We Both Paid the Same Stranger to Sublet the Same One-Bedroom, and Neither of Us Would Move Out novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: Courtyard Meeting

The courtyard looked like a wedding that hadn't decided to happen yet.

Forty folding chairs stood in rows on the old tile, and six long tables wore white paper.

Strings of bulbs crossed the air from the third-floor rail to the oak by the gate.

Gloria had gone to the church to bully a ham.

That left the five of us, sitting in a circle of the borrowed chairs.

Dolores sat on a milk crate in the middle, holding her steno pad like a hymnal.

"Problem with the toast," the chemist said again, as if the first shout hadn't carried to Wisconsin.

"What problem?" I said.

"Gloria's schedule." She held up a sheet of paper. "Dinner at six-thirty, cake at seven, toast to the Kowalskis at seven-fifteen. If Corey arrives at six and takes his money at six-fifteen, then we wait an hour with him eating a ham sandwich."

"He'll leave," said the public health student.

"He'll mingle," said Dolores. "He's a mingler. I have a dozen pages of it."

"He'll see the five of us together at one table and bolt."

"Then we sit apart," Randy said.

"At forty people's tables? In front of Gloria?"

Everyone looked at me.

I had a pen in my hand and the back of someone's lease on my knee.

I had been writing a page since I sat down, and I didn't know I was doing it until they looked.

"What's that?" the nurse said.

"A list."

"Of what?"

"Of what we say, in what order, and who says it."

I tilted it toward them.

At the top I'd put five names and five amounts, and the dates they'd wired.

Under it was the plan.

"Randy gives him the four hundred in cash at six-fifteen, in front of Dolores, who is writing it down," I said. "That's the moment he takes the money. Phones are recording from every pocket."

"Then what?" the chemist said.

"Then nothing. He goes to the buffet. We let him eat. We let him say hello to everyone. We let him shake the hand of every old man in the building."

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