“Cup of coffee,” I whispered, horrified as a recovering alcoholic would be to hear himself ordering a scotch on the rocks. “Black. No sugar.”
He took me to a table. I sat. I drank my coffee when it came.
I never touched the stuff in New York City. My life was already high-strung enough without surplus caffeine. Part of my patented System for mind-altering substances. By exerting control in small ways, like skipping coffee or never smoking pot, I could ignore how I’d lost control in big ways. Like how I was spending five hundred dollars a week on crystal meth—Tina to her gay friends—and doing some increasingly unwise things while under her influence.
“Oh my god, my place is such a shithole,” said a boy behind me. The girl he was with smiled understandingly. “The whole building smells like pork fat like all the time, from my neighbor downstairs cooking damn empanadas for the thirty-ish people who seem to live there.”
“State Street is the Wild West,” the girl said. “The new frontier.”
“I know,” he said, and here came the punch line, the self-congratulatory point to the story: “And it’s totally worth it, for how much space I get for the money.”
Unspoken: unlike your place.
I knew all the beats, because I’d been overhearing this conversation for years. Had had it myself on more than one occasion. But that had been in Brooklyn—Williamsburg, then Bed-Stuy, then Bushwick. That had been someone else’s home being unraveled. Now it was mine.
State Street had been where the poor people lived, or one of the places, back in the day. Now it was the new frontier, the development that the gentrifiers were just beginning to dismantle.
I shut my eyes, blocked out everything but the words they said and the taste of my coffee. Hate and caffeine; each one exhilarating in its own way. On the wall beside me, a pig was painted in bright primary colors on a piece of plywood with splintered edges. It could have been the work of a child, except for the eye—which was entirely too human, and deeply disappointed in us.
Why did this hurt so bad? I hated Hudson. I’d hated everyone in it. For twenty years I’d hid from it.
But my father loved it. And losing it had broken him.
When the gentrifier larvae got up to go, I followed them. I barely thought about it. Hate had filled me up, was pressing the buttons that operated the machinery of me. We went down two blocks, then turned west and went one more. At Fourth and Columbia, they entered a long low industrial space that had been inactive for as long as I could recall but was now bustling with light and motion.
I walked inside and bile flooded my mouth. Light fixtures made of stag horns hung from the ceiling. So did human-size dream catchers. Hundreds of frames filled the walls, old photographs and obscene needlepoints and protest slogans in bright calligraphy. A woodworked banner placard ten feet tall and twenty feet long was behind a desk.
PENELOPE’S QUILT, it said.
“Help you?” a woman asked, smiling, because of course I did not look like a local. I had the knitted cap at an insouciant angle, the tight jeans, the short sweater. The beard that was eloquently tapered instead of unruly and lumberjacky. The leather jacket that was black and shiny instead of brown and scuffed from farm or shipping labor.
She thought I was One of Them.
And I hated her so much. With those vintage rhinestone cat-eye glasses—which were, admittedly, magnificent—and that proprietary smile.
“Not just this minute, thanks,” I said, but did not depart immediately.
“I’m Lilly,” she said. “You tell me if you need anything.”
Of course I knew what Penelope’s Quilt was. The internet’s largest community of artists and makers. Headed by a quirky gay celebrity billionaire founder CEO, who was apparently running for mayor of Hudson. Hundreds of thousands of new artworks came on the site every week, but none of them could be bought with money. Barter only. Every maker started with a baseline score, and then the community assigned value to each new work, and then you could exchange that work for another artwork of equal or lesser value. Or you could trade twenty-five original lithographs for a fucking hand-sanded Tlingit canoe or whatever. It had been explained to me a hundred times before, by earnest artist friends who adored it, and it had always seemed proudly, unacceptably complicated.
What the fuck was it doing headquartered in Hudson?
“Here,” Lilly said, putting a pamphlet in one caffeine-shaking hand. “Come to our potluck!”
“Thanks,” I said, smiling, drowning, and stumbled out into the bright white day.
Chapter Nine
“Service isn’t ’til tomorrow,” says Ossie’s sister Lettie when she comes out of the funeral home and finds Dom waiting.
“I know,” he says. “Wondered if I could talk to you.”
“Hope you’re not planning on wearing that,” she says, heading down the walk and past him, tapping his uniform on the way. “Ossie’s friends don’t care much for cops.”
“I don’t care much for Ossie’s friends,” he says, following her. “But I won’t be wearing it.”
“Funny,” she says. “Here I thought you were one of her friends.”
So she knew that they’d been lovers. Of course Ossie would have told her sister. Not because they were close, but because Lettie was born-again now, and Ossie scandalized her whenever she could. Attalah won’t like it, knowing that Lettie knows, but the two haven’t talked since high school so it’s unlikely to come up.
“I was,” he says. “I am. But I’m not overly concerned about the opinions of her little wannabe gangbanger buddies.”
“As if you were any better. A married man, stringing her along.”
Dom frowns. And what about you, Lettie? How good were you to her? How good are you to her now, putting together her funeral when she left a suicide note that explicitly said “No ceremony”? But he bites back those words. He can’t begrudge her her grief, or her anger, or even how she expresses it. To have lost someone she loved so much, to suicide—he feels certain he’d break forever from a pain like that. “That’s not how it was and you know it. Did she or didn’t she have a bunch of other guys to sleep with? Half of them, she was the one doing the stringing along.”
Lettie nods. Looks at the ground. And just like that he watches her anger at him melt away—a flimsily constructed weapon, like her austere gray dress, against the grief that now rises to take its place. She shuts her eyes. Her cheeks redden.
“Hey,” he says, reaching out a hand to touch her shoulder. She flinches, and then she hugs him. Her body is so much like Ossie’s it hurts, small against his tall frame.
“I’m sorry,” she says, the words hitching slightly. “I’m just—I’ve just . . .”
“Hey,” he says. “Shhh.”
They stand like that. Thick leaves shade them, but soon they will be falling.
“Don’t take it personally,” she says. “I’m mad at pretty much everyone in her life. Everybody who failed her. Including myself.”
“Same,” he says.
“Why’d you come here, anyway?”
“To talk to you. About Ossie. Find out if she said anything to you. Anything—” He doesn’t know how to end the sentence—that might explain why her mouth was full of seawater, 114 miles from the sea?—so he just goes with “unusual.”