Chapter 14: The Meeting

Ida rang a spoon against a water glass until the lobby went quiet.

By seven there were nineteen tenants on the stairs and the rest standing in the doorway.

The twins sat on the bottom step with a bag of pretzels.

Stan had brought a folding chair for his hip and then refused to sit in it.

Ida stood on the third stair so that she was nearly as tall as the man in the bathrobe.

"Thank you for coming," she said. "I'll be brief, because I'm eighty-two and I want my dinner."

A few people laughed, and the room loosened.

"Mr. Culverhouse has found a buyer, and the buyer will tear this building down."

"Some of you have lived through worse than a demolition. I have, twice."

"But I don't intend to live through this one without a fight."

"What fight?" said the mother of the twins. "He owns it."

"He does," Ida said. "Dara, did you bring the lease forms?"

I had them in my toolbox, the same folder I had carried in on the first day.

I held it up.

"Page six," Ida said. "Section fourteen. Read it out, dear."

I found the page and my eyes caught on a paragraph I had skipped a hundred times.

"If the Owner receives an offer to buy the Building, the Tenants shall have the right to match it within sixty days."

The lobby was so quiet I could hear the radiator.

"A previous owner put that in, in 1998," Ida said. "Stan remembers him. He was a decent man and a bad businessman."

"I thought it was a typo," Stan said, from behind his chair.

"It isn't. It means that if we can come up with the same money as the developer, the Linden Arms belongs to us."

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