The Super Fixed My Sink, Then Everything I Hadn't Said Was Broken novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Slow Drain
The building super fixes her dripping sink and tells her to hold the flashlight and not move; at the door she says that's everything, and the tap drips once after she shuts it.
The knock came at seven, two raps, evenly spaced, and I knew who it was before I got up from the couch.
I had my reading glasses on their chain and a spreadsheet of denied claims open on my laptop.
I had not called anyone about anything.
"Super," said Rafa through the door. "The tenant below you texted me about a stain on her ceiling."
I opened it six inches.
He was standing on the landing with a flashlight in one hand and a canvas tool bag over his shoulder.
He's twenty-four, and he fills a doorway, which I had decided months ago not to notice.
"It's nothing," I said. "I'm fine. It's a small drip."
"That's what the stain says too." He smiled, and I saw the chipped corner of his front tooth. "Can I look?"
"I didn't submit a ticket."
"I know you didn't, Magda. You never do."
I let him in.
He crossed my kitchen and set the bag on the linoleum without being told where.
The sink is a Kohler double basin, older than I am, with a chrome trap curving under it.
I had wrapped that trap in a dish towel in March and in a second towel in July.
He pulled both towels out, looked at them, and looked at me.
"That's seven," he said.
"It's an old building."
"It is."
He got down on his back with his head and shoulders inside the cabinet, and his boots stuck out across my kitchen floor.
His shirt rode up an inch at the hip.
I looked at the refrigerator magnet, which said Rzeszow in my mother's handwriting.
"Magda, come here. I need a second pair of hands."
I came.
"Hold this." He pushed the flashlight into my fingers and curled them around it with his own. "Point it right there, on the nut. Don't move."
I held it.
I stood bent at the waist beside the cabinet with the beam on a chrome nut, and I did not move.
He wasn't asking.
He was telling me, in a low, even voice that didn't rise at the end, and my arm held the light steady.
Water ticked into the bucket he'd slid under the pipe.
The wrench clicked.
From where I stood I could see the back of his neck, the short black hair at the nape and a line of sweat starting under his collar.
Below his left ear there was a scar the size of a thumbnail, and I looked at it for a long time.
I had a spreadsheet open in the other room, a mother who expected a call on Sundays, and a divorce decree in a drawer.
None of it was in my head.
"Lower. Little left."
I moved the light.
"Little more."
I moved it again, and his hand came up out of the dark and closed over mine on the flashlight.
His palm was hot.
It was hotter than a hand should be, a wide dry heat that went through my knuckles into my wrist.
He turned my hand an inch to the left and held it there.
"There," he said. "Right there. Good."
I felt that word low in my stomach.
It's the radiator, I told myself.
The radiator under the window had been clanking since six, and the kitchen was ninety degrees.
He took his hand away, and my arm stayed exactly where he had put it.
I held the light steady for what must have been ten minutes.
He never once told me I could stop, and I never once lowered it.
When he slid out from under the cabinet he sat up on the floor with grease on his jaw and the old trap in his hand.
"Dry," he said. "Run it."
I ran the tap.
Nothing leaked.
He watched the pipe, and then he watched me, and the chipped tooth showed again.
"Thank you for holding it," he said. "You're steady."
"It's a flashlight."
"It's a good hold."
I handed him a clean dish towel for the grease because I didn't know what else to do with my hands.
At the door he stopped with the bag on his shoulder.
"Why not put in a new trap?" I said, because it was the only question I could think of. "Instead of patching it every time?"
"The trap's old," he said. "I'll look into a new one."
He said it so evenly that I believed him.
"That's everything," I said. "Thank you. That's everything."
Rafa stood in my doorway with the hall light behind him.
"Is it?" he said.
He didn't smile this time.
He waited, with his weight on one boot and his eyes on my face.
I could have said anything.
I could have said, my hands are shaking, or, stay for a minute.
"Yes," I said.
"Okay." His voice was soft. "Lock this behind me."
I shut the door and turned the deadbolt.
I stood in my kitchen with my glasses swinging on their chain and my pulse going in my wrists.
In the quiet I heard his boots going down the back stairs, one flight, then the next.
Behind me the tap let go of a single drop into the basin.
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