Six dollars and forty cents in my wallet. Three hundred and twelve in the lining of the coat. Four hundred and eighty-six rolled into the toe of the left boot in my bag. Eight hundred and four dollars and forty cents, total. That was what I had to make last until I figured out the next thing, which I had been about to figure out for six weeks. The Marian House Hostel was twenty-eight a night with an Illinois address and proof of residence, which I now had folded against my ribs. A week’s bed. Seven nights of a door that locked, a shower, a pillow that was not the inside of my own coat.
I logged out of the computer. I cleared the browser. I wiped the keyboard with my sleeve, which was less about prints—they would not be looking for prints—and more about the small superstitious pleasure of leaving nothing behind.
My stomach made an angry sound. I had eaten a banana at six and half a granola bar at nine. Not enough. Not even close to enough.
I shouldered my bag and walked toward the elevator with my chin up and my hands in my pockets and the small forged sun of my new address tucked warm against my heart.
A forger, a runaway, and a federal witness walked into a library, I thought. The librarian looked up and said, you again. And I almost laughed.
Almost.
Iwalkedfromthelibraryto State and Lake with my hands shoved deep in my pockets, the forged ComEd bill warm against my ribs, and the wind doing that thing it did off the river where it tried to crawl up your sleeves.
The alcove was behind the shoe repair, in the slot between the building and the dumpster, sheltered on three sides. He had set it up like a small careful room. A flattened cardboard box for a floor. A plastic milk crate for a stool. The army surplus blanket I had given him three weeks ago, folded twice and tucked around his legs like an old man’s lap robe in a parlor. He sat on the crate with his back against the brick, reading.
A Walter Mosley paperback. The spine had gone soft and pale at the creases. He was about a third of the way through. He had been about a third of the way through last week, which told me something about how often the cold made it hard to focus enough to read.
He looked up when my shadow fell across the page and his whole face creased, the way a paper bag creased when you smoothed it out a second time.
“Miss Anna.”
“Mr. Wendell.”
I held out the coffee. Medium, black, two sugars, the way he had told me the first time, looking embarrassed to be specific. And the brown paper bag with the buttered roll, still warm from the bakery on the corner where the woman behind the counter had stopped charging me for the rolls about ten days ago, which was its own problem and one I was not currently equipped to solve.
He took them both with both hands. He did that every time. He took them the way you would take a baby being handed to you, with the slight settling of the shoulders that meant whatever else this was, it was going to be done with attention.
“Sit a minute,” he said.
I sat on the corner of the cardboard, knees up, bag between my feet. The dumpster smelled less than you’d think. He was meticulous about which side he sat on, depending on the wind.
“How’s Mosley?”
“He’s alright.” He took the lid off the coffee and sniffed at it like he was paying his respects, then sipped. He closed his eyes. He opened them again, looking at me like he wanted to make sure I’d seen him appreciate it. “Two sugars. Lord.”
“Same as last time.”
“You don’t forget.”
“I forget plenty of things. But coffee orders are sacred.”
He smiled at that, and tucked the bag with the roll into the inside of his coat, against his chest, the same place I had put the forged ComEd bill twenty minutes ago. I made myself not see the symmetry.
He frowned then. Slowly. Like a man who had spent his life noticing things and was about to notice another one.
“Miss Anna.”
“Mm.”
“Where’re your gloves?”
I looked down at my hands, which had come out of my pockets at some point to hold the coffee while I’d been handing it over, and were now resting on my knees in their pale, ridiculous nakedness. The knuckles were red. The skin between my thumb and forefinger had split. I had been ignoring it for a week.
“Oh,” I said. “Left them at the shelter. Idiot.”
This was a lie of a kind I had become disturbingly fluent in. There was no shelter, exactly. There was a rotation: two nights in the women’s overflow at the Catholic place on Wabash when they had a bed, one night in the chair at the twenty-four-hour diner on Wells when they didn’t, the rest of the nights on the el if the el was running and on a stairwell I knew about in the south Loop when it wasn’t. None of these places held my gloves for me, because I did not own any gloves.
He looked at my hands a long time.
