My Vampire's Points System novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Window Film

She inspects the peeled film, measures it from inches away, and finds soup on his stove that nobody should have known she needed.

I got to the bank on Detroit Avenue at six-fifty the next evening, with a tape measure and a bad mood.

The steel door opened before my knuckles touched it.

"You're early," Cyrus said. "It's only been twenty-three hours."

"The rule says within twenty-four."

"Then I'm glad it isn't the other rule, the one where you ask me to apologize."

"Is there a rule where I get to ask how a pane of film peels itself?"

"That one isn't in the handbook."

He stepped back to let me in.

He was wearing the same dark sweater, and he still had no shoes.

I walked straight to the east window.

The corner of the film had come loose in a long curl, about three inches.

The streetlight showed through the gap.

I pulled out the tape measure.

"Three and a quarter inches," I said.

"I would have guessed three."

"The edge is straight."

"Is it?"

"Film peels in a curve, Mr. Morvath. This is a line. Somebody pulled it with a thumbnail."

He looked at the window, then at me.

"Then it was a very careful accident," he said.

I wrote *3.25 in., east pane, straight edge* on the clipboard and underlined *straight edge* twice.

"I still have to press it flat," I said. "The county keeps tape in the trunk, but I forgot it."

"I have tape."

"Of course you do."

He came back with a roll of clear packing tape, and the white paper cutter from his desk, and stood at my shoulder.

I smoothed the film up the glass.

He held the loose edge steady with two cold fingers.

We were very close, close enough that I could see the grey in his eyes was darker at the rim.

I noticed he did not breathe.

He had no reason to, I knew that, but it still caught me, how still a person could be.

My fingers were warm on the glass, and his were next to mine, and neither of us moved the last half inch.

"There," I said, much too loud.

"There," he agreed, much too quietly.

He took his hand away and put it behind his back.

"Four points," I said. "Not five. A first breach with no damage is four."

"The portal said five."

"The portal is wrong."

"You can change the portal?"

"I can change the number on my own form. And I'm doing it."

He watched me write it.

"That's very kind," he said.

"It's accurate."

"It's both."

I turned away from him before my face could do anything silly, and that was when I smelled the kitchen.

It was warm, and savory, and it had dill in it.

I knew that smell.

I had not smelled it since my grandmother's kitchen on Fleet Avenue, thirty years of Sunday afternoons.

"You have a stove that works?" I said.

"It works. Nobody had told me."

I followed the smell.

There was a pot on the big black stove and a loaf of rye on the counter.

A single bowl and spoon were set out on a folded towel.

The whole kitchen was lit with one lamp.

"Mr. Morvath," I said.

"Cyrus."

"Mr. Morvath. What is this?"

"You stamped my card in March," he said. "At the front counter."

I blinked.

"I stamped four hundred cards in March."

"You told me my photo looked like a man running from a subpoena."

I did remember that, very vaguely, a man in a hat and a long scarf who had laughed so hard he coughed.

"That was you?"

"It was. You ate lunch from a thermos while you worked."

He went on, as if he had practiced it.

"You said it was your grandmother's soup, chicken and noodles and dill. You said nothing in the cafeteria came close."

I had said it to the man in the hat.

I had said it as a joke, to be nice, to somebody I would never see again.

"You came here to inspect my kitchen," Cyrus went on, quietly.

"I had a bowl and a pot, and a recipe off a church website in Parma."

"You cooked."

"I can't taste any of it. I used a thermometer, and the website, and your face in March."

"My face?"

"You looked happy about the soup."

I could not make a sound.

"If it's wrong," he said, "you can write that down. I won't count it as a breach."

I sat on the stool by the counter, because my knees had stopped agreeing with me.

He ladled the soup into the bowl and set it down, and the spoon beside it, and backed away to the far wall.

I tried it.

The noodles were soft and thick, the broth was golden, and the dill came up in the steam.

It was exactly right.

I put the spoon down and looked at him.

"Who taught you to do the broth like this?" I said.

"The church lady in Parma. I called her."

"You called a church lady."

"She said I sounded like a nice young man. I did not correct her."

I laughed, and it came out wet and ugly, and I put my hand over my mouth.

He looked alarmed.

"It's right," I said. "It's exactly, completely right."

"Then I haven't failed."

"You haven't failed."

I ate the whole bowl while he stood at the other end of the kitchen with his hands behind his back.

I had a violation to process, and a clipboard, and a man who had peeled his own window.

But the soup was my grandmother's, and I could not make myself see the clipboard.

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