Everyone Else in This Building Is a Returnee novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Keys
Dara Keller starts as the new super of the Linden Arms, where every tenant knows her name and the electrician in 2B hands her the coffee she takes, down to the sugar. He says it is the twelfth first day.
The first person to say my name in the Linden Arms was a woman I had never met.
She stood in the lobby with a watering can, and she was about eighty years old.
"You must be Dara," she said. "Welcome home."
I was holding a toolbox, a duffel bag and a folder of lease forms.
I had not told anyone my name since I crossed the front step.
"Did the owner call ahead?" I asked.
"Something like that," she said, and went back to watering a plastic fern.
The old man at the front desk table stood up with a hand on his hip.
He was bald, with a white mustache and suspenders, and he held out a steel ring of keys.
"Stan Ostrowski," he said. "Twenty-six years as super. You're the one with the references."
"I'm Dara Keller."
"I know," he said kindly. "There are forty-one keys on there. Don't lose the red one."
I took the ring, and it weighed about as much as a brick.
Stan walked me through the building.
The boiler was moody, the third-floor tub drained slowly, and the man in 4C was never to touch the thermostat.
Every tenant we passed greeted me by name.
A woman with twin boys on the second floor said, "Hi, Dara, the washer in the basement eats quarters on Tuesdays."
A man in a bathrobe on the third floor said, "Dara, good luck with the radiators."
None of them had been introduced to me.
I had signed the contract by email eleven days ago, and I had never sent a photo.
"Stan," I said on the stairs. "How does everybody know who I am?"
"Small building," he said.
It was a twenty-four unit building with six floors, and he was a bad liar.
At the second-floor landing, the hallway light was flickering.
A stepladder stood under the fixture, and a man was on it with a screwdriver in his teeth.
He was tall, lean, in a worn flannel shirt, with close-cropped black hair gone grey at the temples.
He took the screwdriver out of his mouth and looked down at me.
I have been looked at by plenty of men.
This was different, because he looked at me like a person looks at a place he used to live.
"That's Perry in 2B," Stan said. "Best electrician on the East Side. I'll leave you two."
He left.
Perry came down the ladder one rung at a time, and picked up a paper cup from the top step.
"I wasn't sure when you'd get in," he said. "It's probably still hot."
He held it out.
The cup was from a coffee place on Brady Street that I had not driven past yet.
I took it, and our fingers touched.
Heat went up my arm that had nothing to do with the coffee.
I drank, because it was there and because I am not made of stone.
It was an oat milk latte with one sugar, extra hot.
I have ordered that drink for nine years and I have never once explained it to anyone.
"Okay," I said slowly. "Who told you?"
"Nobody," he said.
"My order is not a thing you guess."
"No," he agreed. "It isn't."
His voice was low and steady, and his hand shook just slightly when he put it in his pocket.
"I'm Perry Hannon," he said. "I live in 2B. I'm very glad you came."
"That's not an answer."
"It's what I've got."
He looked at me with the kind of attention that makes you check your own hair.
I stepped back and the coffee sloshed over my thumb.
"I'm going to ask this one more time," I said. "How do you know how I take my coffee?"
He was quiet for a long breath.
Down the hall a door opened and closed, and a radio started up somewhere above us.
"I've had a lot of practice meeting you," he said.
"I've never met you."
"Not yet," Perry said, and his mouth moved into a smile that looked old and tired and glad.
"Eleven times before this one, Dara. This is the twelfth first day."
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