• • •
She’d almost reached her landing with the basket of folded clothes when she heard the doorbell ring. Ed was teaching his night class. She groaned in frustration and elbowed the door open, hustling to the front stairs to get down there before the bell rang again. The boy had always been a light sleeper, but in the months since he turned five he’d seemed to awaken at the mere suggestion of activity. This constant up and down — two flights to the laundry room, a long flight to answer the door — was driving her crazy.
When she saw Angelo standing there, she wondered if she’d forgotten to slip the rent payment under the door. She found the whole exercise so humiliating every month — stooping in subservience, struggling to slide the envelope past the stubborn insulating lip — that she might unconsciously have followed her desire to forget about it and see how long it would be until they said something.
“Is this a good time to talk?”
“Sure, come in.”
She was in a form-fitting sweat suit, which made her a little self-conscious walking up the stairs in front of him. When they got upstairs, she asked him to have a seat at the dining room table, but he chose to stand in the doorway, leaning against the doorjamb, holding the knit cap he’d taken off his head.
“Can I get you some coffee? Water?”
“No, thank you.”
She sat.
“I’ve run into a little financial trouble,” Angelo said.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, and because she didn’t want to hear the details, she began to worry the upholstering on the chairs.
He inhaled deeply, cracked his swollen knuckles. “I don’t want to burden you with the whole story. Long story short, I’ll have to sell the house.”
“All right,” she said.
“I wanted to see if you had any interest in it.”
Recently, she and Ed had begun to seriously discuss the possibility of buying a house. She’d campaigned to sway him to the virtues of home ownership by appealing to his practical side. Owning would mean an added financial burden, but they’d be building equity instead of flushing rent money, and they had already put enough aside for a down payment. The only things holding them back were his conservatism about expenses and general fear of change. She hadn’t been thinking multifamily, but the rental income would offset part of the mortgage, and it struck her that it wasn’t going to get any easier to convince Ed to buy a house than telling him she wanted to buy the one they were already in. They wouldn’t even have to get a moving truck. This was her best chance to capitalize on his recent softened stance; the longer they waited, the more time he’d have to convince himself that they shouldn’t tie their money up in a home. And when he heard that Angelo was in trouble, he would want to help him out.
It didn’t hurt that her father, who had promised to haunt her until she and Ed owned a house, would be appeased. She’d been thinking of her father’s curse more and more lately. She could make the case that she’d been in a house long before he was dead, and that it was just a matter of signing a few papers to make it officially hers. He would appreciate the neatness of such a solution.
“This is all very sudden,” she said.
“I’d sell it to you at a discount,” he said. “I’d only ask that you keep my family on at an affordable rent.”
“I’ll talk to my husband about it.”
“Please do,” he said. “I’m going to have to move quickly, one way or the other.”
Her mind was churning. She didn’t like being on an upper floor, especially after Ed’s cousin’s kid in Broad Channel, playing Superman, had climbed out onto a second-story roof, jumped, and broken an arm and a leg. And she was tired of not having a driveway of her own. She used to consider herself lucky that Angelo allowed her and Ed to park in the driveway at all, but that gratitude had worn off, and now it nettled her to have to walk around the house to get to her door, or to have to ring Angelo’s bell when she was blocked in.
“There’s one thing I would want,” she said.
“You name it.”
“I would want to switch apartments. I would want to be on the ground floor.”
“It’s your house,” he said.
“And one other thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I would ask you to park your car on the street,” she said. “I would want the driveway clear for our use.”
He seemed to chew on what she’d said. His mouth rose at the corners in a forlorn smile at the concessions his situation — she realized that she didn’t care to know the first thing about it, not the first thing — had forced upon him.
“No problem,” he said, regaining the momentum he’d briefly lost. “There’s plenty of parking around here. Worst case, I walk a block or two.”
“And we’d need the garage cleaned out.”
“Everything will come out of there.”
“And the cedar closets in the basement. You can have the ones we use now.”
She thought she heard him whistle. She couldn’t tell if he was taken aback or impressed by the bargain she was driving. “All of these details can be arranged,” he said. “We can work together on this.”
“I just needed to get these things out in the open.”
He picked up her keys from the bowl on the mule chest and let them twirl in his fingers. “I got you.”
“I’ll talk to Ed.”
“And you’d keep us on?”
“Yes.”
He dropped the keys and straightened up. “At affordable rents?”
“I wouldn’t charge an arm and a leg,” she said. “You folks are like family now.”
“Even if I die?”
“Angelo! My God.”
He gave her a look that suggested he saw her not as a woman but as another man. “I’m asking: even if I die?”
“Even if you die. Of course.”
“I just want to know my family is taken care of,” he said. “I’m not looking to break the bank. I just want to take care of my people.” He backed toward the stairs.
“I understand,” she said, stepping toward him.
“Why don’t we find out how much houses like this are going for, and then you can give me less than that.”