Chapter 2 - The Apartment Above the Leak
I didn't want Roland in our apartment. I wanted him to understand why leaving it wasn't as simple as buying a bus ticket or finding a friend with a spare couch.
"The city told me to submit a housing application," I said under the awning. "The housing office told me to get a letter from the owner. The owner said he'd sign when I paid the fees he added after the leak."
Roland asked how much the fees were.
"Nine hundred dollars."
"For what?"
"Damage to the walls."
He stared at me. "The walls were damaged by the pipe inside the building."
"Tell that to Mr. Daugherty."
Roland didn't offer to pay. That would have angered me more than the question. He said his inspection was limited to a contract involving building repairs and that he needed to verify what the city had done with the report. He wasn't a housing officer and couldn't approve an apartment for us.
For the first time since the clerk had pushed the packet back, I felt someone was describing the problem in words that belonged to the world I lived in.
"Will you tell them what you found?" I asked.
"Through the proper process. And I can give you a copy of the summary that concerns your unit, if I'm permitted."
I nodded.
Then Leo tugged my coat. "Can we go home now?"
Roland crouched beside him again.
"I was friends with your mom a long time ago," he said. "I think we all have questions, but your mom and I will talk about those carefully."
"Will you disappear?" Leo asked.
The question silenced us.
"I won't make a promise I don't know how to keep," Roland said. "But I can give your mom a way to reach me."
He wrote his number on the back of a business card and handed it to me, not to Leo.
At home, water had pooled beneath the bathroom sink. The plastic bucket I'd left there was full. I emptied it while Leo sat at the table drawing the man from the office. In his picture Roland had an enormous blue coat and hands big enough to hold a house.
"You think he likes dinosaurs?" Leo asked.
"I don't know."
"Can we find out?"
"Maybe."
I hated that answer, but I didn't know what else to say.
I worked early shifts at a laundromat and cleaned offices twice a week after closing. Between those jobs I earned enough to pay basic rent most months, not enough to satisfy sudden repair charges or save for a new security deposit. When the upstairs pipe burst, the landlord promised a contractor. A man arrived, painted over a stain, and left without opening the wall. The smell returned in three days.
My friend Tasha, who worked with a legal-aid clinic, had urged me to preserve every message and photograph. I had done so. I hadn't yet managed to get a hearing on the charges before Daugherty threatened eviction.
That evening Tasha came over with soup and sat beside the broken kitchen window.
I told her about Roland.
"The Roland?" she said.
"There's only one."
"You spent years saying he disappeared."
"He did."
"And now he says you left?"
I pulled a folded envelope from my dresser. It was a copy of the note I'd placed under Roland's apartment door eight years earlier, after he stopped answering calls. I wrote that I was pregnant and that I needed to know if he planned to come back from his work assignment.
A week later the envelope came through my mail slot unopened. Someone had written MOVED in block letters across the front.
"I thought he sent it back," I said.
Tasha studied the photocopy.
"Do you have the original?"
"In the drawer with Leo's birth certificate."
"Keep it. But also remember you don't know who wrote that word."
I had spent years treating that returned letter like a verdict. Tasha saw it for what it was: a piece of evidence with questions attached.
Roland called after Leo was asleep.
He said he'd spoken to the housing office supervisor. They had an alternate procedure for verifying income through pay stubs and tax documents when a landlord refused to cooperate. The clerk should have told me that.
"I can make an appointment with the supervisor if you want," he said. "I can't promise a vacancy, but your application shouldn't stop at the wrong form."
I thanked him without forgiving anything.
Before hanging up, he asked, "Did you ever write to me?"
I told him about the letter.
May you like
He went quiet.
"Teresa," he said, "I never saw it."
