“She acts like she owns the building, but the washer and dryer are for both apartments.”
“I’ll get these sheets going.”
I walked downstairs with the sheets knotted up in one hand to find the basement doorway. Sure enough, the first-floor apartment door was cracked open, and a pair of blue eyes peered out at me with the flat stare of a hired assassin. When I turned to say hello, the door shut again. That must be Mrs. Mahoney, destined to be my nemesis. I’d had neighbors like that in New York, so I wasn’t too intimidated; I could probably turn on my Brooklyn charm and bring her around to tolerating me. It was a skill I had learned from years of apartment living: the key was to ignore any hostile behavior directed toward you and ask them for advice about the neighborhood food.
When I arrived back at the top of the stairs, I could hear Lisette on her phone, and I paused to listen through the door.
“No, I understand. I—Paul, I totally understand. I’ll find something. It’s no big deal.” I waited for her to end the call before coming inside. Lisette turned to me, a forced smile on her face.
“Paul can’t take me for a couple of days,” Lisette said. “I can call my church, though. There’s lots of old ladies there with empty rooms, and they’re bored now that their Haitian refugee family moved to Gander. Someone should be able to take me in. I’ll be this week’s arts and crafts project in the basement.”
“Okay,” I said, then added impulsively, “or you could stay. On the sofa, I mean. If you need to. If it’s really just for a couple of days.”
“Not really?” Lisette gaped at me.
“I mean, if you don’t mind me having the bedroom…”
“No, of course. That would be incredible. Paul can take me, just not until Tuesday. And I work in a coffee shop. I can bring you really good muffins at the end of the day.”
“I love muffins. I think we have a deal,” I said.
“That will give me time to talk to the women at the church, too.”
Later that night, sitting in the bedroom without a functioning lock, I wondered if I was insane to let a stranger stay with me whom I had only just met. I was probably lonely, with Laura away. But I also liked Lisette. I sensed in her stories something like the chaos from my own childhood, the quick moves where your stuff went into a duffel bag, the inability to keep track of times and dates. It sounded more familiar than I wanted it to be.
The next morning,I woke up to light pouring into my eyes and reminded myself that this far north the sunrise would be insultingly early. I stumbled up out of Charlotte’s comfortable bed and wandered over to the back window. As soon as I opened it, there was the faint smell of fish and cow manure. I tried to tell myself it was romantic, that it meant I was in some remote, lonely corner of the world where my horizons wouldbe broadened and my soul renewed. This was likely to be more convincing once I’d had my first cup of coffee.
I shuffled into the living room, where I saw that Lisette had rolled herself into a perfect cocoon on the sofa.
“Sorry,” I whispered, as I began to putter around the kitchen looking for coffee-making ingredients. She sat up almost immediately and gave me a tired smile.
“Let me!” she cried. “I don’t mind at all. I’ll show you how it’s done.”
“In the meantime, I’m going to stumble over to the eastern windows and glare at the sun for a bit. It rose at least half an hour earlier than in Brooklyn and I’m feeling resentful.”
Lisette laughed. “You can scold it for me, too,” she said. “It’s like that friend who always tries to convince you to go running.”
Lisetteand I made a good couple of days of it, as it turned out. She was away most of the time at the café where she worked, but when she was home, she was careful about being quiet when she came in, especially if she saw that I was on a video call for work.
“Did he just say, ‘Good-bye, rock star’?” she asked me after I got off a work call with Kedar.
“That’s my boss. Corporate people talk like that.”
“They call each other rock stars?”
I laughed. “Kedar is very, very positive. Everyone he works with is the best. Everything we’re doing is amazing. Every article I write is a home run. It lets us both pretend we’re not working in finance, which is an incredibly boring industry.”
“I want someone to call me a rock star.”
“First you have to hit some home runs,” I said.
“Maybe that’s my problem. No home runs.”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “You just worked a full day at a café. Did anyone spit out their coffee in front of you?”
“No.”
“Did customers complain to your manager?”
