Previously – Chapter 7: What Do You Get Out of This
The leg quarters were ninety-nine cents a pound. Nobody puts leg quarters at ninety-nine cents unless they need them out of the case by Sunday.
Jake stood in front of the case at the Tony’s on Elston with a hand basket over his forearm and had the plate cost before he finished reading the sign, the way a covers count is there before you finish opening the book. Fifty-two cents. So here was the case, and it made itself: if you cannot build something people will pay for on top of fifty-two cents, you have no business being in the business.
He put twelve pounds in the basket.
He was on the sidewalk before the other side got its turn. There was no business, no walk-in, no prep cook named Nestor, and the freezer in the apartment on Kedzie was one drawer with a dead ice maker jammed into two-thirds of it, and against that the fifty-two cents did not stand up for four seconds. The finding, reached on Elston with a bag in each hand, was that three pounds had been the number.
He cooked eight pounds of chicken that night in two pots, standing at the stove until ten-forty, because the alternative was throwing away six dollars, and six dollars was most of a day.
Lila came Wednesdays and Sundays, off the Brown Line with her work bag, and ate the chicken. The chicken went four nights. On the second night she looked at her plate and said, “And this evening, chef?” and he said it was a Thursday preparation, and after that it was a thing. Friday it had capers in it, because a jar of capers had been in the cabinet when he got the keys and belonged to nobody. By Sunday she was doing the announcing, and she did a very good maître d’.
That was March. That was more or less the whole of March.
The apartment was a one-bedroom on the third floor above a currency exchange. Lila had found it off a listing while he was still in the valley and had walked it twice on video with the phone held out at arm’s length, and the lease went in his name, which he had wanted and had said so once, badly, from a hallway in Reseda. The keys came in the back pocket of the folder. The currency exchange had a sign that stayed on all night and put a rectangle of green across the ceiling of the bedroom, and the radiator in the front room made a sound like a man being hit with a pipe and gave off no heat whatsoever. The one in the bedroom gave off heat like a foundry. By the second week of March he had ruled on it: you sleep with the window open a few inches in thirty-degree weather and you eat your dinner in your coat, and he never once reopened it.
Before long they had a geography. The doorway between the two rooms was the only part of the apartment fit for people, so that was where they sat: Lila against one jamb with her laptop on her knees, Jake against the other with the Tarrant’s book. Neither of them ever proposed it, and neither of them ever asked why two grown adults were sitting on the floor of a doorway in their coats.
* * *
The folder had been in the bottom of the closet since February. He had read the one-page summary and nothing else, because a man handed a one-page summary is being told, courteously, that the rest is not for him.
On a Sunday in March he went in past it, looking for wire instructions.
Loose in the front pocket was a banquet event order with sixteen characters on the back in her printing, and clipped to that a bank confirmation: one outgoing wire, seventy-seven thousand two hundred and forty dollars, 2:41 on a Tuesday in January.
Behind tab five was Charles’s packet. Charles had gotten carried away: six pages, five of them definitions, and across the top of page six, in a font from 1987, CONTINUING GUARANTY.
The Guarantor waives any requirement that the Lender proceed first against the Borrower.
He read it three times, which is two more than a sentence like that needs.
At the bottom, on the ruled line, in the handwriting that put a name and a time on everything it touched: Lila Anne Brenner. He had not known she had a middle name until a form in Reseda.
So: findings, in order, in his coat. One, Charles worked for Delia. Two, Delia would take the call and be gracious the whole way through and would not release a guarantor a day early, having never released anything early. Three, there was nothing to put in its place: no bars, no car, and a credit file a bank would read the way you read the chart at the foot of a bed.
He drafted a sentence. I want you off this. That was not a sentence, that was a wish with a verb in it. He drafted a second one, heard it come back in her voice as a question, and set it down.
What he said, on the Wednesday, was, “Page six.”
“Charles sends two of everything,” Lila said. She had her bag on one shoulder and the mail in her teeth. “You should have a second one behind it.”
“You signed it in December.”
“It needed a signature in December.” She got the door shut with her hip. “It comes off when the last one clears. Is there chicken?”
So there was no remedy, and he built an instrument anyway out of the only material in the building, a paycheck. Rent, Delia on the first, the phone, the card, food at the level a man can eat at. What sat at the bottom was six hundred dollars a month, and nothing he could reach was going to touch page six.
It would touch seventy-seven thousand two hundred and forty.
He set the transfer for the fifteenth, because the first belonged to Delia.
* * *
Money had a bottom now. You could get to the bottom of it in nine days and stand there.
He had it laid out on an index card taped inside a cabinet door, because Ray said put it where you’ll see it and not where you’ll look at it. Seventy-two thousand a year from Tarrant’s, about forty-six hundred a month after everything the state and the federal government thought of. Twelve hundred for the apartment. Twenty-four hundred on the first to Delia, wired; Charles’s office confirmed it every month with an email so bland it was almost a kindness. Six hundred on the fifteenth to Lila, which was page six, and he had put it on the card in the same hand as the rent so it would never look like generosity. The phone. The Ventra card, because the Tacoma was gone.
What was left, and he had checked it three times because the first two times he’d assumed an error, was seventy-one dollars a week for food.
In one calendar year at Dalton & Sons he had comped seventy-one thousand dollars of food and liquor and considered it marketing.
He learned the city the way a poor man learns a city, in a specific order and with a great deal of unnecessary pride, and the order was Aldi on Elston, then Tony’s, which was better than it had any right to be, then the Jewel and only for the app deals. The app deals were a trap. The price on the shelf was not the price unless you had clipped a coupon inside the application, and he took that up at a register at eight-fifteen on a Wednesday night with a seventeen-year-old named Ashanti, courteously and at length and with the authority of a dozen years of running rooms, posted price against conditional price, and he made the argument well. Ashanti said, “You gotta clip it, though,” and was completely correct.
He clipped it. He stood in the vestibule under a poster for money orders and clipped the coupons and went back in and watched the register take the yogurt from four dollars to two-fifty, and walked home up Kedzie feeling something he could not name and did not enjoy.
* * *
The Thursday meeting was in the basement of a Lutheran church on Lawrence with a linoleum floor, a coffee urn manufactured in a country that no longer existed, and radiators along the wall that worked perfectly, and Jake took it personally.
In that room, when you talked, what you were doing was called giving therapy, and men who ran forklifts said it without any irony at all.
Ray Mendoza sat in the second row on the aisle and stayed quiet for the first two weeks Jake was there.
He was sixty-six and built like a fire hydrant, and he wore a windbreaker indoors because he owned no other jacket and had never once wanted one, and he kept a folded paper towel in his shirt pocket. He had twenty-two years, and in that basement that was roughly the same as being a mountain.
Jake had given therapy for eight minutes his third week. He had been good, and had known it while it was happening, and he graded it on the walk to the car and gave it high marks: the timing, the turn at the end, a man near the urn who had come in hard-faced and was sitting forward by minute six with his hands open.
Afterward Ray came over with two decafs and handed him one.
“Dalton.”
“Jake.”
“Dalton,” Ray said. “You talked for eight minutes and you said ‘spiral’ five times. I don’t know what that is. You drove to a house on a Thursday and you sat down in a chair.”
Jake got as far as the first word of a defense. Ray went on over the top of it.
“And you said you’d been running from this your whole life.”
“I did say that.”
“From where to where,” Ray said.
Jake opened his mouth.
“That’s what I thought. That’s an expression guys use when they don’t want to say a date and a number.” Ray drank some of the decaf and made a face at it, the same face, Jake would learn, that he made every single time. “So. Date and a number.”
“November ninth. Four hundred and twelve thousand dollars.”
“Okay,” Ray said. “See, now we’re two guys talking.”
He gave Jake his phone number on the back of a receipt and told him to call every day at seven-thirty in the morning, and when Jake said that was very generous of him, Ray said to just call at seven-thirty, and went to put the chairs away.
The calls were short. He had expected something else. Wisdom, maybe. What he got was three minutes about what Jake was doing that day, in order, with times attached, and then Ray would say “All right” and hang up while Jake was still talking.
In the fifth week Jake said, on the phone, that he’d been sitting with a lot of shame lately.
“What’s it feel like,” Ray said.
Jake had a good one ready. He’d had it ready for a while. “Like standing outside a house you used to live in.”
There was a silence on the line long enough that Jake checked the screen.
“Thirty years I fixed buses,” Ray said. “Forest Glen garage, thirty-one years, three months. You know what an operator would write on the card? ‘Making a noise.’ That’s it. That’s the whole card. Making a noise.” A cabinet closed somewhere in Ray’s kitchen. “Where. When. Cold or warm. Loaded or empty. Left turn or straight. You give me ‘making a noise,’ I got a bus on the shoulder at Belmont and Central and fifty people late to work.”
“So?”
“So you’re making a noise, Dalton. When.”
Jake looked at the ceiling of a rented bedroom with a green rectangle on it.
“About four in the afternoon,” he said. “Between shifts. When there’s nothing to do for an hour.”
“Okay,” Ray said. “That’s a real thing. We can do something with that.” Then: “You don’t have a problem with life. You got a problem with four o’clock.”
* * *
Tarrant’s had a hundred and eighty seats on Ohio Street and a banquet room upstairs called the Drake Room for no reason anyone living could explain, and a laminated dessert menu with photographs on it.
Sal Tarrant came in on Fridays, called him chief, and left at ten. The ribeye was fifty-four dollars and cost them eighteen, and there were a dozen wines by the glass and three of them were the same wine, and Jake had all of it inside one shift and said none of it for six weeks, because a new man who is right in week one is a new man for a year, and he had fired that man himself, twice.
Jake learned fifty-one names in a week.
He kept Los Angeles to himself. It came out in April anyway, when a rep from the linen company recognized him and said, “Wait. The Bantam? In Silver Lake? My sister’s whole wedding party!” and Jake said yes, that was mine, and asked about the rep’s sister, and got the linen contract down in the same conversation by pointing out that they were being billed for a bar towel nobody had ordered since before the pandemic.
What he did, mostly, was small. He moved the seven o’clock book to six forty-five and seven-fifteen and the kitchen stopped drowning at seven-twenty. He rewrote the side work so that the closer wasn’t polishing glassware at midnight while three servers stood at the computer doing nothing, and he posted it on a Monday in a plastic sleeve, and Dot Papas, who had worked that floor for thirty-one years and had been civil to him and nothing else, read the whole page standing up with her glasses down her nose.
“Who did this.”
“Me.”
“It’s right,” Dot said, and went to get her apron.
He worked doubles most of the week and stood at the host stand during the rush because the host stand was where the whole building went wrong. He learned that Emmanuel in the dish pit had a daughter at Von Steuben with a viola, and that Vinny the sous could not be told anything before ten a.m. and could be told anything at all after two.
In May, Ray told him to tell Sal.
“Before somebody else does. Guy owns a restaurant, he’s gonna find out. Better it comes out of your mouth.”
Jake did it on a Friday in the office off the Drake Room, standing up, in about ninety seconds, with no story on it. Sal listened all the way through, said he appreciated it and that everybody’s got something, and shook his hand.
The following Tuesday the deposit run went to Vinny. Nobody announced it. The bank bag was simply not on the desk at close, and when Jake asked, Sal said Vinny lived out that way anyway. In June the safe combination changed and Jake was not given the new one.
He built the case for raising it and ran it to the end, which is the part that matters. Sal would say something kind and would not give him the combination, and then there would be a thing in that office with a name on it, in August and at Christmas. So: no. He ran a hundred and eighty seats for a man who would not let him near the money, and he ran them well, and he was never told why, and every night at one, when Vinny came up the back stairs with the zip bag under his arm, Jake found something to look at across the room.
He mentioned it to Ray on the phone. Ray said, “Huh,” and then asked whether he’d paid the fifteenth. Jake said he had. That was all either of them ever said about it.
In June a woman came in with six people from a hospitality conference at the Hyatt, and Jake knew the back of her head before he had a reason to.
He went over.
“Ms. Hoefling. Jake Dalton. Newport Beach came out to Vegas about a year ago and looked at my P&Ls, and you were the only one at that table who read them.” He watched the polite blankness go out of her face and watched what came in behind it. “I’m the manager here. Take the strip over the ribeye, and you’ve got an eight o’clock curtain at the Goodman, so I’ll pace it for you.”
“Thank you,” Kate Hoefling said. “The strip, then.”
He paced it himself, and they made the curtain with twenty minutes in hand, and he took the twenty minutes for himself, in full, the way you sign for a delivery.
A week after that a regular named Fitz had his card decline at the bar in front of a woman he had obviously brought there on purpose, and Jake took it back to the terminal and ran it forward before he took a step, because too quick and the man knows and too slow and the woman knows. Forty seconds is a machine problem. He stood there forty seconds and came back and said the thing had been an animal all week, catch you next time. Then at close he put sixty-one dollars of his own money in the drawer and rang it through himself.
The second week of June was the week his shoes gave out. The right one split across the flex and he wore them four more shifts with gaffer’s tape on the inside, because a host stand hides a man below the knee.
On the Saturday Lila came up the stairs with a paper bag from an estate sale in Beverly: black oxfords, eleven and a half, barely walked. She said they were nine dollars.
They were not nine dollars.
He stood in the front room in them and said that nine dollars was a crime, that somebody’s grandson had been robbed in daylight, and she agreed it was terrible what was happening to families in this city. Neither of them ever revised the figure. All that summer one of them would say nine dollars about something else entirely and the other one knew exactly what it meant.
* * *
The spreadsheet arrived in the third week of April with the subject line no pressure, just a tool.
It was beautiful, and he could not get past it. Three tabs: Delia, the vendors from the wind-down, and a third called L, which had started at seventy-seven thousand two hundred and forty dollars and came down six hundred at a time, because she had watched two transfers land and built a column for the rest. A cell went from gray to green on the day a payment cleared. She had built it on a Sunday.
He opened it on his phone standing under the Kimball platform and scrolled sideways on the tab called L, and saw a cell at the far right with the number 129 in it and no label.
He called her.
“It’s beautiful,” he said. “Genuinely. I’ve paid people who couldn’t do this.”
“It’s just a sheet.”
“What’s the one twenty-nine.”
“Months,” Lila said, in exactly the voice she used to give a guest a walking time to Millennium Park.
The heat came on under the platform, a great gust of it out of a grate, and a train went over the top of him.
“Right,” he said.
“I can take it off. It auto-calculates. I didn’t put it there on purpose.” She stopped. “I can take it off.”
“Don’t take it off.”
“I won’t.”
“It’s a good sheet,” he said again, and they both stayed on the line for a while afterward talking about a bat mitzvah the Warrick had lost to the Peninsula.
She kept it. He looked at it on the fifteenth of every month.
He tried once to build the rest of it into something and got nowhere, because every piece collapsed the second he picked it up and looked at it on its own.
She knew the balance of the checking account before he did, because they’d put her on it for the auto-pay. His idea. He had proposed it at a kitchen table in February in a voice he had been rather proud of at the time and could still hear. She knew about the sixty-one dollars in June before he mentioned it. He came out of the shower one night in July and she was sitting on the end of the bed with his phone in her hand, holding it plainly, the way you hold a remote, and she said, “Your mom called twice,” and that was true, and she had also been somewhere else in it, and she handed it over and asked what he wanted for dinner.
He started keeping the receipts.
That was the thing he could not explain to himself afterward. Nobody asked him to. But he came in one Thursday at six-forty and she said, “Where were you?” in a voice like a person asking about traffic, and he heard himself say the Jewel on Broadway, and then he took the receipt out of his coat pocket and put it on the counter, face up, without being asked, and smoothed it flat.
Lila looked at it.
She did not pick it up. She looked at it for about two seconds and then went and got plates down, and neither of them said one word about it, then or ever, and by August there was a brick of receipts in a drawer under the silverware in an apartment where the front radiator did not work.
* * *
The garage Ray rented in Portage Park had a lawn mower in it, a snowblower belonging to a neighbor, and a 2004 Buick LeSabre with eighty-six thousand miles on it that Ray spoke of the way other men speak of a horse.
“Hold the light.”
Jake held the light.
“Not on me. On the thing.”
Jake held the light on the thing, which was the underside of a mower deck, and Ray lay on a piece of cardboard with a socket wrench and said nothing for a while.
“She’s got my passwords,” Jake said. “I gave them to her. She’s got the mail forwarding on the Delia account. She knows what’s in my pocket, actually, literally, she’d know if I had six dollars in my pocket.”
“Uh huh.”
“And I want to be very careful how I say this, because I know how it sounds.”
“You always know how it sounds,” Ray said. “That’s your problem. Say it wrong for once.”
Jake moved the light an inch.
“I feel like I’m being supervised,” he said. “By somebody I love. And I don’t get to mind.”
Ray put down the wrench and put his hand out and Jake gave him the three-eighths without being asked, which was new.
“Somebody made her your parole officer,” Ray said, “and it wasn’t her.”
Jake didn’t say anything.
“You want me to tell you she’s out of line. She’s not out of line. She’s right, and it’s eating both of you, and those two things sit together all the time. Happens more than you’d think.” The wrench started again. “Nothing to do about that except the boring thing.”
Jake waited to be told which boring thing.
“Pay her. On the day. Not before. Not extra.”
“Why not extra?”
“Because extra’s for you.” Ray came out from under the deck on his elbows and looked at him. “You want to send her seven hundred instead of six so you can be a guy who sent seven hundred. She don’t need a guy who feels good on the twelfth. She needs six hundred dollars on the fifteenth. Same amount, every month, till it’s a thing she stops thinking about.”
“A hundred and twenty-nine months.”
“So it’s a hundred and twenty-nine months,” Ray said, and went back under.
He came out again a minute later, and he was wiping his hands on the paper towel from his shirt pocket, and he said, without any particular emphasis: “You said ‘I promise’ twice since you got here. I’m sixty-six and we’re looking at a lawn mower.”
“Did I?”
“Twice.”
Jake made a gesture with the light that was supposed to stand in for the end of a sentence he had not started.
“It’s a verbal thing,” he said.
“Yeah,” Ray said. “That’s what I’m telling you.”
He handed Jake a nine-dollar part in a plastic bag on the way out: an air vent for a one-pipe steam radiator, because Jake had described the banging over the phone in April and Ray had diagnosed it before Jake finished the sentence and then made him say the word steam three times because Jake kept saying heating system.
“Your guy won’t put it in,” Ray said.
“He says he’s coming.”
“He’ll come,” Ray said. “Eventually he’ll come.”
* * *
He told the room about 1994 on a Thursday in the last week of July.
He had not planned it. He had a different thing drafted in the car, with the times in it because Ray liked times: four o’clock, and a Sunday in June when he’d stood outside a currency exchange for six minutes reading the odds board in the window next door, and then had not gone in, and had called Ray from the sidewalk. He got a third of the way through that and heard himself say, “You have to understand what I grew up inside of,” and then he was telling it.
“Nineteen ninety-four,” he said. “Atlantic City. My father goes there in September because his brother-in-law’s wedding got called off eleven days out and the room was nonrefundable. A man he didn’t like didn’t marry a woman he’d never met, and there’s a room.”
The urn ticked. Somebody at the back coughed and said excuse me.
“Six hundred dollars and a rented tuxedo. Rented for the wedding, canceled with the wedding, and he paid for it anyway, because if you’re going to go, you go correct.”
Nothing happened in the room. He kept going, because that was what he knew how to do.
“He pressed a stranger’s line at a craps table. She did not seven out for one hour and forty minutes, and he came off that table with two hundred and fourteen thousand dollars.”
He waited a half-beat, where it goes.
“He bought a Cadillac. He bought a boat.” Nothing. “That boat sat in my uncle’s side yard six years under a blue tarp and never touched water. And he gave the rest away in ten months. Not gambled. Gave. Two months of rent for a guy he’d met the previous Tuesday. Ten months and it was gone.”
A folding chair creaked. A woman named Pam, who had eight months, was looking at the floor in front of his feet.
He could hear his own voice in the room. It had never once not worked.
“And he told that story every day for the next twenty-nine years. He owned four bars and he lost four, and if you’d asked him on the last day of his life whether he was up or down.”
He stopped.
He stood there for what was probably three seconds.
“He’d have said up,” Jake said.
The radiators along the wall went on with a knock and ran.
He put his hand on the back of the chair in front of him. “That’s it. Thanks.”
He sat down. Pam said something about her sister. The basket went around. At the end they read the thing they read and stacked the chairs, and Ray took two decafs off the urn and handed him one at the bottom of the stairs and said nothing about any of it.
In the Buick, going up Pulaski, Ray said, “I gotta do the shoes on this.”
“The what.”
“Brake shoes. Rear. Listen.” He came off the pedal at Montrose and there was a faint dry scrape underneath them, like a spoon in a pan. “Hear that? The pad’s fine. That’s the hardware back there. Guys hear it and they go buy a whole kit.”
Jake listened to it for two more blocks.
“Ray.”
“It’s brakes,” Ray said.
“I know, but is it?”
“Dalton.” Ray put his blinker on. “It’s brakes.”
* * *
On a Sunday at the start of August he told her about the transfer window and could not get out of it. Two hours from the tap. If the bus at Kimball runs late you pay the second fare, so he had started leaving at 4:52 for the earlier 82, and he explained the 4:52, and then did it again, because the first time he had left out the walk. Her face stayed where it had been. He could hear that there was no end anywhere in the sentence he was inside of, and he kept going, because stopping meant sitting on that couch with nothing in his hands.
In the middle of August he told her about lunch.
They were on her couch and she had her laptop open on the arm because there was a wedding at the Warrick on Saturday and the mother of the bride had opinions about the uplighting, and she asked him how his day was, the ordinary way, not the other way.
“I had a break at four,” Jake said, “and I went and sat in the Dunkin’ on Ohio and had a sandwich for forty minutes by myself, because I didn’t want to talk to anybody.”
Lila’s hands stopped over the keyboard.
“At work?”
“At work. Vinny’s fine, everybody’s fine, nothing happened. I just didn’t want to be around people and I went and sat somewhere they weren’t.” He was looking at the television, which was off. “So that’s what I did with my four o’clock.”
She was quiet for a second.
“Was the sandwich good?”
“It was terrible.”
“Yeah,” Lila said. “They’re terrible.”
She went back to the uplighting. He picked up his phone and put it down again without unlocking it. After a while she moved her feet over onto his leg without looking up from the screen, and he put his hand on her ankle, and it went unremarked.
* * *
The man came on the fourth Tuesday in October.
Jake had texted Dragan about the front radiator a dozen times since February and received, in total, three thumbs-up emoji and one message that said guy coming. On that Tuesday at ten-forty in the morning a man named Enrique buzzed up with a canvas bag and said “steam?” and Jake said yes, steam, and Enrique went to the radiator and put his hand on it in three places and said, “Vent’s shot. And it’s pitched wrong.”
“Somebody told me that in April.”
“Yeah, well,” Enrique said.
He unscrewed the old vent, which came off gummed and orange, and screwed on the new one, and then he took two cedar shims out of the bag and knocked them under the feet at the far end until the whole thing pitched back toward the pipe. He put his level on it and Jake watched the bubble come off center and settle. He took the level off.
It took twenty minutes.
At two-fifteen the system came on and the pipe knocked once, and then the radiator began to fill from the near end, and Jake stood in the front room of a rented apartment above a currency exchange with his hand out at the far corner of it, where there had never been anything, waiting.
It got hot. All the way at the end, the last fin, where it was supposed to be.
He called Ray from the floor.
“Nine dollars,” he said.
“Told you,” Ray said. “Now open a window, it’s October, you’re gonna cook.”
He had the day off. He got the window in the front room open two inches, and it took some doing, and he walked down to Tony’s and bought three dollars and eighty cents of chicken thighs and a head of garlic and a bunch of parsley that was on its last legs and was therefore eighty cents, and one lemon, and he stood in the kitchen from five o’clock browning the thighs properly in a fourteen-dollar pan, and doing it properly meant not touching them, and not touching them meant standing there.
Lila got home at seven with a bottle of sparkling water and had her shoes off in the hallway before the door shut, a thing she had been doing since the end of August, when her name went on the lease in a phone call that took six minutes and that they both treated as an errand.
“It’s warm in here.”
“It’s a furnace in here.”
She stood in the front room with her arms crossed and looked at the radiator, and then she went over and put her hand where he had put his, at the last fin, and left it there.
“Huh,” she said.
“Twenty minutes.”
“Twenty?”
“Twenty minutes, and two pieces of wood, and one nine-dollar part.”
“Eight months.”
“Eight months.”
“I’d have had a man here in a day and a half,” Lila said, “and I’d have been insufferable about it,” and Jake said he had absolutely no doubt about that at all, and went to turn the thighs.
They ate at the table at seven-forty, which was a thirty-dollar table from a place on Milwaukee that sold other people’s furniture, and it wobbled, and Jake had folded a section of the Sun-Times under one leg in March and left it at that.
It was good. That was all. The chicken was better than good. The skin had gone the way it goes when you leave a thing alone, and there was enough lemon in it, and the parsley had held up. Lila ate two thighs and most of the garlic and told him about the mother of the bride, who had wanted the uplighting changed to a color she referred to only as warmer, and who had rejected three warmers, and who had, at five o’clock that afternoon, in the ballroom, in front of the banquet captain, selected the exact color it had been on Monday.
“You said nothing.”
“I said, ‘That’s perfect, let’s lock it in.'”
“You didn’t.”
“I locked it in.”
“Lila.”
“I locked it in,” she said, “and Marcus looked at me like I’d shot somebody,” and she laughed at her own thing with her hand over her mouth, and Jake sat back in a chair that had come with the table and watched her do it.
He got up and washed the pan while she talked, because you wash that pan hot or you don’t get it back. She came and stood in the doorway with the dish towel and dried it and then hung the towel on the oven handle and squared it, both halves even, without any indication that she knew she was doing it.
He set the pan on the burner where it lived, and when he turned around she had not gone anywhere.
She was looking at him. Not past him, not at the pan, not at the doorframe she had her shoulder against. At him. At his face, steadily, the way you look at something you are deciding about, and she did not say anything, and she did not stop.
There had been a whole year of his life in which he could not have stood thirty seconds of that. In a lobby in Las Vegas, in a bar with his own name over the door, he had always had to be doing something with a woman’s attention, spending it, moving it along before it settled anywhere long enough to find out what it had landed on. He had been extremely good at that. It had been most of what he was.
He stood in a rented kitchen with a dish towel behind him and seventy-one dollars a week for food and let her look.
She came off the doorframe. She put her hand flat on his chest, not pushing, just putting it there, and left it, and his heart went on doing what it did under her palm, unhurried, unimpressive, his.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
She kissed him at the corner of his mouth first, which is not where anyone kisses anyone, and then properly, and her hand came up along his jaw where the shave was two days old, and she made a small sound at the roughness of it that she would have denied making.
The oven ticked as it cooled. The pipe knocked.
He got his hands under the back of her shirt and stopped there, at the small of her back, and went nowhere with it, and she leaned into that, into his hands not moving, and put her forehead in against the side of his neck and breathed out all the way.
“There are dishes on that table,” she said, into his collar.
“There are.”
“I’m not doing them.”
“Nobody is doing them.”
They got as far as the bedroom door and no further for a while.
She reached past him and pushed the door open with two fingers.
Afterward the green rectangle from the currency exchange lay across the ceiling where it had lain every night since March, and her head was on his arm, and his arm had gone numb some time ago and he was not going to bring it up.
“You left the burner on,” she said.
He had. He got up and turned it off in the dark, and by then the bedroom was unlivable, so they took the water glasses out to the couch.
Somewhere below them on Kedzie a car went past with the windows down and something Colombian playing, and the pipe knocked once, and the front room went on being far too hot.
“We have to open more windows,” Lila said.
“We do.”
“You have one more window.”
“I have one more window,” Jake said, “and it doesn’t open,” and she said that was a real shame, because she was about to put her feet on him, and she did, and the two of them sat in an eighty-four-degree apartment in October with the door to the hall propped open with a shoe, arguing about whether the new place on Argyle was actually any good or whether it was simply the first one to have a decent room, and the radiator ran, and ran, and did not stop.
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