The Super Fixed My Sink, Then Everything I Hadn't Said Was Broken novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: Make It Right

The knock came at midnight, two raps, evenly spaced, the same as every other time since October.

I stood on my side of the door with my hand on the deadbolt and let him wait.

I let him wait a long minute, in the hall, under the stair light on its timer, and then I opened it.

He had brought nothing.

His hands were empty, and he held them a little out from his sides so I could see.

He had showered, and his hair was still wet at the nape.

He had put on a clean flannel shirt buttoned all the way to the collar.

"Come in," I said. "Wipe your boots."

He wiped his boots.

He came three steps into my kitchen and stopped.

I had put the Kohler box in the middle of the counter, next to the sink, with the March receipt facing the room.

He looked at it for a while.

"Magda, I'd like to say something first."

"No," I said.

"I owe you..."

"You said it this afternoon, in front of a plate of pierogi and five people with forks," I said. "I heard all of it."

"Then what do you want me to do?"

I had thought about that question for ten hours, on the train, at my desk, in the shower.

I had rehearsed a speech in the elevator at work, and I had thrown it out.

My heart was going so hard I could see my cardigan move.

"Don't apologize with your mouth," I said. "Apologize with your hands."

He didn't move.

"Give me an order," I said.

It was the first thing I had ever asked anybody for in a voice that steady.

I watched it land.

His eyes went dark and very careful, and the chipped tooth showed, not as a smile.

"Bathroom," he said.

"Rafa."

"Go in the bathroom. Take your cardigan off and leave it on the hook. Stand in the tub and wait for me."

My knees went.

I held the edge of the counter.

I said, "Yes," and I walked down my own hall with every step feeling like a thing I was being allowed to do.

I heard him open the drawer of my nightstand in the bedroom.

"Where do you keep the rope?" he called, in the voice of a man asking for a spoon.

"Where you left it."

"And the wand?" he asked.

"Same drawer. It's waterproof, I checked the box."

There was a silence.

"You read the box," he said.

"I read the box on Sunday."

I heard him laugh once, low, to himself, and then I heard the drawer shut.

The bathroom is the size of a closet, white tile to the shoulder, with a deep old tub in an alcove and a chrome shower rod screwed straight into the wall at either end.

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