Miles opened his eyes. 40 years in this trade, and he had never sat still long enough to be told.
Tuesday he came back again. The tenants nodded to him in the stairwell now. Nobody said much. Somebody left a foil wrapped plate outside the door where he sat with no note. Around midday, a small voice spoke from the landing above him. Holly sat on the top step, her knees pulled up, one hand resting on Winnie’s sleeve. School was out for the holiday, and the child had a paper and a stub of pencil in her lap. She was looking at him. “Miss Winnie says I can tell you the building’s rule,” she said. “If I stay on this step, that sounds like a fair deal,” Miles said.
He did not turn his whole body toward her. He kept his eyes on the wall so that she could choose to look or not. “When the heat comes on, the man in the basement knocks on the pipe. Three times.” She wrapped her pencil on the iron rail. Once, twice, three times. “Then everybody knocks back floor by floor all the way up. It means the heat is up. Come home.” “Who taught you that?” “Mr. Harold and the people before him. Nobody knows who started it.” “It’s a good rule,” Miles said.
She thought this over. Then she rose and Winnie rose with her and together they went to the window at the end of the landing. Below at the curb sat a white truck with red letters on the door. Two of his crew had come to collect the rented heaters. Ror and Pel Mechanical. “That’s yours?” Holly said. It was not a question. “It is.” “There’s a lot of them. I see them on the highway.” She frowned. “You’re the boss of all of those.” “I am.” “Then why can’t you make the boiler go?” Winnie made a small sound. Not quite a cough. Miles looked at the truck for a long moment. He could have said it’s complicated.
He could have said the parts were backordered. It would have been true and it would have been a lie. “Because the boss forgot how to ask the people who can,” he said.
Holly considered this with grave attention, as if it were a math problem. “That’s silly,” she said at last, not unkindly. “Yes,” said Miles. “It is.”
That evening, Ida let him carry the last of the returned cords upstairs. Naen’s door stood open with Marisol at the kitchen table, writing in a folder. Naen sat by the window in her blankets.
When Miles set the cords down, she squinted at his coat. “You’re losing a button.”
He glanced down. It had hung by a thread for a month. “It’s nothing.”
“Give me that.”
“Mrs. Ferris, you don’t need to.”
“I’ve been sitting in a chair for 3 weeks. Let me be useful.”
She held out her hand. He took off the coat. He had not let anyone do that for him in decades. She found a needle in a small tin and threaded it slowly, her fingers unsteady but sure. Stitch by stitch the button came back to life. A little crooked, sewn tight.
“There,” she said. “Now it’ll hold.”
He put the coat back on. It felt heavier somehow in a way he could not explain. Down the hall, Marisol’s radio murmured the evening forecast. “A hard freeze is expected Christmas Eve with temperatures dropping to 8°.”
Naen coughed once, then again, a dry, shallow sound. Marisol was on her feet before the second one ended. Her hand light on Naen’s wrist, her eyes on the clock. Naen’s breath had begun to catch on every third breath like a thread pulling tight. Nobody in the room said a word, but Miles heard it the way he had learned to hear a pipe going wrong in the wall.
Tuesday night settled over West 143rd Street like a lid. By 9:00, the wind had found every gap in the old brick. It whistled through the fire escape and rattled the vestibule door. Inside, the tenants closed their doors early and stuffed towels against the sills. Somebody on the fourth floor was playing a radio very low, a slow saxophone, as if the music itself might keep the cold out.
