The envelope has a strip of red across the top where I peeled it wrong, in a hurry, then put it back and never looked inside. My coffee has gone the color of old cement. On the calendar, a blue square says Tyler's ortho and a green one says Mom - airport and a yellow one I wrote in pencil says maybe, with a question mark - and then erased, and then wrote again.
The cobblestones tilt under the wheel and I've to lift the bag over a lip of broken tile, and then I'm standing in a doorway painted the green of old copper, with laundry overhead going pink in the last light. Nobody is looking at me. A cat on a windowsill two floors up watches the laundry, not me. I put my hand flat against the tile - blue and white - cool, older than anything I own - and stay there while a man on a scooter takes the corner and disappears and the street goes quiet again. The bag sits on its wheels beside me, perfectly still, going nowhere, and so do I.
The menu is laminated and heavier than it looks - and I hold it open past the point of reading it, past the point of needing to, a woman with nothing urgent in her hands. The waiter comes back twice before I say the thing I've been saying to myself since the bus: *the one with the mushrooms, the dark broth. * When the glass is empty I look up and there's no one to glance at, no one whose face will tell me if this is a good idea - and I say *another, please* into the air, just like that, and he writes it down. The candle between the salt and the pepper is down to a nub, and I watch it instead of my phone - and nobody asks me why.
The Passport in the Envelope
The steps are uneven, some cracked down the middle, and I count them without meaning to, the way I used to count the days until something. At the top there's a railing gone warm in the sun and a view that costs nothing and I grip the metal with both hands and lean forward and my shoulders start before my face does, a shaking that moves up from somewhere below the sternum - below the years of the yellow square and the erased pencil mark. I make a sound I don't recognize. A pigeon lands three feet away and regards me without alarm, the way pigeons do, the way nothing here has any record of me yet. My knuckles on the hot railing are the last thing I see clearly before everything goes useful and blurred.
The bench slats are warm through my jeans and I've the phone pressed to my ear and below me the river is doing something bronze and slow. Tyler's retainer is cracked along the left side and there's a thing with the gutters and my mother's voice gets smaller and then larger the way it does when she walks between rooms. I watch a man on the far bank fold a newspaper into quarters and I can see every fold from here. The retainer, the gutters, my mother's breathing between sentences - I hold all of it in one hand - the way I'd hold a stone I'd found and wasn't sure I wanted to keep.
The tile comes out of the sock still wrapped in a piece of torn paper bag, and I set it on the edge of the sink where the caulk has gone gray and soft. The calendar is still there - Tyler's ortho in blue, the green square empty now, the pencil yellow one someone turned face-in against the wall and that someone was me. I hold the tile under the window light: white field, blue bird - the size of my palm, chipped at one corner where it was already chipped when I paid for it. The coffee maker beeps three times the way it always has and I don't move toward it yet.
The drawer sticks the way it always has, bottom left corner, and I've to lift and pull at the same time, the motion so old my body does it before I decide to. Inside: the rubber bands - the dead batteries, a takeout menu laminated and soft at the fold, and underneath all of it the torn paper bag that used to hold the tile. I put the bag back. I close the drawer. Then I open it again and take the bag out and set it on the counter next to the tile, where the light from the window hits them both, and I leave them there when I go to get my coffee - and I leave them there when I come back.
Something That Shakes Loose on a Hill
The ortho office has a clipboard and the clipboard has a form and one of the questions is *emergency contact* and I write my own name in the box before I understand what I've done, and then I leave it.
The realtor's printout is on the kitchen table, glossy and cool, and there's a house on it with a porch I keep looking at instead of the numbers. My sister calls it sensible and I watch the word land on the table between us like something dropped from a height. I pour her coffee and pour mine and the tile is still on the counter behind her, the chipped corner facing out - and she doesn't ask about it and I don't turn it. At the bottom of the printout someone has circled a bedroom count in red pen - three, which is one more than we need and one fewer than I was thinking - and I fold the paper along that circle, carefully, the way you'd fold something you meant to return to. My sister is still talking and the coffee is getting cold and the porch in the picture is facing west, I think - and I don't say that either.
The lease form has a line that says *date of intended occupancy* and I write in the month and then cross it out and write the next one, and the pen goes through the paper a little at the cross. The agent is standing at the window with her back to me, pointing at something in the yard, and I look at the back of her jacket instead of where she's pointing. In my bag, under the folder she gave me - the tile is wrapped in the same torn paper bag, which I didn't plan and can't explain. She turns around before I finish explaining about the gutters, and her face is waiting for me to say yes or no, and I feel the weight of the railing in my palms, the hot metal - the pigeon who didn't look up. I click the pen twice and sign on the line below the crossed-out month, the one where my actual handwriting is.
Disclaimer
This article is for general informational purposes only and doesn't constitute professional, financial, medical, or legal advice. Consult a qualified professional about your specific situation.
