Page 55 of Levi

I stop in the doorway.

The slot by the wall isn’t bare carpet anymore. Now there’s two sleeping bags. The heavy kind, flannel on the inside, one laid flat against the floor and one open on top, squared into the gap like he measured it.

Because he did. It’s exactly the width of my shoulders.

They’re new. Tags gone, but the creases on the bottom one are still factory-sharp. He bought them sometime this week and never breathed a word. Carried them up these loud stairs, placed them carefully down in this gap, and left them here for me to find with no note.

Same as the ribs he slid into my refrigerator. And the donuts he was planning to drop off without a word before I caught him in the act.

Dante didn’t fight me about the floor. He didn’t try to sell me the couch like the couch was the right answer and I was the one who needed correcting. He saw where I slept. On the ground, against a wall, where I can watch the door.

He decided on his own that wasn’t a thing for him to fix. Just a thing to put something soft under. So he did, and he charged me nothing, and he said nothing.

I don’t lie down on it yet.

I walk to the bathroom instead, because there’s a situation in there that’s been bothering me since the first morning, and I’ve finally got the afternoon and the reason to take care of it.

The rust stain in the tub. A long orange-brown streak running down from the faucet, old iron in old pipes, the kind of stain that moves in and stays. Everything else in that bathroom is squared away like Dante himself — towels folded in thirds, one bottle of everything, no clutter — and then there’s that ugly streak, sitting in the middle of it like a scar.

I’d bet anything he’s gone after it. He wouldn’t live with a stain like that because he hasn’t tried. He lives with it because it won. Sprayed it with whatever the store sold him, scrubbed till his arm gave out, watched it not care. Then he did what you do. He stopped seeing it. That’s the only way to live with something you can’t fix. I know a fair amount about that.

But I grew up on well water. Iron stain was in everything. Every tub, every sink, every white shirt washed at home. My grandmother fought that war her whole life and she won it weekly, and I was the grandkid holding the pumice stick. Store cleaner won’t touch it. You need the old remedies, and you need to not be in a hurry.

I search under the kitchen sink, because everything in this apartment is where it should be. Rubber gloves, and a can of the gritty powder cleanser, which has oxalic acid in it whether the man who bought it knows that or not. He wouldn’t. He’d have used it on the counters.

I wet the tub, shake the powder over the streak, and let it sit and work while I do nothing at all, which is the step everybody skips. Then I go at it in small circles, patient, letting the chemistry do the lifting and my arm just steer. Rinse. Check. Half gone already. I lay down a second coat and wait longer and work it again.

It takes the better part of an hour and it’s the best hour I’ve spent in weeks. My knees ache on the tile and my shoulder’s burning and there’s not one thing about it I’d trade.

When I rinse the last of it down, the porcelain comes up white. All the way original white, like the day they set the tub. The streak is gone like it was never there.

I dry the tub out with my dirty t-shirt from the duffel so there’s no water spots, because he’d notice water spots. Gloves back under the sink, can turned label-out the way it was facing. Nothing in this apartment looks different than it did this morning. Except one thing looks like it did fifteen years ago.

No note from me either.

This is the only language the two of us both seem to speak without getting into trouble.

I head back down the hall and lie down on the bed he made me on the floor. Flannel on top, floor still underneath the way I need it, wall at my back and the door in my sight. The best bed ever made for me.

He’ll find the tub tomorrow morning. Standing right there, wrung out from tonight, running the shower, and there’ll be a second where the tub looks wrong to him because it looks right, and he’ll have to work out what’s missing.

He’ll know exactly who. He won’t say one word about it, and neither will I.

Chapter 20: Dante

By two o’clock the crew is scrubbing Levi out of the house.

The cleaning crew moves through it in pairs, and behind them the place loses Levi one surface at a time. The chip bags go into a trash bag. The torn cookie sleeve, the warm soda, the deli paper. Gone. A woman wipes down the island where he ate standing up every day this week. The marble comes back to the cold blank shine it had the night I first walked in, before anyone had set a glass on it without a coaster.

I do the sectional myself after telling the lead to skip it, which earns me a look and no argument. The phone’s down in the cushions, screen-down, cracked, almost dead. It’s the one piece of him the house is allowed to keep. It has to stay, pinging this address. I push it deeper into the seam, where a cleaner’s hand won’t find it in the morning, and square the cushion over it. Every other trace of him leaves the house today. This one I bury on purpose.

I don’t take time to think about why that sits wrong. There’s a house to stage.

Benji works behind the crew, rebuilding the listing off the photographs in his head. Hydrangeas back on the table, purple, fussed to look unfussed. The runner squared. The bread and the lemons and the cookbook propped open to the pappardelle again.

The tableau that says someone with taste lives the easy life here. Re-staged for a woman from Atlanta who walks through at noon tomorrow. Benji moves a stem and steps back to the foyer angle to check it, same as the first night, before any of this started.

It’s good work. A few more hours and I’ll need to pick up Levi to take him to the Roadhouse. I mentally talk myself down while my hands fold a new throw. He’ll only be there a few hours. Three drinks, and Sheila holds the cap. She calls me at a fourth.