Lethal Love novel · Chapter 5 of 32

Chapter 5: Double, In Cash

I peeled the notice off the glass so Gran wouldn't see it from the street.

Then I sat on the stairs to her apartment with it in my lap until the radio upstairs went quiet.

She found it anyway.

She found it at seven the next morning, folded under the kettle, because I'm a bad liar before coffee.

"Halsted," she said.

"Gran."

"Forty-one years I've been on this block. I let out that man's wedding suit."

"I'll fix it."

"With what?" She folded the notice into a neat square and put it in her apron pocket. "We'll fix it. Put the kettle on."

On Thursday the ladies came at ten, like they had every Thursday since I was in diapers.

The retired teacher brought her husband's funeral suit to be taken in for her second husband.

The two sisters brought rugelach and an argument about whose turn it was to be wrong.

Gran told them about the notice before they had their coats off.

By eleven they had a plan involving a petition, a city councilman's mother and a casserole.

At eleven fifteen the bell rang.

A woman in chef's whites walked in with a pair of black trousers over her arm.

She had short black hair, red lipstick and a face that had never waited to be introduced.

"I need these hemmed," she said. "An inch. Maybe an inch and a half."

They were chef's pants, the cheap kind, with a grease stain on the knee.

Nobody hems chef's pants.

"Who sent you?" I said.

She grinned. "My brother says you're the best hem in Brooklyn."

"Your brother doesn't own anything with a hem."

She laughed.

It was a laugh.

"Cosima," she said, and held out her hand. "He doesn't know I'm here. He'd kill me. Figuratively."

"Jemma."

"I know."

She looked at the machines and the radio on the shelf. "So you're the one he writes to at three in the morning."

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