“Business calls,” she said after hanging up. “Sorry to cut this reunion short, though, Ronan.”
“No, no, do what you have to do,” I said, and handed her a business card. “That’s my cell phone number. Let’s set something up with Jark.”
“Will do,” she said, and hugged me again. This time it was she who held on tight.
I followed her out onto the sidewalk, and she locked the door behind her.
“You don’t want to turn off the screens?”
“No,” she said. “They run twenty-four-seven. You never know who might walk by.”
It was the old photos that infuriated me. Our history slid past, one image at a time. A worm to hook customers with. I don’t know why it bothered me so much.
“Bye, Treenie,” I said as she got into her car.
I didn’t recognize any of the faces I saw on Warren Street. But they were still there, all the people I had known back then. All the people I had hated. Maybe one or two got out. A couple more were locked up, and probably an abnormally high number of them were dead. But mostly they were still there. Somewhere.
They never liked me. None of them. Because I was gay—because I didn’t care about any of the things they cared about—because I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of that shitty town.
Because you were an asshole all the time, prompted an unwelcome voice in my head.
I was an asshole all the time because they were assholes to me first. And because I was just generally miserable.
Because of your mother.
I flinched away from the topic, but that would not do. If I was going to be ruthless with them, I had to be ruthless with myself.
Yeah, because of my mother. Because she killed herself when I was sixteen. Because I didn’t handle it well. Because who fucking could. Because my dad didn’t, either, and who can fucking blame him . . . but I had blamed him, of course. I’d needed his help and he couldn’t provide it, and so I hated him, and so I did stupid things and burned a lot of bridges and then as soon as I graduated I got the hell out of Hudson and didn’t look back and didn’t talk to him for a year, even though he called me once a month, and when we did resume communication it was a weird, desultory thing where we never really said anything of substance—and I could tell I hurt him—and I knew I could help him so much with a simple fucking visit—but I couldn’t bring myself to do it—and I told myself there’d be time, there’d be so much time for us—
And now: there wasn’t time. He was almost all the way gone.
I stopped myself short of the edge of that abyss. There was no time for self-pity or regret. I had work to do.
Hate had taken me this far. It was the blade between my ribs. It was the pain I grabbed hold of, to make my art.
I owed it everything.
Chapter Thirteen
“Attalah!”
Rick Edgley is mostly naked when he opens his door, wearing only cut-off jeans, and he’s clearly mortified to have been discovered in such a state by someone he actually respects. Luckily for him, and for her, he still has the lean muscled body he’d had back when he had a serious shot at making it as a professional fighter. “Thought you were the Jehovah’s Witnesses again. Was gonna just curse you out and slam the door in your face.”
“It’s fine, Edge,” Attalah says, laughing. “Can I come in? Wanted to talk to you about something.”
“Sure,” he says, nodding nervously, now that his initial embarrassment has died down and he has time to wonder what this visit is all about. “Let me go get decent?”
“I’m plenty indecent,” she says. “Don’t put yourself out on my account. Looks like you were working on something.”
“Basement’s flooded,” he says. “Again. Can’t fucking figure it out.”
She follows him down the hall, to an open door. He pulls a flannel shirt off the knob and puts it on, then descends. “You okay to come down with that cane?”
“I can do anything,” she says, descending after him.
Her own home’s basement floods sometimes. It means a slightly wet floor. This is serious—water comes up at least one step, maybe two.
“Cleaned it out, so there’s nothing to be damaged, and I put the washer and dryer up on risers, but it’s still fucking weird.”
“You had someone look at it?”
Edgley takes the last couple of steps down. Water comes up to mid-calf. “Couple of plumbers. Nobody can figure it out. Or at least, they say they’d need to do a whole lot of work to figure out the problem—let alone fix it—and I just don’t have that kind of money. The weirdest thing?” He sticks his finger in the water, and then sticks it in his mouth. “It’s salt water.”
“How is that possible?”
“Beats me. I thought maybe limestone in the foundation? Or natural sodium deposits in the ground? But I don’t think that’s actually a thing.”
Now that he mentions it, the basement does have the very definite smell of the sea.
As nonchalantly as she can, she says, “Are you still the only locksmith in Hudson?”
“Pretty much,” he says. “Gotten so busy in the last couple years that sometimes my wait time is too long, and guys from Kinderhook or Catskill come in instead. But mostly it’s all me.”
“Do you have the contract with the county to change locks after evictions?”
“Ah,” he says, smiling. “There it is.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Why?”
“I just want information,” she says. “That’s all. I promise. County won’t give us numbers on how many evictions happen. But you could, couldn’t you?”
“I guess I could, actually.” He nods, relieved, thinking that this is all she wanted. “Offhand, approximately, I’d say about ten to twenty a month, depending. More so in spring and summer.”
“But you could get me more detailed numbers, right? Look through old invoices, that kind of thing?”
“Yeah, but that’d take me a shit ton of time. What’s this for, anyway?”
With great effort, letting the pain show in her face, she lowers herself to sit on the steps. “We’ve been talking behind the scenes about trying to get a bill introduced in the Common Council, to make Hudson a zero-eviction city.”
Edgley frowns. “Zero evictions? How would that even work?”
“There’s precedents for it working in other towns. Look,” she says, her face all candor and vulnerability. So far she hasn’t said anything untrue. “I’m not trying to take money out of your pocket. But these are your friends, your neighbors, right? How many times have you had to help throw somebody you care about out of their home?”
He just watches where the water laps against the wall and then nods.
“And the chances are good that this would never be introduced, let alone pass. And even if it does, we’re talking three years at the soonest before it takes effect. It’s really just an organizing tool, something to get folks riled up behind. See who’s willing to stand on our side, who’s against us. That kind of thing.”
All of this is true. But it isn’t why she is there. What she wants to do with that information.