“Be careful.”
“Always. You be careful too. And Maple?”
“What.”
“Thank the man.”
She hung up.
I looked at Knox, who was pretending he had not been listening to the entire conversation.
“That was Mira.”
“I know.”
“She confirmed the diner is fine.”
“Good.”
“She’s staying there overnight.”
“Smart.”
I went back to my book, which was a mystery novel from 1997 that I had found on the shelf in the apartment and had no memory of my grandmother buying. Knox went back to his paperwork. The heater kept the apartment at exactly seventy degrees.
Around five o’clock, Knox made dinner.
I saymadebut what he actually did was open two cans and heat them in a pot on the tiny electric stove that he had somehow gotten to work using the generator, the way you make miracles happen when you understand the basic principles of power distribution and stubbornness.
Beans. Bread. Butter.
It was the plainest dinner I had ever eaten and also the best.
We ate it at the small table that had been my grandmother’s work surface forty years ago. The light from the propane lantern — because Knox had apparently known that the lights would go out and had prepared for that too — made the room look smalland warm and completely removed from the world outside the window.
Maple, the part of me that was still thinking clearly said. This is the most dangerous thing that has ever happened to you.
But the rest of me, the part that was cold and tired and had been carrying the weight of the foreclosure like a stone in my chest for sixty days, just sat across from a man who had appeared in my house with a generator and did not ask any questions.
When I finished eating, I said, very quietly, “Thank you for the soup.”
He did not look up from his plate.
He said, “It was just soup.”
But he said it the way you say something when you are lying to yourself and to her and to the empty kitchen, the way you say it when you know that it was not just soup, that nothing about this was just anything, that the blizzard was still coming and the world outside was still frozen, but inside this small apartment above her garage, something was beginning that neither of us had the power to stop.
The wind outside rattled the windows.
The heater hummed.
The lantern light made his face look like a place I might want to stay.
6
KNOX
She washed the plates while I sat at the table and did not move.
