did not stamp them and did not send them. Every month he built the argument for sending one, and every month it came apart in the same place, which was where she would have to answer it. The one from March ran a page and a half.
Lila,
The wedge salad is still on the menu. I have raised it in three consecutive managers’ meetings and Sal says people order it, which is true, and I say that isn’t an argument, which is also true, and then we do the linen.
There’s a woman who comes in Wednesdays at five fifteen and orders the veal and sends it back. Same table, same order, same complaint, which is that it isn’t hot in the middle. It is hot in the middle. This went on for two months before it occurred to me to sit down across from her instead of standing next to her, and when I did she told me about her husband’s stroke and the rehab place out in Norridge and how she can’t cook for one person, it comes out wrong, there’s no way to do it. Then she ate the veal. She sent it back again last week. I’ve told the kitchen to keep firing it exactly the way it is.
A bus got stuck under the viaduct on Ashland Tuesday and sat there most of the afternoon with the roof peeled up like a lid, and six different men stopped to tell the driver what she should have done. She kept her hands in her jacket and let every one of them finish. I watched twenty minutes of it out the window of the dry cleaner and did not get one other thing done that day.
The creamed spinach here is genuinely good and nobody knows.
It’s cold. The radiator in this kitchen bangs once around ten in the morning like somebody dropping a wrench, and I’ve stopped getting up to look at it.
Jake
He folded it and put it where the others were.
* * *
The email came in at 9:06 on a Tuesday morning in early October, while Lila was at the folding table in the sublet on Hubbard with a space heater at her feet.
It was from a woman named Meera Raghunathan at a functional-beverage company called Pell & Dry, forwarded by the Halberg client with a note that said only this is the one, she’s the one you want. They were launching to their distributors in November, four hundred and ten people in one night, and the brief had a line item for a clear-ice program at six stations, so somebody over there knew the work.
The venue was held. It was in Las Vegas.
She read it once fast and then once properly, and the number at the bottom of the scope was larger than the sum of every job she had done. She sat back. The space heater ticked. She typed: Meera, yes. Send me the venue contract and the run of show and I’ll come back to you with a number by Friday. She read it once, which was not enough, and sent it at 9:14.
* * *
The Halsted Federal branch on Irving Park opened at nine, and Jake was usually the third person through the door on the first of the month. Yvette typed the five thousand without asking where it was going, told him again that he could do this on the app, that it was the exact same wire, and charged him eighteen dollars for it.
She had asked him once, in the first month, whether it was a car. He’d said no. She had not asked again, and he ranked that against everything anybody had done for him that year, and it came out first.
Charles sent a statement every quarter on Delia Cross’s letterhead, cream stock, with the balance and the applied payments and, in a smaller font at the bottom, Thank you. In January the balance had been fifty-six thousand nine hundred. By the end of October it was six thousand nine hundred.
There was no statement for the other one. He had sent Lila six hundred dollars on the fifteenth of every month from April, and she had taken eight of them, and then she sent December’s back, and January’s, and the third time the transfer failed against an account that had been closed. He made the entry anyway, on the first, in the back of a legal pad. The date, six hundred, and under it the figure it was supposed to be coming off, which had come down eight times and had not moved since. Seventy-two thousand four hundred and forty dollars. He had argued himself out of that column twice and gone on keeping it, because a number nobody is reading is still a number.
He kept the statements in the same drawer as everything else.
* * *
In October he found a year of missing kegs in the draft variance at Tarrant’s. He wrote the theory out first, with a man’s name in it, then took it off the top and brought Sal the invoices with nothing attached. The safe combination came back in November on a Post-it, with no conversation attached to that either, and in December Sal Tarrant made him general manager and gave him the P&L, which was the part he wanted, because a P&L is a document that cannot be charmed.
He took the wire up from twenty-four hundred to five thousand and told nobody he had done it.
He was good at it. That had never been the problem.
In March a woman waiting for a table at the host stand squared the stack of business cards and turned the tent card for the Easter menu to face the room, without looking at either of them while she did it. It went through him like a staple gun and was finished before she looked up, and he sat her party and went into the office and did the linen order.
* * *
Ray moved to Tempe in April because his daughter had a house with a room in it and his knees had opinions about a third-floor walk-up in Portage Park.
He’d told Jake, in the first month after the relapse, that a man in his position should make no large change for a year. Jake had stayed in Chicago on that instruction, in a city with one particular person in it, and had built a life out of the streets he did not drive down.
Then Ray sold the walk-up.
“You told me not to move.”
“I’m sixty-seven,” Ray said.
They loaded the Buick on a Saturday: a box of tools, a folding chair, and four boxes of books. Ray had never once mentioned reading anything.
“You read.”
“I read constantly. What did you think I did?”
“I don’t know. Nothing.”
“I sat in my apartment doing nothing for six years and then you came along.” Ray shut the trunk with his hip. “Yeah, I read.”
They stood on Central Park Avenue in the wind.
“So,” Jake said.
“So it’s not the moon.” Ray got the keys out. “Meeting’s at seven, same as here, but they do it in a Denny’s on Sundays, which I’m not going to enjoy.”
“You’ll hate that.”
“I’ll hate it enormously.”
“Ray. I want to say something.”
“Then don’t.”
“I’m going to say it anyway.”
“You always do.” Ray opened the driver’s door and stood in the gap of it. “You’ve got that thing where you want to close a room. Every time you sit down somewhere you want to leave it better than you found it. It’s a nice quality and you should quit doing it to me.”
“What do I do?”
“The same thing.” Ray got in and pulled the door shut and rolled the window down two inches. “That’s the whole thing about it, is it’s the same thing.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.” He started the car.
He pulled out and sat at the corner a long time with the blinker going, and then he turned and was gone, and it was twenty to ten on a Saturday morning and Jake had nowhere to be until three.
The phone was in his hand before he had decided anything, and from there he ran it forward: the call, the four seconds after it, the part where somebody says something about a year. Four boxes of books in the trunk of a Buick, and one person in that city who would have known what it cost to find that out this late. He put it away and drove to Tarrant’s and built the May schedule nine days early, and it was a good schedule.
* * *
Owen sold commercial flooring in Elk Grove and had asked Jake to sponsor him in May, in a parking lot, with his hands in his armpits.
Jake was tremendous at it for about seven weeks.
He called Owen on the days Owen was going to be bad, because he could see them coming, and said the right thing every time. He drove out to Elk Grove and sat in a truck with him for an hour and a half and told him about 1994. The whole thing: Big Mike in the rented tux, the two hundred and fourteen thousand dollars, twenty-nine years of a man telling one story. He told it well and knew where to slow it down. At the end Owen said, “God. That explains everything about you,” and Jake felt, briefly and enormously, magnificent.
“You’re not going to do this alone,” Jake told him in July. “You call me. Any hour, I don’t care. I promise you that.”
Owen went out on the second weekend in August and did not call. He lost money Friday and more on Saturday and then went to his brother-in-law’s in Schaumburg for eight days, and Jake found out on the Thursday from a woman named Charlene at the meeting who assumed he already knew.
He drove around for two hours afterward and did not go anywhere.
He called Ray at eight o’clock Arizona time. There was a television on behind him.
“He didn’t call me.”
“No.”
“I told him to call me. I said it in those words, I said any hour.”
“Jake.” A pause; the television got quieter. “You made him a fan.”
“What does that mean?”
“You did the thing you do. You were great. You drove out to Elk Grove, you were funny, you told him about your father.” Ray’s chair made a noise. “Fans don’t call you at three in the morning. Fans call you when they’ve got something good. They call you when they can hold up their end.”
Jake sat in a parked car on Belmont.
“So what was I supposed to do?”
“Less,” said Ray.
* * *
Owen came back on the twenty-second of August and sat in the second-to-last row and would not look at anybody.
Jake had a speech. He had built it over eight days and it was good: honest, responsible, a joke in the middle to let the man breathe. He got up at the end of the meeting and walked over with all of it loaded.
“Did you eat?”
Owen looked at him.
“No,” he said.
“There’s a Greek place on Milwaukee that’s open. It’s not good.”
It was not good, and Jake asked him nothing, and Owen talked a while about the warehouse and a forklift and then for about a minute about the eight days, and Jake said, “Yeah,” twice, and that was all he said.
In the parking lot afterward Owen started a question, stopped, and said, “Do you still want to do this? With me.”
“Do you need a ride Thursday?”
“I’ve got a car.”
“Do you want a ride Thursday?”
“Yeah,” Owen said.
Jake gave him a ride on Thursday, and the Thursday after that, and never promised the man anything again.
* * *
He wrote to Marisol in September, on a Sunday, at the kitchen table, and it took the whole day.
The first three drafts were letters about himself. He threw them out. The fourth was half a page and had no jokes in it at all.
He wrote that he had taken three pay periods out of the payroll account two and a half years earlier, in March, and told her the processor was late, and that he had known it was a lie while he was saying it. He wrote that he had made her invent a hospital and write down which one. He did not write that he was sorry, because he had used that word on her five or six times in two years while continuing to do the thing; he wrote instead that she had been right to give her notice and that he should have made it unnecessary.
He put in a check for eight thousand two hundred dollars, the three pay periods plus the bonus he had promised her in 2022, and walked it to the box on Belmont at ten at night so he could not spend the evening deciding about it.
The check cleared on the seventh of October.
He knew the exact day because for two and a half weeks he had been sorting the mail in the vestibule before he got to the stairs, and after the seventh he kept doing it into November.
That was all. She had taken the money and given him nothing, and she was entitled to every part of that.
* * *
On the fourteenth of November he took a chip for a year. It was a Thursday like the others; there were a dozen people, the urn had been unplugged early, and Charlene said something nice. A year before, in that room, she had dug to the bottom of the margarine tub for a twenty-four-hour chip while twelve people watched her do it, and nobody had made anything of that either. Both facts went in one column, and the column was why he kept going.
He drove home and made eggs at ten at night because there was nothing else in the apartment.
* * *
On the first of every month, after the wire, he came home and wrote to Lila.
He had started in December without deciding to, on the back of a Tarrant’s prep list, and by February it had a shape: the bank at nine, the eighteen-dollar fee, the confirmation folded in his jacket, the kitchen table at noon.
He still bought her coffee. Sixteen dollars for twelve ounces, on the first, at the place on Lawrence, and he drank it standing up in the dark before work. It was not a tribute to anything. It was what he drank now.
The letters were not about anything. He would sit down with a year of things in him and write her a page about a walk-in door that would not seal.
He did not write about the money, or the meetings, or Owen, or the parking structure on West Charleston. Twice he started to and both times the page went dead under his hand, and he wrote about the linen order instead. He wrote about the boxes of books in the trunk of a Buick.
He addressed them all, the apartment in Lincoln Square, the number, the zip, in his terrible handwriting. He put a stamp on the first three, out of a book he had bought for the purpose, and then stopped, because a stamped envelope is a decision and an unstamped one is a piece of paper.
They went in the drawer in the kitchen with the takeout menus and a tire gauge and a charger for a phone he no longer owned and the black frame with the photograph in it, face down, where he had put it the week after she left.
By July the stack had taken a curl off the drawer, all of them bending the same way. By October it would not shut on the first push, and he learned to lift the tire gauge out and lay it flat and close it with his hip.
On the first of November he wired five thousand dollars to Las Vegas and came home and wrote the twelfth one, about a busser named Rafa who had worked out on his own how to carry a full tray up a flight of stairs by turning his hips, and how good that was to watch, and how there was nobody at Tarrant’s who would understand why he had stood in a doorway watching it.
He folded it and wrote the address on the front and laid it on top of the others, which made twelve, and closed the drawer with his hip, and went to work.
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