Chapter 16: The Spare Room

Clive looked at the open door of my car for a long second.

"Where to?" he said.

"My place has a spare room. It's got a desk and a futon and a window that sticks."

"Iris."

"You'll pay rent when you have money. Get in before I change my mind."

He put the box of diplomas on the back seat beside my mother's sheet music and folded himself into the front.

His knees hit the glove box.

"This car is older than our engagement," he said.

"This car is paid for."

He laughed, and then he put his head back against the seat and closed his eyes, and he didn't open them until Fells Point.

The spare room was eight feet by ten.

He stood in the doorway and looked at the futon, the desk, the stacks of loan files on the floor.

"House rules," I said. "Your door, my door. Nobody crosses without knocking."

"And if somebody knocks?"

"Then the other one says no."

He looked at me with the corner of his mouth going up.

"Good night, Iris."

At two in the morning a clank woke me.

Not the radiator's bang. A softer clank, metal on metal, then a hiss.

I went out in my sleep shirt.

Clive was on his knees in the living room with a flashlight in his teeth and a butter knife in the radiator valve.

A saucepan sat under it, catching rusty water.

"What are you doing?"

He took the flashlight out of his mouth.

"Bleeding it. There's air in the line. That's the bang." He tightened something. "I said I'd fix it. Three years ago."

"It's July."

"It'll bang in January too. I was here for that January."

I stood there with my arms folded.

He was barefoot, in old sweatpants and nothing else, with rust on his forearm and a smear of it across his ribs.

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