I Lost To His E-Cup Mistress novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Green Truck

Rafe drives Joanna and the cedar chest to her grandmother's flat in Astoria, tells her why he was declared dead, and remembers the night she sewed his cuff. Preston arrives on the stoop with roses and sees Rafe in her kitchen.

His truck was parked on Sixty-Second Street with two wheels on the curb and a parking ticket under the wiper.

It was an old green pickup with a coil of rope on the dash.

"You're dead," I said, climbing in. "You don't have a ticket for that."

"I've got a ticket for everything." He peeled it off and dropped it in the cup holder, where six more were folded.

He pulled out into traffic, slowly.

"Where am I going?"

"Astoria."

"Is that your place?"

"It was my grandmother's," I said. "I never gave up the lease."

"Smart."

"It wasn't smart. I just couldn't stand to hand her keys to a stranger."

He nodded.

For three blocks neither of us said anything, and the chest thumped softly in the bed behind us every time we hit a pothole.

"Why are you dead?" I asked.

"I'm not. Constance just says I am."

"Why?"

"My father left me a vote on the Foundation," he said. "Constance would rather I was dead than voting. After the funeral, I went upstate. She told the board I'd died overseas. Nobody checked."

"Nobody checked for eight years?"

"Preston knew I wasn't." He glanced at me. "He never said a word."

I looked out the window at the Queensboro Bridge going over us.

"I didn't know he had a brother. He never mentioned you. Not once. Not at the wedding."

"I wasn't invited to the wedding."

"I sat at that head table for six years of Foundation lunches. Nobody ever said your name."

"That sounds like her." He turned onto Thirty-Fourth Avenue.

"Why were you at the loading dock?" I asked.

"The doorman told me nobody was allowed to carry anything out until Friday," he said. "I figured Friday was when she planned to burn it."

I laughed.

It surprised me so much that it came out as a hiccup.

I hadn't laughed in front of a person since the ballroom.

He pretended not to notice, which was kind.

My grandmother's building was a narrow brick walk-up over a bakery that had been there since the sixties.

The stairwell smelled like rye and radiator.

He took the chest up three flights by himself, with the strap across his chest, and he didn't stop on the landings.

When he set it down in the middle of the flat, he looked around once.

There was a sewing machine on the table, a sofa under a crocheted blanket and a kettle on the stove with a chip in the handle.

I watched him see the thimbles on the windowsill.

"I like it," he said.

"It's four hundred square feet."

"That's why I like it."

I filled the kettle.

He stood by the window with his hands in his jacket pockets, looking at the street, and he said it without turning around.

"We've met before."

"No, we haven't."

"Eight years ago. A benefit at the Gramercy Theatre. My cuff caught on a door hinge and tore, and a woman in the coat check sat me on a stool and sewed it with a needle she took out of her own hair."

I stopped with the kettle in my hand.

I remembered a man.

Not his face.

A pair of shoulders in a rented jacket, a stool that was too low for him, and a grown man holding his arm out very still so I wouldn't prick him.

"You said I should charge for it," I said slowly.

"You said a stitch in time was free, and the stitch in the wrong place would cost me twenty dollars."

"I didn't know who you were."

"I know," he said. "I didn't say. I'd just buried my father that week, and nobody there knew my last name either."

The kettle began to hiss.

He still hadn't turned around.

"I wrote my number on the program and left it in your tip jar," he said. "I figured you'd call or you wouldn't."

"I never found it."

"Then you never saw it."

He said it simply, without blame, and I was the one who looked away.

"Rafe." I put the cups down. "Why are you helping me?"

"Because I read the thing his mother taped to your grandmother's chest."

His jaw tightened.

"And because of what you told me in the truck about the videos. Six years of them, every one with a time stamp and a clean edit."

I had told him, somewhere around the bridge, when the pothole hit.

"Preston can't attach a PDF to an email," Rafe said. "I've watched him try. Whoever has been sending you those videos isn't my brother."

"Somebody could do it for him."

"Yes," he said. "That's what I'd want to know."

The buzzer went off.

It rang once, then twice, then held down for so long that the sound filled the whole flat.

I went to the window.

Down on the stoop, Preston stood with a huge bunch of red roses held out like a shield.

Behind him, at the curb, a black car idled with Constance's driver at the wheel.

My husband looked up and saw me in the window.

Then his eyes went past me, to the man in the work boots standing at my kitchen counter.

His mouth fell open.

"Rafe?" he said, so loudly that the whole street heard.

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