Chapter 11: The Pipe

By January my mother had decided that Perry was acceptable.

It took him one Sunday dinner, a fixed porch light and a second helping of her dry pot roast.

She told me in the kitchen, with a spoon in her hand.

She said he looked at me like I was a house he wanted to buy.

"That's a weird way to put it," I said.

"It's a good way," said Carol. "Don't sell."

On the fourteenth of January the building was quiet at eleven at night.

The temperature outside was four degrees, and I was in bed in 1B with Perry's arm across my waist.

Then something above us went off.

We were on our feet before the echo finished.

A sound followed, a roar of water, coming down the walls.

"That's the riser," Perry said, white to the lips. "The fourth-floor joint."

I grabbed my toolbelt and my boots.

"How do you know?"

"Because I fixed it on the thirteenth," he said. "Every year. Because it breaks on the fourteenth."

We stared at each other in the dark.

He had not fixed it on the thirteenth.

He had not looked, because he had burned the only thing that told him to.

"Basement valve," I said. "Now."

We ran.

The whole building was awake by the time we reached the stairs.

Water poured down the stairwell, and doors banged open on every floor.

The man in the bathrobe from the third floor was shouting.

"Dara! It's coming through my light fixtures!"

"Everybody out of 3A and 4A!" Ida called from the landing, in a voice I had never heard come out of her.

"Take your valuables and your cats. Move!"

She sounded like a general.

The shutoff valve in the basement had not been turned in twenty years.

I put both hands on the wheel, and Perry put his on top of mine.

"Together," he said.

We pulled.

It gave an inch, then another, then a groan, and the roar above us slowed to a trickle.

We stood in two inches of water, breathing hard.

"It's off," I said.

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