The cameras were a recent addition, installed with Holmes’s help. Now Myles could take part in meetings while also keeping an eye on the store. If customers needed him, he would know. And then, of course, there was security. Things being the way they were these days, you couldn’t be too careful.
The two men came in and out of view, the black man leading. The other man kept looking over his shoulder. He was stocky, with long dark hair tied into a ponytail.
What were they looking for?
Feeling a hand on his shoulder, Myles turned around, eyes reluctantly following his head. McGee was holding a piece of paper. She was waiting for him to take it.
“This is a draft of the press release,” she said.
Holmes grabbed a copy, barely glancing at it. “It’s just more of the same,” he said, letting the sheet float back down to the table.
“I think it’s good,” April said, eyes still gliding down the page.
“This environmental stuff,” Holmes said. “No one cares. The city’s such a fucking mess.”
“It’s not the same,” McGee said. “I’m trying to make it clear these are global issues that affect us locally—” All at once she stopped, her lips still parted.
Myles felt her gaze narrowing in on him.
“Seriously?” she said.
In the corner of his eye, Myles could see something happening on the monitors, but McGee continued to hold him there with her binocular stare. “What?” he said.
But she wasn’t looking at Myles. It was Fitch this time, slumped in the chair behind him, unshaven chin bobbing against his chest. Holmes and April had noticed, too, and they seemed to be waiting to see what McGee would do, what she’d say.
The only sound across the entire basement was something burbling in Fitch’s throat. In his sleep, his knee shot up, thumping into the table. One of McGee’s red markers rolled to the edge and onto the floor. It was that dull clatter of plastic on cement that finally caused Fitch’s eyes to pop open.
“What’s going on?” he said.
McGee’s nostrils flared, the way they always did when she was angry. “Why do you even bother?” she said. “What’s the point in showing up at all?”
Fitch yawned into his elbow.
“We were up late rehearsing,” Holmes said.
Fitch laid his head down on his arms. “There’s just something about people talking.”
“He always used to fall asleep in school,” April said.
McGee looked from one to the next. “Why are you defending him?”
“We’ve been talking about the same stuff for weeks,” Holmes said. “What are you afraid he missed?”
The stubble had been on Fitch’s face for three days. His clothes had been on him even longer. And yet somehow he looked the same as always, like one of those guys paid to glower in his underwear next to strips of scratch and sniff cologne. And April could have been the pouty, negligéed beauty draped over his neck. First cousins, and even perfect strangers couldn’t miss the family resemblance. Was there something in the country club water, Myles sometimes wondered, that bred people like these?
“Moving on,” McGee said, making no effort to hide her anger. “We need to get the banners finished. We’re running out of time.”
At the front of the store, where the two men had entered only a few minutes before, Myles now saw another guy, newspaper white, wearing a winter coat. All last week they’d gone without a single customer. Now they suddenly had three at once? As Myles debated whether to go upstairs, he watched the man in the winter coat move from monitor to monitor, coming closer with each step to the other two men.
Myles was hunched over the desk, squinting at the screen, when McGee called his name again.
“What?” he said quickly. “What?”
“I asked if you think those friends of yours are still coming.”
“What friends?” he said.
McGee gave him a pained smile. “You said you knew some people who’d help us out.”
“Yeah,” Myles said, already turning back toward the monitors. “Sure.”
But McGee had another question for him, and another, and then another, and he wanted to tell her what was happening upstairs with the three suspicious guys, but the way she was looking at him made it impossible for him to tell her to wait a second, just one second, just long enough for him to get another look. Her eyes wouldn’t let him go. Five minutes passed, then ten. He waited for the bell at the cash register to ring for his assistance, but the ring never came.
And then the meeting was over, but by then it was too late.
As McGee straightened her papers and markers, Myles glanced from one monitor to the next. The men upstairs had vanished without him having any idea why they’d come. And now the meeting had ended, and he had no idea what had been decided.
The walk home began in silence, except for the scraping of McGee’s boot heels on the cement.
“It went well,” Myles said. “Didn’t it?”
McGee didn’t speak or slow down or turn her head.
“It’s going to be great,” Myles said. “People are going to be excited.”
“Please stop talking,” she said. “It was better before, when you weren’t paying attention.”
She was surprisingly fast for someone with such short legs.
When they reached the building, she waited for him to open the door, the one bit of chivalry he was allowed. The overhead door was heavy, but she was like an ant, a thousand times stronger than anyone would think. Sometimes he wondered if she stepped aside out of pity, just to make him feel useful.
The building had once been a factory of some kind. Ball bearings, according to one story, but it was hard to imagine something so small leaving such a mess. The lower half of the building was still full of metal drums spray-painted with skulls and crossbones. Myles had pointed them out to McGee on the day she’d brought him here for the first time, eager to show the place off.
“Well, they’re sealed, aren’t they?” she’d said.
Even though this was exactly the sort of stuff she was constantly getting agitated about. Brownfields and poisoned groundwater and toxic sludge. But for some reason she found it more compelling when these things happened to people other than them.
He and McGee were the only ones living in the building. The rest of the second floor had been converted to artists’ studios. Maybe the light blasting through all those vast, uninsulated windows was flattering to canvases. On sunny days, Myles found the dirty glass had a way of making his life feel sepia-toned.
Before the sun went down, though, the artists fled. Myles didn’t know where they went, but he liked to imagine little cottages in the suburbs with herb gardens and roaring fireplaces. He almost never talked to his neighbors. One was a mailman, or maybe he worked at the DMV. Something awful. His paintings were dark and blobby, like album covers for heavy metal tribute bands. And there was the middle-aged woman who rolled clay into thin gray turds that she assembled into something she called jewelry boxes but in fact looked like colanders made of Lincoln Logs. The third was a batty old hippie who taught art at the community college. Myles had never seen her stuff. She was always finding reasons for shutting her door whenever he came near.
McGee didn’t mind the exposed ceilings or the wall of windows looking out over an old railway bed. Or the floorboards slathered in gray industrial paint. She didn’t notice that their futon, lying in the corner beneath a mound of blankets, looked like a jumble of newspapers swirled together in a dirty alley. She didn’t care that the bathroom had been an afterthought. There hadn’t been one at all when McGee found the place. But there were some things, thank God, even she was unwilling to live without.