Part 1
Part 1 of 27 of Eleven Years of Thursdays by Helen Abbott
“Three months,” the man said. “Your mother’s three months behind, and I’m not running a charity.”
It was seven forty on a Tuesday morning. I had a coffee going cold in one hand and my daughter’s left shoe in the other. Nora had one shoe. Nora always had one shoe. Out in the driveway Tom was scraping the windshield with a credit card, because the ice scraper had been in the other car since February and neither of us was going to be the one to move it.
“I think you have the wrong number,” I said.
“Is this Claire?”
“Yes.”
“Then I don’t.”
I moved the phone to my other ear. “Who is this?”
“Ray Kozak. I own the building at 414 Brandt.”
“I don’t know anybody on Brandt.”
“Your mother does.” Paper moved on his end, the slow crackle of a man who still wrote things down by hand. “Eileen Renner. Apartment 3B. Six hundred a month, cash, first week of the month, going back to March of 2015.”
I laughed. It came out wrong, too loud, and Nora looked up from the floor with her eyebrows raised, interested, hoping for something.
“Sir, my mother lived on Kenwood for thirty-one years.”
“I know where she lived. She wrote it on the lease.” He said it patiently, the way you’d talk to somebody who was being slow on purpose. “I’m not asking you to believe me. I’m asking you when I’m getting my rent.”
The furnace kicked on. Nora found the shoe under the radiator, held it up, and I didn’t look at her.
“Say the name again,” I said.
“Eileen Margaret Renner.”
Nobody outside our family used her middle name. She hated it. She had been named for a grandmother who by all accounts had been a nasty piece of work, and she signed everything E. M. Renner in a tight little hand, and there it was coming out of a stranger’s mouth at seven forty in the morning like it was ordinary.
“My mother died,” I said. “July fourteenth.”
The crackling stopped.
I waited for him to say the thing people say. Everybody had been saying it for three weeks, at the funeral home and the church basement and the Kroger on Wilmington, and I had gotten good at the face you make.
“I’m sorry,” Ray Kozak said. He said it slowly. He sounded like he meant it, which was somehow worse than if he hadn’t.
Then he said, “So who’s up there?”
“What?”
“Somebody’s up there. The lights go on at dark. The trash goes out Tuesday nights, tied off, bagged right. Somebody’s running water up there.” He paused. “Mrs. Alvarez on two says she hears the floor.”
I put the coffee down on the counter and I missed the coaster, and the ring it left is still there.
“Mr. Kozak,” I said. “Who lives in that apartment?”
And he said, “I was going to ask you.”