Too Late. I'm Married to the Godfather novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: The Lease

The studio was on the fourth floor of a walk-up in Bushwick, above a laundromat that never closed.

I'd paid the rent on it every month for four and a half years.

Eleven hundred dollars, out of my own paycheck, from my own account.

The key stuck in the lock the way it always had. I had to lift the door and shove.

Inside, it smelled like dust and old radiator.

A mattress on a metal frame. A card table with one chair. A kettle. My residency textbooks stacked under the window, and a lamp with a crooked shade.

On the wall over the bed I'd taped a printed sign from my first year: "PAGE ME ONLY IF SOMEONE IS ACTUALLY DYING."

I sat down on the mattress in Nonna's green dress, which I hadn't managed to unzip by myself.

I didn't cry.

I just sat.

Forty minutes later, somebody climbed the stairs.

Heavy, slow steps. Somebody tall trying to be quiet on old wood and failing.

They stopped outside my door.

Nobody knocked.

I heard a long breath, and then the creak of a man sitting down on the top step with his back against my door.

"The quiet one in the gray coat followed you," Giancarlo said through the wood. "Don't blame him. I'd have fired him if he didn't."

I leaned my head against the wall.

"I'm not letting you in."

"I didn't ask."

"You're going to sit on the stairs all night?"

"I've sat in worse places." A pause. "There's a laundromat downstairs. It smells like dryer sheets. I could live here."

I laughed. It came out wet.

"How long have you had this place, Doc?"

"Since before you."

"And after."

"And after," I said.

He was quiet for a while.

"Every month?"

"Every month. The first. Out of my account."

"Why?"

I pulled my knees up under the green dress.

"Because it's a door nobody else has a key to," I said. "After that night I didn't sleep anywhere I couldn't lock. Then I married a man with forty guys and a house full of family and a grandmother who walks in without knocking. I loved it. I still needed a door."

He didn't answer right away.

When he did, his voice was rough.

"You could've told me."

"You'd have bought the building."

"I'd have bought the laundromat," he said. "For the smell."

I put my palm flat on the door, about where his shoulder would be.

"Remember the night you came in?" I said.

"January twelfth. I was bleeding on your floor."

"You were bleeding on my floor and you had six men with you, and they all tried to cut the line."

"You made them sit in the plastic chairs."

"One of them took a number."

"He still has it," Giancarlo said. "He keeps it in his wallet. He says it's the only time anyone ever made him wait."

I laughed again, and this time it didn't hurt.

"You told me you couldn't feel the needle," I said.

"I couldn't. I was looking at you."

"That's a line."

"It's a true line. You put in fourteen stitches and told me if I got blood on your shoes you'd charge me for them."

"They were new shoes."

"I sent you new shoes."

"You sent me eleven pairs, Giancarlo. That's not an apology, that's a store."

He laughed through the door, the low one only Rocco and I got.

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