Chapter 23: Stan's Party

The Linden Arms became ours at noon on the thirtieth of June, and Stan retired at six.

He did it on the roof, in a clean shirt and his suspenders.

On his bald head sat a paper crown the twins had cut from a cereal box.

Forty folding chairs stood on the tar paper, and the whole building had hauled coolers up the steel stair.

I had brought sixty pounds of ice, because Stan's note said to.

The sun was low and orange over the East Side.

The lake looked like a line of silver at the end of the avenue.

Somebody had strung lights between the chimneys.

Perry stood beside me at the cooler with a paper cup in his hand.

He had gone quiet in the last hour, and I knew his quiet by now.

It was the kind that had a question in it.

Ida tapped a cup against a bottle.

She stood on an upside-down bucket to be seen, in her purple cardigan, with a plastic fern in the crook of one arm.

"I have been to a great many parties," she said. "I've attended the same ones twice."

"I know how most of them go."

A ripple of laughter went through the chairs.

"I have never been surprised at one," she said. "Until tonight."

She looked down at the front row, where Stan sat with his hip stuck out and his mustache trembling.

"Stanley, you kept the keys for twenty-six years, and you chose well."

"I did choose well," Stan said, loudly. "Forty applicants."

"You picked the one person in the building who wouldn't know what was coming."

She turned to me.

"Everyone here knows the end of something," Ida said. "Dara knew nothing."

"She came up the front steps with a toolbox and a duffel bag, and she stayed anyway."

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