Goodbye to the Man Who Betrayed Us novel · Chapter 30 of 32

Chapter 30: Third Night

"What for?" I said.

"Come see it."

We walked up San Pablo in the dark, past the laundromat and the bus stop.

The lot sat on the corner, halfway between the two signs.

Chain-link, weeds, a shopping cart on its side, and one old fig tree in the back corner.

I'd walked past it every day of my life.

I'd never looked at it once.

Rafael opened the gate with a new key.

"From here you can see the counter," he said. "And from here, the garage."

He turned me by the shoulders, one way, then the other.

He was right. Both signs, one each way.

"A yard," he said. "For a girl who wants to look at everything."

"And after the yard?"

"A house. Someday. When you say."

I didn't say anything.

I stood under the fig tree with his deed in my hand and let him wait.

He didn't mind waiting. He never had.

Three weeks later we moved.

The apartment over Ortega Towing had three rooms and a kitchen and a window over San Pablo.

The crew had spent every night of those three weeks on it.

The old mechanic rewired it. The young one painted it, and a lot of himself.

Lily's room was yellow.

She'd picked it out of a book of paint chips, one square at a time, holding each one an inch from her glasses.

Raymond wouldn't come with us.

"Somebody has to snore in your mother's sewing room," he said. "I'm not going back up that hill. It's too quiet."

He'd sold the Pacific Heights house in August.

On moving day he carried boxes down the stairs all morning and wouldn't let anybody help him.

At noon Lily counted the walk from the garage door to the counter door.

"Four hundred and six," she announced, at the bell.

"That's far," the young mechanic said.

"It's not far. It's four hundred and six."

The church brought sandwiches.

Stool Nine supervised from a lawn chair on the sidewalk.

The laundromat lady hung Lily's curtains and cried, because she'd been crying at everything since the trial.

By ten that night the boxes were mostly gone.

Lily was asleep in the yellow room with both whales and the owl, and the window open a crack.

She didn't need the shield anymore. She didn't need the drops.

She'd checked her doorway three times before she let me turn off the light.

"Mama. Can you see me from your bed?"

"If I leave the doors open."

"Leave them open a little."

I left them open a little.

Rafael was in the kitchen in jeans and a gray T-shirt with yellow paint on the shoulder.

He was trying to find the box with the coffee in it.

"Tomorrow's problem," I said.

"Tomorrow's problem has a little girl who wakes up at six."

"Then tomorrow's problem goes to the counter for coffee. It's four hundred and six steps."

He laughed and gave up on the box.

I was in leggings and one of his navy work shirts with the sleeves rolled up four times.

I'd stolen it that morning, and he'd watched me do it.

He leaned back against the counter and looked at me.

"That's my shirt," he said.

"It was your shirt."

"Was."

"You have a dozen of them," I said.

"You kept track of my shirts."

"I notice things. It's a family habit."

He held out his hand.

I took it.

He walked me down the short hall past Lily's door, open a crack, the nightlight on.

We both stopped and looked in.

She was asleep on her back with her glasses on the nightstand and her arm around the big whale.

He pulled our door almost shut.

The bedroom was the only room the crew hadn't painted yet.

There was a real bed in it, on a real frame. No pallets.

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