Previously – Chapter 6: One Card
The carpet in the intake lobby at Vista Del Valle was the color of a manila envelope that had spent a decade in a drawer, and it was cut in squares, because somebody two directors ago had made a smart, unglamorous decision: when a square goes, you lift the square.
Lila approved of it. It was the only thing on the property she approved of.
Chairs on three walls and no view of the valley, unless you counted the back of a self-storage place. Beside the vending machine a laminated sign, hand-corrected in ballpoint, said E4 IS OUT. DO NOT PUT MONEY IN E4. Somebody had put money in E4. You could see the bill through the slot.
“He can bring the shoes,” said the intake tech, whose name was Tonya. “No laces.”
“They’re loafers.”
“Then he can bring the shoes.”
Jake stood three feet away with the duffel at his feet, doing the thing where he turned into furniture. He had not said twenty words since Burbank. He’d shaved in the airport and cut himself under the jaw.
Lila took the clipboard.
Three pages, two of which wanted the same information in different boxes. Emergency contact: her own name, her number. In the box marked RELATIONSHIP she wrote Partner, a word neither of them had ever used out loud.
She wrote his Social Security number in the little boxes without asking him for it.
“Insurance?”
“Self-pay. I called the business office Tuesday. It’s set up.”
Tonya looked up at her properly for the first time. “Then you’re ahead of me,” she said.
The property inventory took twenty minutes. A jacket, gray. A book, paperback, no title recorded, just book. His phone went into an envelope with the time on the flap. 11:04.
“Cash?”
Jake said, “No,” and it was the first true thing anybody had said in that room, and Lila heard it and looked at the parking lot.
* * *
The room was down a corridor with a scuffed handrail on both walls. Two beds, two dressers, a window with a view of an air-conditioning unit. On the other bed sat a man in a Chargers shirt, eating pretzels out of a bag with a rubber band around the top.
“Curtis,” he said, and put out a hand with pretzel salt on it.
“Jake.”
“Jake.” Curtis nodded slowly, as though the name confirmed a theory. “You in a league?”
“A what?”
“Fantasy. Are you in a league. Because the commissioner has vetoed exactly one trade in ten years and it was mine.”
“I’m sure it was fair,” Lila said.
“It was lopsided in his favor,” said Curtis, with a certain peace about it, “and he vetoed it anyway, on the grounds of collusion, and there were two of us in it.” Jake sat down on his bed. “They let you do the draft in the day room. Not the money part.”
They had ten minutes. She used three putting his shirts in the dresser because he was sitting there not doing it, then straightened the blind, out of true on the left, and it went back out of true, because the bracket was stripped.
At the door he said, “Hey.”
“I’ll deal with the business office. And your mom’s Thursday.”
“Lila.”
“I’ve got the six-ten out of Burbank and I’m on at seven tomorrow, so I have to.” She stopped. “Okay.”
He didn’t say anything else and neither did she, and the thing they did instead of the thing people do in doorways lasted about six seconds, and then she went out through the lobby, where Curtis’s laugh came from behind her at something on television.
* * *
The spreadsheet ran to a dozen tabs by the second week, and it was, she would have said if asked, the best thing she had ever made. The engine came out of `misc_v2`, the workbook for a restaurant that did not exist.
Vestry was hopeless, which made Vestry easy. Mabel’s went to a man who wanted the liquor license, and the twenty-nine thousand for the ninety days in Reseda came out of it.
The Bantam mattered, and the Bantam took Marisol.
“No.”
“Marisol.”
“I gave notice in October. In writing, to him, and he printed it out and put it in the drawer with the tape and the batteries.” A keg cart, a bottle bin. “I’m not being difficult. I’m telling you where the drawer is.”
“I know where the drawer is. I need you through the sale, and there’s a stay bonus, and I’d like your name on the transfer, which is worth something to you and nothing to me.”
“Through the sale,” Marisol said. “I’ve got the fourteenth of January.”
“I know you do. It’s on the front tab.”
A pause long enough for Lila to hear the ice machine in the Bantam’s service alley, cycling, dumping.
“You’re good at this,” Marisol said. It was not a compliment. “He’s not going to know how much of this you did.”
“That’s fine.”
“It’s not fine. I’m telling you it’s not fine.” A door. “Send me the paperwork. Not a summary.”
Mabel Dalton was Thursdays at six, and had a bad hip and a landline and a great deal of time. Lila told her Jake was in a ninety-day residential program, and Mabel said oh, in a particular register, and then, “For the drinking?” Lila let the beat go by, and Mabel filled it herself. “It’s the stress. His father never touched it, you know.”
“That sounds like him,” Lila said, who had never met him.
Her own life held. She slept from about 1:30 to about 5:20 and had stopped counting that as a shortfall.
What happened at 1:30 was that she got into bed and her body, which had no interest in the spreadsheet, wanted him. It wanted his weight on the mattress and his forearm across her and his mouth on the back of her neck, in a detailed and unhelpful order. She gave it four seconds. She had timed it once. Then she rolled over and thought about vendor terms until it went.
She cleared the LA apartment on a Sunday with two guys from a labor app. Everything went but one box she shipped to herself: a jacket, his father’s knives, and the 1994 photograph. She wrote FRAGILE on it and laid it on top, and did not think about it at all.
* * *
The first Sunday she was allowed to visit was the eighteenth day.
She left the airport at 9:40, and a jackknifed box truck at Sepulveda put her in the lot at 1:24. Visiting ran until three.
The visiting room was the day room with the television off. Curtis was at the next table with a woman who’d brought a toddler, and the toddler was going table to table like a building inspector.
Eighteen days of eating at seven, twelve and five had made him a slightly different man, heavier in the face, pale under the tan, his hair gone shapeless.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hey.”
She sat.
“The Bantam’s at two hundred and six with a guy who wants to keep the staff.”
“Good.”
She stopped. He was looking at the coffee urn.
“You want a coffee?”
“It’s not coffee. They put something in it.” He was still looking at it. “It’s decaf and somehow worse than decaf. Curtis has a theory.”
“What’s the theory?”
“It’s a boring theory.”
A silence arrived and sat down at the table with them.
Her hands were flat on the table, and she was working at the skin beside her thumbnail with the nail of her forefinger, a thing she had never done in her life and had been doing since November.
Jake reached over and put his hand over both of hers.
He didn’t look at it or say anything about it. He kept looking at the coffee urn and left his hand where it was, and after a moment she stopped, and after another she turned her hand over under his so they were palm to palm, which was as far as either of them was going in a day room with a toddler in it.
“The chairs in here are a crime,” he said.
“They’re stackable. That’s the whole brief. Nobody has ever been asked to make a stackable chair that is also a chair.”
“You could fix this place.”
“In a weekend.”
He pressed his thumb into the middle of her palm, once, the way you press a bruise, and let go.
“How is it in here?”
“It’s fine.”
“That’s not,” she said, and let the rest of it go, because the rest of it was a fight.
“It’s fine, Lila. It’s a building. There’s a schedule. There’s a woman who cries at the video, the same video, every Tuesday, and everybody’s fine about it.” He shifted in the plastic chair.
“Okay.”
“You’ve said okay six times.”
“Well, I’ve been in the car since nine-forty,” Lila said, “so my material’s thin.”
She had not meant to say the time. He heard the time. He looked at her and then away and did not ask.
“They want you at a family session,” he said. “There’s a form.”
“I’ve had the form since Tuesday. I sent it Wednesday.”
“Of course you did.”
At two-fifty a man came in and said times without any particular authority and everybody stood up. He walked her to the fence, which was as far as anybody went.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m going to fix all of this. I promise.”
“Okay,” Lila said.
She did seventy minutes of email at the gate.
* * *
Her mother called the following Sunday at ten past nine in the morning, because she had never in her life understood a telephone as an interruption.
“I’m not interrupting.”
“You’re not interrupting.”
“I made the soup with the escarole in it. I’m telling you because you always ask and then I forget to say.”
Lila was at her own counter with the laptop open behind her and the escrow instructions in a folder propped against the toaster, and she said that sounded good.
“Your father says the fella’s had some business trouble.”
“Some.”
“Well.” A cupboard door, a faucet running, a woman doing four things. “Business is business. Your father’s had business trouble since 1988.” She laughed at that, entirely without edge, the way you laugh at weather. “How’s his mother taking it?”
“She’s fine. She thinks it’s stress.”
“It probably is stress. Are you sleeping?”
“I’m sleeping.”
“Because you can always come home, you know. There’s the bed. There’s soup. You could sleep for a week and I would not say one word about it.”
And that was all of it. No second question. No how much, no how long, no and where does that leave you. Her mother had been handed a man in a residential program in California, three businesses being sold off inside ninety days, and a daughter who had gone quiet since November, and had arrived, in under four minutes, at soup.
“Maybe in the spring,” Lila said.
“Spring’s lovely,” her mother said, pleased, and told her about the Sikorskis’ dog.
Lila stood there afterward with her hand still on the phone. She could not have said what she wanted her mother to have said instead. Only that it was not soup, and that there was no version of that sentence she was ever going to be able to say out loud.
* * *
Delia Cross’s house off Rampart had a lemon tree in a pot by the step, doing considerably better than the one in the courtyard off Sunset, and a doormat, and a wreath (in December) made of dried wheat.
She’d written to the address Jake gave her from memory, on Warrick stationery, because Warrick stationery gets answered, and had a reply in six days.
Rosalba let her in. The kitchen was at the back, with a window over the sink, a bowl of nectarines, and a wall calendar from a dental practice in Henderson with two days circled.
“Lila,” Delia said, and put out her hand. “Delia Cross. Sit anywhere. Do you drink tea?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“Good, because I’ve stopped keeping coffee in the house and everybody’s very disappointed about it.” She filled a kettle at the sink. Somewhere in her fifties, in a cardigan, in a house held at a temperature she had evidently chosen and would not be discussing, moving around her kitchen the way people do who have never once had to think about where anything is. “The concierge. Chicago. The Warrick.”
“Senior concierge.”
“Senior concierge,” Delia said, as though that settled something pleasant, and set two mugs down. One said HENDERSON HEART & SOLE 5K 2019.
The tea was loose, in a pot, with a strainer, and took three minutes. In the three minutes Delia asked whether the flight had been all right, and said the early one out of Midway was the only one worth taking. Then:
“Now. Before we start, because I’ll forget. My lawyer’s daughter is getting married in Chicago in March. Charles. He’s asked me a hundred questions I can’t answer. They’re looking at your place. Is it worth it?”
Lila’s mouth was moving before anything else in her had a vote.
“Yes, with two conditions. Don’t take the room block on two and three, take six through ten: the elevator machinery is behind the two-oh-two stack and it runs from five in the morning and nobody tells you until you’re in it. And ask for Sophie Okafor by name, not the sales line. The sales line sells you a package. Sophie tells you which package is a waste of money.”
Delia had picked up a pen from beside the fruit bowl and was writing on an envelope.
“Six through ten,” she said. “Okafor. Two Fs?”
“One.”
“That’s very helpful. Thank you.” She put the pen down and poured, and pushed the milk over, and then said, in exactly the same voice, “So. Three hundred thousand dollars.”
“Three hundred,” Lila said. “A hundred and fifty-five once the wind-down clears. The Bantam covers the advance that’s secured against it and a hundred and forty-five comes to you. Mabel’s clears everybody else.”
“There’s a vig on it, since August. It runs about six a month, and it’s why the number moves when he thinks it’s standing still.” Delia turned the mug a quarter turn. “I’m going to stop it. From this conversation. Don’t take that as a kindness. A number that grows while a man is in a building in Reseda is a number nobody is ever going to pay me, and I would like to be paid.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me for arithmetic.” Delia drank some tea. “Here’s what I’d like. A good-faith payment. Then the balance over thirty months, first of the month, no interest, nothing else on it. If a month is going to be late I’d like a call before the first, not after. I don’t need a reason. I’ve never once needed a reason. I need the call.”
“How much good faith?”
“Seventy-five would do it,” Delia said.
Lila did the subtraction and then the division, and did it twice, because the first time she got it wrong.
“That’s two thousand six hundred and sixty-seven a month.”
“Twenty-four hundred,” said Delia. “We’ll let it run the extra four months, we don’t need to be silly about it.”
“I’m sorry. I’m going to do that again.”
“Take your time.”
She took her time. Thirty-four months, and a man who at that moment had no job, no bars, and no car that wasn’t owed on. It was generous. It was the best terms she had ever seen offered to anybody.
“And if it doesn’t get paid?”
“Then Charles files. It’s papered: there are markers, they’re signed, they have the times on them. And it goes to a judgment, and a judgment is a very boring thing. Four years, thirty thousand dollars of my money, and whatever he ever earns after that, garnished, in a way that follows a person between states, which nobody realizes. I’ve done it twice and never got the whole thing back once.”
She said it the way she had said do you drink tea.
“So it isn’t what either of us wants,” Delia said, “which is why I’m offering you thirty-four months at nothing, and why you’re going to take it.”
“I’m going to take it.”
“Good.” Delia took a ledger off the top of the refrigerator, a hardbound accounts book with a green cloth spine gone soft with use. She opened it flat at a page with a ribbon in it and unclipped a pen from the front.
She wrote the date. She wrote the time (Lila watched her write 11:42) and then the terms, in a hand that was small and completely legible, the handwriting of somebody who had once been graded on it.
Then she said, without looking up: “Whose name goes on it?”
The refrigerator came on. Out the window over the sink a man was doing something to a hedge with a machine.
“Mine,” Lila said.
Delia’s pen stopped. “Then I’ll say what it is, so nobody can tell you later that you didn’t know. The borrower is Jacob Dalton. You would be signing as guarantor. If he stops paying I come to you for the whole of it, and I don’t have to go to him first.”
Out the window the hedge machine cut out and started again.
“Mine,” Lila said.
“Full legal name.”
“Lila Anne Brenner.”
Delia wrote it, blotted it with the side of her hand out of an old habit, and closed the ledger.
“Charles sends the terms Tuesday. Don’t sign anything from him that runs past two pages, he gets carried away.”
She walked Lila to the door, past a hall table with a school photograph of a boy in a red sweater on it, and opened it, and the cold came in off the desert and stood between them like a third person.
“I’ll say one thing and you can do as you like with it. His father was the same, and I liked him too, and I’d like you to understand that liking someone is not one of the inputs. It has never once been one of the inputs.”
“I know.”
“You know it,” Delia said pleasantly, “you just don’t believe it yet. Safe flight. And tell your friend Okafor that Charles’s daughter is a nightmare, so she should quote accordingly.”
* * *
The buyer’s bank re-traded it on the eleventh of December: the general manager committed for a hundred and twenty days past close, or the number came off two hundred and six to a hundred and eighty-eight. Escrow would run to the ninth of January on the license transfer regardless.
Lila had written to Marisol about the March payroll in November, three sentences, because it sat behind everything and there was no fourth sentence to write.
She called the landlord on Fountain herself at ten past four, in her work voice. He was perfectly pleasant. He was not moving it. There was a juice concept with a deposit already wired.
So she did the arithmetic. Twelve thousand dollars in stay bonus, in Marisol’s hand on the eighth of May, against twenty-two seats on a street with no parking. Rooms came up. She had never once failed to find anybody anything.
She built the retention that afternoon and sent it at 6:15, and it came back signed inside a day.
Marisol called on the sixteenth.
“I signed what you sent me.”
“You did. Thank you. It closes the ninth.”
“The space was leased yesterday.” Traffic behind her; she was outside somewhere. “I paid your friend in Pasadena twenty-four hundred dollars to read a lease I’m not going to sign.”
“Let me make three calls. There’s a corner on Hyperion that’s been dark since August, and I can have rooms in front of you by Friday.”
“No.”
“I can have the twenty-four hundred back to you inside a week. One phone call.”
The traffic went on a while.
“Send me the closing packet,” Marisol said. “Not a summary.”
The packet ran to ninety-one pages. Lila sent it that night at 11:20, with no summary on top.
* * *
The family session was on day sixty-one, in an office with the air-conditioning unit in the window and a box of tissues on a low table, positioned. Yvonne, the counselor, had a way of not filling silences that Lila recognized professionally and did not enjoy from the other side of it.
It went well for thirty-five minutes. Jake talked, and was better at it than she’d expected. Not charming, which was the surprise; slower, flatter. He said two things about his father she had never heard, one of which contradicted a story he’d told her in a gondola in July, and she let it go by.
Then Yvonne turned in her chair, about fifteen degrees. “Lila, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“What do you get out of this?”
“Sorry?”
“Out of this. This arrangement. Out of doing all of it.” Yvonne’s hands were in her lap. “It’s not a trick question.”
“I’m not sure.” Lila found her footing. “I love him. I mean, that’s what you get.”
Yvonne nodded and waited.
“And somebody has to do the work,” Lila said. “That’s not a complaint. Someone had to sell three businesses in ninety days and it wasn’t going to be a man in a residential program, and I’m good at it, so it’s efficient that it’s me. It’s triage. You triage.”
Yvonne nodded and waited.
“And it’s temporary. It’s ninety days. That’s the whole thing.”
She heard her voice doing something she didn’t recognize, a rise at the end, and stopped it.
“That’s not what I asked,” Yvonne said, kindly. “I asked what you get.”
Lila turned the question over and could not find the handle on it. Nothing came up at all. She had four hundred deflections and had never in her life failed to reach one.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t understand the question.”
“That’s okay,” said Yvonne, and turned back fifteen degrees. “Jake, I want to come back to what you said about the March payroll.”
Nobody made her answer. The room moved on and left the question in her lap for the remaining eighteen minutes, and then she shook Yvonne’s hand, and Yvonne said it was good to meet her, and meant it.
She was angry for eight days.
Marcus found her at twenty past midnight on a Wednesday rebuilding the concierge station’s supply closet: everything out, a label maker, new bins, the umbrella stock counted for the first time in the hotel’s history.
“It was a disaster in here.”
“It was a closet.”
“It was a disaster in a closet.”
“Go home,” Marcus said, not unkindly, and she said she would, and did, at ten past one, and was back at six-forty-five.
* * *
Sophie’s kitchen, a Friday, one in the morning, after the Pemberton wedding. A father-of-the-bride speech that had to be physically walked off a stage. Both still in event clothes, both barefoot, eating cold arancini off a sheet pan because neither had eaten since ten.
“Theo’s asleep,” Sophie said. “Theo was asleep at nine. Theo has the constitution of a Victorian child and I have never loved anyone more.”
Lila laughed, and the laugh came out wrong. It ran a half second past where it should have stopped and then broke off somewhere unhelpful, and Sophie looked over.
And Lila, who had not said any of this to anyone, said: “I don’t think I can do it.”
Sophie put down the arancini.
“Which part?”
“The three years. It’s three years, Soph. Three years of twenty-four hundred a month and he doesn’t have a job, and I’ve got a spreadsheet that says it works, and it works because of a line in it that’s me, and I look at it at two in the morning and the line is me.” She stopped and got a knuckle under one eye and had it under control in about three seconds, a personal record. “Sorry. I’m tired. Ignore me. It’s fine. The Bantam closed, so that’s the sixty-one gone, which is genuinely huge.”
“Lila.”
“What.”
Sophie leaned back against the counter with her arms folded.
“You’ve found a version of your dad you’re allowed to fix,” she said.
The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere upstairs the house did something in its pipes.
“Wow,” Lila said.
“Okay, that came out wrong.”
“No, it was very well put.” Lila was already reaching for her shoes under the stool, and her fingers were doing the buckle without her. “How long have you had that one loaded? Since Vegas? Since the Bradley Ferris thing, was that when?”
“That’s not fair.”
“It’s not, no.” She got the second shoe. “It’s a good line, though. Very Sophie.”
“I’m not trying to win.” Sophie came off the counter without finishing the rest of it. “Lila. Sit down. I’m sorry. The timing was atrocious, I know it was. Will you sit down?”
“I’ve got the seven o’clock,” Lila said. “Thanks for the arancini.”
The car came in three minutes and she went home in it with her jaw doing something at the hinge, and she did not answer Sophie’s text at 1:22 or the one at 1:40 or the one on Sunday, and at work they were flawless with each other, and it was six weeks before Lila spoke to her about anything that was not a room block.
* * *
She did the wire on a Tuesday in January, on her fifteen-minute break.
The bank would not do it online above fifty thousand, so she called from the service corridor outside the back office, because the corridor had signal and the office had a door people opened without knocking.
The hold was six minutes. The hold music was a nylon-string guitar version of something she couldn’t place and then abruptly could. That was worse.
The verification questions were: date of birth; the last four; the amount of the most recent deposit, six hundred dollars; and the name of her first employer, the Norwood.
“And this is a domestic wire to a business account. Can you confirm the amount?”
“Seventy-seven thousand two hundred and forty dollars.”
“That’s the full available balance in savings. Do you want to leave anything in to keep it open?”
“No.”
“There’s a thirty-dollar outgoing wire fee, that’ll come from checking.”
“That’s fine.”
“One moment.” Keys. “Okay, that’s submitted, it releases within the hour. Do you want the confirmation number?”
“Yes, please.”
She wrote it on the back of a banquet event order with a pen from the cage. Sixteen characters. She read it back and thanked him, and he said, “Anything else I can help you with today, Ms. Brenner?” and she said no, and he said to have a great rest of her day.
Eleven minutes. She was back on the desk forty seconds late and nobody noticed, and the first thing that happened was a man in a very good coat who wanted a table for eight at eight-thirty on a Saturday in River North, and she got him one in six minutes.
She put the banquet order in the front pocket of the folder with the escrow instructions.
She did not tell Jake. She did not tell Sophie, who she was not speaking to. She did not tell her mother, and she did not tell Denny, who would have understood it better than anyone alive and would have been so proud of her. That was the reason.
Six years of every other Friday, and eleven minutes.
* * *
The second Tuesday in February was seventy-one degrees in Reseda, and discharge was at eleven.
She sat in the lobby with the chairs on three walls. Somebody had finally gotten the money out of E4. The carpet squares by the door had been rotated: the worn ones moved to the middle, the good ones onto the traffic line. She noticed, and approved, and had nobody to say it to.
Her right flat had gone at the seam. She had been meaning to take it somewhere for five weeks.
Curtis came out first, six days short of his own ninety, and lit up.
“Hey! Chicago. He’s coming, they’re doing the thing with the pharmacy.” He hoisted his bag. “Draft’s Thursday.”
“Good luck.”
“Luck’s got nothing to do with it,” said Curtis, with immense seriousness, and went out through the doors.
Jake came down the corridor at eleven-oh-four with the duffel over his shoulder and the envelope in his hand, and he looked wonderful. Somebody had cut his hair, badly on one side and well on the other. He was brown from ninety days on a smoking patio, and he moved like a man whose body had been returned to him.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
In the car she gave him the folder: tabbed, indexed, a one-page summary on top because nobody reads past a page. The lease on the one-bedroom in Albany Park, keys in the back pocket.
He went through it with the folder open on his knees, quiet a long time.
“Twenty-four hundred a month. For thirty-four months. Zero interest.” He turned and looked at her properly for the first time since Burbank. “How did you do this?”
There was something in his voice that had not been in it in a year.
“Vendor terms,” Lila said.
And Jake laughed. It was the real one, the one that started before he’d decided to do it, and it filled the car, and she hadn’t heard it since a walk-in cooler in September.
“God,” he said. “You’re a menace.”
“Seatbelt.”
He put the folder on the floor and said, “Can we stop? I want a hamburger so badly I’ve been thinking about it since Thanksgiving,” and they went to the In-N-Out on Sherman Way, and she pulled into the lot rather than the line, which went around the building.
He ate it with the wrapper spread on his knee, talking about a man named Ruben who’d taught him to make coffee in a sock, and he was funny, and he was there, and every so often he stopped and looked out at the lot like a man checking a fact.
“Have some,” he said, holding out the fries.
“I’m fine.”
She had her hands on the wheel at ten and two. It was 12:40. The 405 south would start to go at two and be unsurvivable by three-thirty, and her flight was 6:15 out of LAX.
Sherman Way at one. Or Victory, and eat the lights at Woodman.
The signal at the end of the lot changed twice while she sat there working it out.
“Ready?” she said.
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