Chapter Text
Hell’s Kitchen, New York City
June, 1935
The apartment was quiet in the morning the way June was quiet. Heat already on the sill. Tar smell coming up off the street before anyone had a right to be hot. A wagon somewhere below, iron rim on stone, and then the wagon turned and the street went thin again. No school bell. No reason to hurry except the deal, and the deal did not start until four.
Ben drank his coffee standing up. The pot had the same scorched bottom it always had. Steam sat in the kitchen like a second curtain. He had his coat on before the cup was empty, which meant the office and not the roofs, which meant he was trying to keep the promise the way a man kept a promise when he still wanted to break it a little.
Frankie sat with milk. He did not ask for the other mug. He had learned that asking turned a morning into a speech.
“Library?” Ben said.
“Library. Then Stick.”
“Four.”
“Four.”
Ben hesitated at the door like a man who had made a deal and was still getting used to the sound of it. Coat. Key. The small sound of him not taking the elbow. Then he went down and left the house to Frankie, and the landing took his steps and gave them back smaller until they were only the street.
Frankie found the glasses on the table where he had started leaving them. He found the cane on the hook. He locked the door the way Ben had shown him, key first, then the twist to be sure, and he did not wait on the landing to see if a heart would follow him up the stairs.
None did. The roofs were empty of that particular weight. The block had its ordinary noise, a baby, a radio that could not find a station, Caputo already arguing with a kettle two floors down. Frankie started walking.
—
The library held the cool the way stone held it, a step down from the street and then the smell of glue and dust and the oil they put on the floors so the chairs would not shriek. Frankie knew the route by the change in air and by the woman at the desk who breathed through her nose when boys came in talking.
David was already in the chair. He had two books and no intention of reading the second one. His heart was easy. It always was in this room. That was part of why Frankie came.
“You came,” David said.
“I said I would.”
“You also said you had a plague that one time.”
“That was my dad.”
“Same house.” David shoved a book across the table until it bumped Frankie’s hand. The cover was worn cloth. The corners had been worried by other fingers. “Grant. I marked the page. Don’t start at the beginning or the librarian will think you live here.”
Frankie found the punched dots and the paper clip David had bent into a marker. The clip was warm from David’s pocket. “You bent her clip.”
“She has more. She’s rich in clips.”
They read. Not a lot. Enough that the room became a room again. Pages turning. A man coughing two tables over into a fist he thought was quieter than it was. Someone dragging a chair that had one short leg. David kicking Frankie’s chair when he thought Frankie was going too slow.
“You’re mouthing the words,” David whispered.
“I’m not.”
“You are. You look like my uncle at church.”
Frankie kicked him back, light, and missed the chair leg and got David’s shoe, and David snorted into his sleeve and then pretended he had not.
“See. Blind and violent.”
“You’re the one who brought Grant.”
“Grant would have liked me.”
“Grant would have made you dig a latrine.”
David thought about that. A page turned in his book that he was not reading either. “That’s fair.”
They lasted an hour because an hour was what the morning would give them before the heat outside remembered their names. Frankie’s fingers found a line and lost it and found it again. He could hear David’s pencil tapping a rhythm that was not a rhythm so much as a boy who could not sit all the way still. The librarian cleared her throat once, dry, pointed, and they pretended to be serious for three pages. The seriousness did not take. It never did with David. That was the other part of why Frankie came.
When they stood, David took both books and Frankie took the cane. The glasses went back on because the doors ahead were bright even if June was only June.
“Walk me to the corner,” David said. “Then I’m going home before my mother decides I drowned.”
The walk was the good kind. Sun on the glass fronts, a warmth that made the dark lenses earn their keep. A woman arguing with a grocer about peaches that were fine yesterday. The grocer’s heart was bored. The woman’s was not. David described a dog that was not as big as he claimed. Frankie told him so.
“It was at least a pony.”
“It was a dog.”
“You didn’t see it.”
“I heard it pant. That was not a pony.”
David laughed under his breath. “You would know.”
“I would.”
At the corner David stopped. A streetcar bell two blocks over. Somebody’s radio through an open window doing a song with too much brass. “Lot tomorrow? Not the one with Johnny. The other one.”
“Yeah.”
“Bring the glove.”
“It’s your glove.”
“Then I’ll bring it. You just show up.”
Frankie smiled. The cane found the curb without being asked. “I’ll show up.”
David went left. His heart went with him and thinned and became the block. Frankie went toward Stick’s, and for a few blocks the city was only the city, heat and a fish smell from a cart that had no business still being out and the tick of his own cane on stone that he did not need and used anyway so the block would make the kind story.
—
The fourth floor smelled like cabbage and dust and the drip that did its work whether anyone listened or not. The stairs talked under Frankie the way they always talked, wood that had learned too many feet. He raised his hand for the door and did not have to knock.
Stick opened first. He always did when Frankie was on time. Cabbage. Old cotton. The faint metal of the coin box that never seemed to hold a coin.
“You’re on time. Don’t get used to me noticing.”
Frankie put the cane by the door. He set the glasses on the sill because the room did not have a sun worth fighting. He stood in the worn place by the stove where the boards had gone smooth.
Stick did not talk about March. He did not talk about hearts. He moved, and the sleeve said where, cloth on air, a shift of weight that most people would have called nothing. Frankie had to be gone before the hand arrived.
The first time he guessed. He stepped left because left had been lucky last week. Stick’s knuckles brushed his shoulder, dry and exact, not a hit so much as a mark.
“Again.”
Frankie reset his feet. The stove ticked. Somewhere below a woman laughed at a joke that did not travel up the stairs all the way.
The second time he waited too long. He heard the start of it and thought about the start instead of leaving. The hand found his sleeve.
“Again.”
He breathed the way Stick had shown him without calling it breathing. In through the nose. Out like the room was a thing you could put down. He listened past the drip and past the cabbage and past his own heart, which was faster than he wanted it to be and which Stick would hear if Stick cared to, and Stick always cared to.
The third time he heard the skip. Not a lie. A weight leaving a board. He stepped off the line and Stick’s hand closed on air.
Stick did not say good. He reset his feet. The floor complained in the same two places it always complained.
They did it until Frankie’s shirt stuck to his back. Heat in a closed room with a man who did not open windows for comfort. He missed two more after the good one because the good one made him proud and pride made him late. He did not miss the next four. It was better than March. He knew it in his legs before he knew it in his head. March had been a wall and a split lip and anger with nowhere to sit. June was sweat and a sleeve and a hand that did not need to land to teach.
Stick stopped. He went to the drip and ignored it, which was how he left most things.
Frankie stood there with his mouth open on a breath he was trying to hide. He wanted the word. He did not ask for it. Asking turned a lesson into a favor.
“Come back,” Stick said.
That was the whole of the praise.
Frankie took the cane. The glasses. The heat of his own shirt. “Thursday.”
“Thursday. Don’t be late.”
The door shut behind him the way Stick’s doors shut, no slam, just a fact. The stairs were cooler. The street at the bottom was not.
—
Two blocks down from Stick’s the avenue opened and the curb dropped for the crossing. Heat off the rails. A hole they never filled, the same hole, a dip in the stone that took a wheel wrong if you did not know it. Frankie knew it. He had known it since winter and he still checked it with the cane because checking was a thing you did in daylight so other people would let you keep walking.
A man spoke from Frankie’s right. Older. Not a boy. Not the salesman voice from March, the one that had come in kind and gone out with the glasses.
“Need a hand across, son?”
Frankie stopped. He listened because March had taught him what nice could turn into. He listened the way Stick wanted him to listen, past the words and into the chest.
The heart was steady. No skip of a lie. No tightness of a plan. A lunch pail handle clicked against a buckle. The man had work in his clothes, sweat that had dried and sweat that had not, onion from whatever he had eaten standing up. He was waiting, not crowding. One step off. Room enough.
Kindness. Real enough that Frankie almost took it for the simple reason that the avenue was wide and the rails ticked and a truck was coming that did not care who had a cane.
He could have said yes. Yes would have been easy. Yes would have been a story Ben could stand. Yes would also have been a hand on him that he did not need, and he was tired of hands that thought they were doing him a favor.
“No thank you,” he said. “I’ve got it.”
“All right. Watch that hole by the tracks. They never fill it.”
“I know it.”
“Good lad.”
The man went on without touching him. His heart stayed even until the next corner took it. Frankie found the hole with the cane, the dip, the grit in it, stepped over, and crossed on his own. The truck went past and left diesel and dust. Someone shouted for a cab and did not get one.
He did not file it as a story for Ben. Ben would hear the man and hear March. Frankie heard the man and heard a curb. That was enough. The afternoon could keep one kind thing without turning it into a lesson.
—
Four o’clock the stairs smelled like onions that were not theirs. Someone on the second floor was already at a pan. A baby cried and then forgot why. Frankie took the last flight the way he took it now, cane tapping for the block and not for his feet, and the apartment door had Ben behind it before the key was all the way in.
Ben was in the kitchen. A paper sack sat on the table. Diner grease. Coffee gone cold in the bag’s corner. Something fried that had been wrapped in yesterday’s news, ink and salt and the cheap paper that stuck to a thumb.
“You’re on time,” Ben said.
“So are you.”
Ben unpacked the sack. Two plates that were not plates. Sandwiches folded in wax. Pickles in more wax. Janet’s handwriting was not on any of it. The diner on Ninth did not write notes. It wrapped and took coins and did not ask how summer was.
“Janet asked how summer was,” Ben said anyway, because Janet would ask and Ben would answer and the office would keep being the office. “I told her you hadn’t burned the house down.”
“Yet.”
“Don’t give her ideas. She sent cookies with me yesterday. They’re in the tin. These are from the counter on Ninth.”
Frankie hung the cane. He set the glasses on the small table. He sat. The chair knew him. The sandwich was warm in the middle and dry at the edge, which was how diner food announced itself. Mustard. A pickle that had more vinegar than cucumber. He ate because he had been moving since morning and because four o’clock was a deal that included food if Ben had anything to say about it.
Ben sat across from him. Coat off. The day’s heat still in his shirt. His heart was the kitchen heart, even, a little tired in the way June made everybody tired. He had not been on the roofs. Frankie would have known the roofs. This was the office and the stairs and a sack.
“Which way today.”
“Library. David was there. We read Grant and he accused me of praying.”
“Were you.”
“I was reading.” Frankie took a pickle. Salt on his thumb. “Then Stick. Stairs. The hall.”
He left the sleeve out. He left the man at the curb out. The house did not need those to stand. Stick’s come back was not a thing you put next to diner mustard. The kind man was not a thing you put next to March if you wanted Ben to stay in the chair.
Ben nodded, then remembered and said it, because nods were a habit he was still breaking. “All right.”
He did not ask if anyone had walked him. He did not ask if the roofs had been empty. He chewed and looked toward the window and kept the deal by staying in the chair. The almost-smile sat at the corner of his mouth and did not ask to be bigger.
“David tomorrow,” Frankie said. “The other lot. Not the one by his building.”
“You’ll be back at four.”
“I’ll be back at four.”
“Hm.”
That was the rest of the speech. Frankie would take it. Four was more than March had given him. Four was a kitchen and a sack and a man who had wanted the street and had taken the chair instead.
They ate. A radio two windows down found a song and lost it. A cart with a bad wheel went by underneath and the bad wheel was a sound Frankie could have followed three blocks if he had wanted to. He did not want to. The tin of Janet’s cookies sat on the shelf like a second supper nobody had to earn.
Frankie licked salt off his thumb. The afternoon was still in his legs, Stick’s floor, the avenue, the hole they never filled. The man at the crossing was already smaller than March. Stick’s come back sat in his pocket like a coin he was not going to spend in this kitchen.
He was twelve and June and a deal that held if both of them let it.
The house held.
Outside, June kept being June, and for once that was the whole of the news.