Chapter 8: The Rule

Joy's landlord called on Wednesday to say the lease allowed one tenant, and my sister had two weeks to make it true.

"I'll sleep in the dental chair," I said.

"You'll sleep in my bed until I find you something," Joy said. "And I snore."

"Joy."

"I mean it, I snore like a bus."

Drew was standing in the doorway with a stack of flattened boxes, delivering a different woman's order, and he had heard all of it.

"I have a spare room," he said.

We both turned.

"It's above the depot in Long Island City. It has a bed and a door that locks. The rent is whatever you can pay."

"That's not a number."

"No," he said. "It isn't."

Joy looked at me with the whole of her face.

"Take it," she said.

"I don't know him."

"You know him better than you knew your husband in his first year."

That was unfair, and it was true.

I took it.

The room was small and clean, with a narrow bed, a quilt that smelled like cedar, and a window that looked out at the truck.

Drew had put a plant on the sill.

It was one of the ones I had left in his cab.

I stood in the doorway with my suitcase and looked at it.

"I'm making dinner," he said, from the kitchen. "If you want it."

The kitchen was a long room at the back with a scarred table and a stove with a dead oven clock that blinked twelve.

"It's been broken for years," he said, when he saw me looking. "I like it."

"Why?"

"Nobody can tell me it's late."

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