Part 3
Part 3 of 27 of Eleven Years of Thursdays by Helen Abbott
414 Brandt was a four story brick walk up with a dentist’s office on the ground floor that had been out of business long enough for the window lettering to ghost. There was a hair place next door, open, two women in it, one of them laughing at something. Across the street a lot where a building used to be, now gravel, now parked cars.
It was eleven minutes from my mother’s house.
I sat in the car and did that math three times because it kept seeming wrong. Eleven minutes. I had driven within four blocks of this building maybe two thousand times in my life. There is a Speedway on the corner where Tom and I stopped for gas the night Nora was born because he panicked and thought we’d run out.
Ray Kozak was waiting on the steps with a folder.
He was seventy or close to it, big through the shoulders in a way that had clearly once been useful, wearing a Carhartt jacket over a shirt with a pen in the pocket. He looked at me for a second too long.
“You’ve got her chin,” he said.
“People say that.”
“Wasn’t a compliment. She used it on me plenty.” He opened the folder on his knee. “Sit down, you’re making me nervous standing.”
I sat on the cold step next to a man I’d met eleven minutes ago and he handed me a lease.
It was a photocopy of a photocopy. March 2015. The rent was four hundred and fifty then. My mother’s signature was on the bottom in that cramped hand, E. M. Renner, the way she signed the check for my braces and the permission slip for the eighth grade trip to Washington.
On the tenant line it said: E. M. Renner, and one (1) occupant.
“That’s not a name,” I said.
“No.”
“You rented an apartment to a person with no name.”
“I rented an apartment to Eileen.” He took the lease back and squared the pages. “She paid me cash the first week of the month for eleven years. In eleven years she was never late, never short, and never asked me for one thing except that.”
“Except what?”
“Except that I don’t knock.”
A car went by with the bass up. He waited it out.
“First year I pushed,” he said. “I’ve got insurance, I’ve got the city, I’ve got a legal interest in who’s sleeping in my building. She said his name isn’t going on anything, and if that’s a problem she’d find somewhere else, and she said it in a way where I understood she’d already looked.” He shrugged, and it cost him something. “Rent’s rent.”
“You never saw him.”
“Never saw his face.” He said it flat, like a man who had gotten tired of how it sounded. “Eleven years. I’ve seen an arm. I’ve seen the back of a head going up the stairwell at a distance, twice, maybe three times. He does the trash Tuesday. He does it at two, three in the morning, and he ties the bag off better than anybody in that building.”
“And that didn’t bother you.”
“Everything about it bothered me.” He looked out at the gravel lot. “But I had a brother.”
I didn’t ask. I’ve thought about that a lot since, whether I should have asked, and I’ve decided it wouldn’t have gotten me anywhere he wasn’t already going.
He reached into the folder one more time and came out with a key on a loop of dirty string.
“She gave me this in, I want to say, 2017,” he said. “Told me to hold onto it.”
“For what?”
“For in case.”
“In case of what?”
Ray Kozak put the key in my hand and closed my fingers over it with his own, which was the single most intimate thing a stranger did to me that entire year.
“She didn’t say in case of what,” he said. “She said if she ever stopped coming, a woman named Claire would show up, and I was to give her this and not make it hard.”