Joyce was sixty-nine years old, and on bad Thursdays she weighed maybe 110 pounds with her heavy wool coat buttoned all the way to her chin. I had known her for twelve years through St. Anne’s, where we both worked the soup kitchen on Tuesdays, and I could tell you right now that most people misjudged her because of how soft her voice stayed even when she was mad.
They saw the little blue veins on the back of her hands and the way she walked slow down the curb, and they figured she was just another old lady waiting out the clock. They forgot about the jars. I watched her once open a jar of stubborn blackberry preserves that my own husband had strained his wrist on, and she just gave it a little twist with those bird-bone fingers and popped the lid like it was nothing. Martin forgot that about her. Martin forgot a lot of things once he started spending his Tuesday nights at the bowling alley down on Fourth Street and running into a woman named Kelsey who wore perfume you could taste from six feet away.
We had lived in that same brick block over the old pharmacy for eighteen years. It was not a fancy place by any stretch of the imagination. The radiators clanked like a bunch of iron pipes in a dryer every time the furnace kicked on, the stairs were narrow enough that you had to turn sideways if you were carrying groceries, and our kitchen window looked right out at a gray brick wall where pigeons nested.
But Joyce loved that apartment with a fierce, quiet sort of love because everything she needed was right there within walking distance. She could walk to her dialysis clinic three days a week, she could walk to the public library for large-print mysteries, and she could make it to St. Anne’s if her knees were behaving. That Thursday afternoon, I was the one who drove her home because the clinic van had broken down and she was shaking so bad she could barely hold her small vinyl coin purse. Her clinic bag was heavy on the floorboards between her feet, stuffed with saltine crackers, her discharge papers from the nurses, and a little flannel blanket they always warmed up for her in the microwave because the treatment rooms felt like meat lockers. She sat in the passenger seat with her eyes shut, too tired to make small talk about the weather or the price of eggs.
When we turned the key in the lock of Apartment 3B at 2:36 in the afternoon, the smell hit us before we even got our boots off. It was thick, wet latex paint, the kind that makes the back of your throat taste like chalk. Not a little touch-up job around the baseboards either. We stepped into the hallway and found blue painter’s tape stuck all the way up the doorframes and plastic drop cloths spread across the scuffed linoleum. Kelsey was barefoot in the middle of Joyce’s living room, wearing a tight black tank top and a pair of jean shorts, rolling sage green paint over the cream-colored walls Joyce had scrubbed every single spring with Murphy Oil Soap and a soft rag. Joyce’s good velvet couch, the one her mother had handed down before she passed away, had been dragged halfway out into the hallway and left sitting crooked against the radiator.
Right beside it, face down on the cold floor where anybody could step on it, was Joyce and Martin’s framed wedding picture from 1989. The glass was cracked right across the corner where Martin’s chin used to be.
Martin was standing by the kitchen sink with a mug of coffee, watching Kelsey work like he was the lord of the manor. He didn’t look startled when the door opened. He looked like an employer whose secretary had interrupted his lunch break. Kelsey didn’t even put the roller down. She just turned around with that fake-sweet smile that felt more like a shove between the shoulder blades and said, Surprise. I’m making it peaceful in here for once. Joyce didn’t drop her clinic bag. She just stood there with her hand still resting on the doorknob, her fingers white around the brass. I thought she was going to keel over right then and there on the welcome mat. I saw her chest go up and down real fast, and I opened my mouth to start shouting because my temper has always run hotter than hers, but she reached out and touched my wrist with two fingers. It was just a little pressure, but it meant stop. She looked at the green wall, then down at the wedding picture on the floor, and finally she looked right at Martin standing by the faucet.
Martin didn’t offer to take her bag. He didn’t ask how her treatment went or why she looked so gray around the temples. He just took a sip of his coffee, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and said the thing that still makes my blood tick over every time I think about it. She has taste, and you have prescriptions. He said it just like that, flat and mean, like he was reading an inventory list. The real twist of the knife was sitting right there on the scarred coffee table where Joyce usually kept her devotional books. Kelsey had stacked Joyce’s plastic Monday-through-Sunday pill organizer right beside a cardboard box labeled DONATE in black marker, like Joyce herself was just old junk they were clearing out to make room for the new model. I felt my face get hot, and I started to say something about how Martin was living in a building where he didn’t even own the doorknob, but Joyce cut me off before I could get the first word out. Her voice was thin and dry from the dialysis, but it didn’t shake. Brenda, she said, please go downstairs to our storage closet.
I looked at her, confused, wondering if the treatment had made her dizzy again. In the cookie tin, she said. You know the one. I nodded because I knew every corner of that place better than I knew my own kitchen. Martin let out a short, ugly laugh that sounded like a dog barking behind a fence. Here we go with the paperwork, he yelled over the sound of the roller sliding up the wall. That was his first real mistake, right there. Men like Martin think paperwork is something only lawyers and bank tellers care about because they’ve never had anybody pull the rug out from under them while they were busy looking at themselves in the mirror. I hurried down those narrow wooden stairs to the basement, my boots hitting the steps hard, and unlocked the wire-mesh door to Joyce’s storage unit. Behind three stacks of empty mason jars, some Christmas wreaths that had lost half their pine needles, and an old box fan with a buzzing motor, there it was. The red Danish cookie tin with the picture of the royal family faded on the lid.
I carried it back upstairs like it was made of glass. When I pushed the apartment door open again, Kelsey was humming along to some country song playing off her phone on the counter, and Martin was showing her how to cut in around the light switch. I set the tin down on the kitchen table right beside the box of donated pills. Joyce didn’t open it right away. She sat down in the wooden chair that didn’t wobble and took off her mittens very slowly, folding them one inside the other. Then she took the lid off the tin. Inside were seventy-eight rent receipts going back twelve years, three different letters from the health department about the faulty back stairs, a receipt for a hot water heater Martin hadn’t paid for himself, and the original lease agreement from October 2006. It was typed on onionskin paper that had yellowed around the edges.
I stood behind her chair and watched her finger trace the top line where the signatures were inked in fountain pen. There was only one name listed as the primary tenant. Joyce Elaine Porter. Martin’s name was three lines down under the heading of permitted occupants. Occupant. Not tenant. Not leaseholder. Just somebody allowed to sleep under the roof because Joyce had signed for him when he came out of that bad stretch in Altoona.
Joyce didn’t yell or wave the paper in his face. She just reached into her cardigan pocket, took out her little flip phone with the large numbers, and dialed a number she didn’t even have to look up. Nadine Bell had lived two blocks over from us for thirty years and spent forty years working down at the county courthouse before she retired to her garden. Nadine picked up on the second ring. Joyce put the phone on speaker right there on the table so the room filled with the scratchy sound of Nadine’s kitchen breathing on the other end. Joyce didn’t waste time with hellos. Nadine, she said, we have some alterations being made to 3B without my permission. Nadine asked her one simple question, her voice like gravel rolling in a tin bucket. Did they alter the unit without your written consent, Joyce? Joyce looked right at the wet green patch on the wall where Kelsey was still rolling paint.
Yes, she said. Kelsey let out a little snort of a laugh and kept right on painting, her shoulder blades working under the black tank top. Martin walked over and leaned his hip against the counter, crossing his arms over his chest. Tell her it’s a family matter, Martin muttered. Tell her we’re just updating the place. Nadine heard him through the speaker. There was a pause, just long enough for Nadine to take a sip of whatever tea she had on her stove, and then she spoke again. No, Mr. Porter, she said loud enough to rattle the salt shaker. This is a lease violation in a rent-controlled building where your name isn’t even on the line that matters. You have thirty days to remove your personal effects, or you’re trespassing.
Martin’s face didn’t go white like it does in the movies. It just got stiff, the way a piece of fat gets stiff when you pull it out of the fridge. He dropped his arms and took half a step toward the table, but he stopped when the front door didn’t even knock, it just rattled once under a heavy, flat palm. At 4:18 on the dot, there was a slow, heavy knock on the wood that wasn’t police and wasn’t a salesman. It was the kind of knock that meant somebody from the management office was standing on the landing with a clipboard and a duplicate key. Joyce folded her hands over the red tin, her fingers finally still, and looked at me with those steady, pale eyes. Brenda, she said, would you let my lawyer in? I walked over to the door and turned the knob, and as the latch clicked back, I didn’t even look at who was standing on the landing because I was already watching Martin’s face drop as he realized that the person who owned the roof over his head wasn’t the man who thought he ran it.
