Part 14
Part 14 of 27 of Eleven Years of Thursdays by Helen Abbott
Ray Kozak called me on the twenty first of November.
“I need you to come down here,” he said. “Not Thursday. Now.”
He was in the dead dentist’s office on the ground floor, which he used for storage, sitting on a stack of folding chairs with a manila envelope on his knee. There was a lockbox on the front door of the building that had not been there the week before.
“I sold it,” he said.
The furnace noise, the smell of old carpet glue.
“When.”
“Signed Tuesday. Closes the fifteenth of January.” He held out the envelope and I didn’t take it, so he put it on the chair next to me. “Outfit out of Columbus. They’re doing the whole block. Everything above the storefronts goes to condos.”
“You can’t do that.”
“I’m seventy two years old, Claire.”
“You have tenants.”
“I have four tenants and a roof that’s going to cost me more than the building’s worth, and I have a wife in memory care in Centerville that runs eight thousand a month.” He said it without any self pity at all, which made it land harder. “Notice is sixty days. Everybody’s out by the twentieth of January. I got Rosa into my nephew’s place on Wagner, already did it, called him Sunday.”
“And Danny?”
Ray Kozak looked at the floor between his boots.
“That’s why I called you and not Thursday,” he said.
I picked up the envelope. My name was on it. Not Eileen’s. Mine, in his handwriting, which meant he had sat down at some point in the last three days and written Claire Doyle on an envelope and thought about it.
“Why did you do it?” I said. “Eleven years. Why did you actually do it?”
“I told you. I had a brother.”
“That’s not an answer.”
He was quiet for a while. Upstairs somebody’s floor creaked, and we both looked at the ceiling, and then we both looked away, because we had both done it and it was embarrassing.
“My brother Mike had what your brother’s got,” Ray said. “Or near enough. In 1974 there wasn’t a word for it that anybody would say in a kitchen. My mother put him in Longview and my father never went, not one time, eleven years, and I went twice.” He rubbed his thumb along the seam of his jeans. “Twice, in eleven years. And I’ve had a long time to think about how a woman I didn’t know from Adam came into my building every Thursday at two o’clock for eleven years in the rain and the snow and I never once saw her miss.”
He stood up, and his knees made a sound.
“So when she said don’t knock,” he said, “I didn’t knock.”