Chapter 1 - Seventeen Dollars

FUERA DE SERVICIO. Third time this month.

Teo read the handwritten sign taped to the elevator door and started up the stairs. The delivery bag went over his right shoulder out of habit, the strap finding the groove it had been grinding into his muscle since noon. He refused to shift it. Shifting it would mean admitting the pain, and he had made the decision to ignore it five hours ago. Now the ache was just part of the shoulder.

He took the four flights of stairs. He had counted the bills before: the eighteen-dollar tip from the Westchester Avenue drop, minus five-fifty for the MetroCard, and the morning coffee he needed to stay awake. The eleven dollars and thirty-three cents stayed in his head. The numbers never moved.

On the second floor landing the cooking smell from 2A hit him. It was rice and sofrito, thick and warm. His stomach pulled toward it before his head could catch the reflex, and then he was angry at his stomach. It was a stupid thing to be angry at and did not help.

The kid from 2C had left the bicycle in the stairwell again, the front wheel jutting across the riser. Teo moved around it without stopping. The third floor smelled like a pipe fitting that needed caulk. The fourth floor held the day’s heat. July in a building without central air meant the hallway stayed hot past midnight.

He pulled out his key before he reached the door.

His eyes went to the kitchen counter first. There was no bottle on the Formica. Either Fernando had not started or he had put it away, and those were different situations. The TV was on in the living room with the volume too high. It wasn't angry loud. It was absent loud, the kind that filled a space because silence cost too much. Fernando sat on the couch with his feet up on the arm, watching a rerun where everyone had the wrong haircut and nothing terrible had happened yet. He kept his eyes on the screen.

The delivery bag went on the floor by the door. Teo straightened, rolled his right shoulder once.

"Hay arroz," Fernando said, still watching the screen.

"Yeah," Teo said. "Thanks."

He went to the kitchen. The rice was in the pot on the stove, covered with a glass lid, still warm under his palm.

Fernando had made rice.

The rice was plain, without sofrito, but it was warm. That was the problem with Fernando. Both things sat in Teo's chest at once: the thin warm gratitude and the larger, darker thing underneath it he refused to name. He took a bowl from the cabinet, spooned rice into it, and stood at the counter to eat. His thumb worked the rim of the bowl. The eleven dollars and thirty-three cents ran through his mind again.

Through the pass-through to the living room he could see the side of Fernando's face in the television glow, soft at the jaw. The right lens of his glasses had gone the year before and he hadn't replaced them, so one eye saw clearly and one eye managed. He had been large once and was a different version of large now. His hands rested in his lap. They were big hands for a man who did not use them anymore.

Teo ate his rice and did not look at the hands.

Then he saw the bill.

On the kitchen table, aligned with the corner, the ConEd envelope sat with its red PAST DUE stamp facing the door. Fernando had put it there. Set it square with the table corner like the angle made it less of an ask.

Don't do that.

Teo set his bowl in the sink. He picked up the bill.

The bill was $214.17. Service interruption if unpaid within thirty days of the original due date. Seventeen days remained.

He set the bill back at the same angle.

The junk drawer stuck on the right side. He pulled it past the catch and looked inside. He saw takeout menus from restaurants that had closed, a screwdriver with a stripped head, and a ConEd reminder from February. At the back of the drawer sat three crumpled singles and two fives. Teo pulled them out.

The cash amounted to seventeen dollars.

It was a grown man's pocket change. He stood there with the bills in his hand and looked at the drawer. He saw the broken screwdriver and the stacks of expired takeout menus. That was what they had in the junk drawer. That was what they were.

Of course.

He made himself look at the badge behind the menus. Fernando in the photo, smiling because someone had told him to smile and he had. Five years ago, pre-injury, pre-the-disability-fight-that-took-three-years, pre-the-lawyer-who-took-most-of-what-came-out-of-it. Hunts Point Market printed in the corner of the frame.

Teo looked away faster than he wanted to.

Behind the badge: two expired coupons for a Shop Rite that had closed the spring before last.

Of fucking course.

He put the seventeen back and closed the drawer. It stuck on the right side, and he pushed it past the catch harder than he meant to. The drawer closed without a slam, though the push had weight in it.

From the living room the laugh track on the TV went off at something and then settled. Fernando made a noise. Might have been a laugh and might have been a throat clearing. The refrigerator hummed.

He went to his bedroom.

The room was narrow. He stepped inside and his shoulders almost brushed the walls. The space held his bed, a chair with a jacket across the arm, a milk crate for his shoes, and his good jacket on the door hook. The wall that fronted the alley still held the day’s heat.

He sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress springs settled under his weight.

Outside the painted-shut window the block was doing what it did at 5:30. A car went by slow, not in a hurry. The woman from the building across the street called a name out the window, two syllables, not angry yet but loading. The bodega on the corner had its yellow awning out, the plantain rack chained to the wall. The gray cat on the crate by the door and moving for nobody. For four years he had bought coffee there every morning he could afford it. Two dollars now, up from a dollar. His hand didn't stop going.

From the north the elevated 6 was building. He heard it before it arrived. The pitch rose, wheels clattering on the track, getting louder. The maximum noise pressed through the painted glass like a hand flat against it. It held. Then it diminished south, toward Third Avenue and the Bronx River and wherever the train went when it left this block behind.

He had lived in this room for four years.

The quiet returned after twenty-two seconds.

He sat with his hands on his knees and looked at the water stain in the corner of the ceiling. It was a brown ring from a leak two years ago that had been patched and forgotten. His delivery shirt had a salt line at the collar from sweat drying in the afternoon heat. The fabric was dark, so it did not show at a distance. He had bought it three-for-ten on Fordham.

He crouched and dragged the shoebox out from under the bed.

Inside: the folding knife, black handle, blade three and a half inches when open. Since fourteen he had carried it because the block had taught him to carry something. The blade had never had to do anything that mattered. He set it aside.

Under the knife was the rubber band around the bills. He saw a twenty, two tens, and three fives. He had two singles left.

The bills added up to forty-seven dollars.

Same number.

The cash matched the number he'd been keeping in his head all day. It was like checking a pocket for keys he knew weren't there. He folded the bills back under the rubber band before the number could sit too long in his palm.

Under the rubber band was the Hostos flyer.

He unfolded it halfway and stopped. The crease had gone soft along a line he hadn't creased on purpose. He had opened and closed it enough times that the paper had decided on its own.

$800 for the semester fee. Accounting class. Back in May he had gone to the open house. With $800 he could cover the class and still keep ConEd paid and still give Fernando enough for groceries about half the time, which was the half Fernando asked. Since January he had been working toward $800.

He was at $47.

Not that.

He folded the flyer back and put the knife on top of it. The shoebox went under the bed.

---

In March he had run into his cousin Dariel on Third Avenue. New phone, new chain. The chain was the kind you held back from touching, and Teo had wanted to touch it — that want had gone into his chest and sat there, and he had buried it before he even knew he was burying it. Three minutes on the corner, Dariel asked how Fernando was, Teo said fine, Dariel got a call and walked away. They were not close. Dariel was his mother's sister's son, and his mother had been gone since he was eleven, so that connection had thinned to the occasional birthday text and one Easter two years ago at his grandmother's in Hunts Point where they had barely spoken.

Dariel was not the issue. The gap was.

There was a name in his phone. Luis Guzmán, called Machete, moved through this block. Two years ago a corner man had looked at Teo's hands while Teo was moving a box. The man said a name and a phone number, and Teo had taken the number as insurance. The contact had sat under L since February. His thumb had never pressed it.

Fernando had a situation and let it become a life sentence. The kid from 2C was two years into a robbery charge at Rikers, and his bicycle was still in the stairwell. At eighteen, Teo was quick. He could look at a room and tell in four seconds where the weight was sitting, whether a conversation was going one way or another. He was good at waiting. That was worth something in a world that rewarded reading and patience. The question was whose world.

He lay down on top of the covers without taking his shoes off and looked at the ceiling stain. His shoulder ached from the delivery bag. He rotated it against the mattress and noticed the muscle catch. Outside, the car alarm on the white Accord at the end of the block went off again. For six days he had been watching the cycle without meaning to.

He noticed things.

The ConEd bill was over two hundred dollars. Fernando's partial disability check arrived in eleven days, but it only covered rent and some groceries. Even if the next two weeks of deliveries went well, they would not have enough. His knuckles worked the numbers on his thigh, and it never came out right.

For twenty-two days he had been telling himself he would not call Machete. The argument had run on the walk from the subway, in the elevator of the restaurant building, and at the bodega in the morning. The argument was complete. The bill did not change.

---

The TV went quiet, then came back, then quiet again. Fernando cycling through channels in the absent way of a man who is not looking for anything but cannot stop looking.

Then the refrigerator door opened. A bottle came down on the counter with a particular weight, glass on Formica, unhurried.

So it had not been put away after all.

The word Of course sat in his chest like a stone he had been carrying a long time.

He stayed still. The ceiling stayed where it was.

Fernando's voice came from the kitchen. "Teo." He was not calling him, exactly; he was saying the name into the apartment to see if it would answer.

"Yeah."

"You ate?"

"Yeah."

The pause held. Fernando moved in the kitchen, opening and closing things. "There's more rice if you want."

"I'm good."

Fernando settled back into the couch, the frame creaking under him. The TV came back on lower. The sounds closed in: the refrigerator, the television, and the neighbor above pacing. The 6 was building from the north again. It was a familiar approach, the maximum press of it against the window glass, and Teo let it come.

The train passed after twenty-two seconds.

---

He sat up. The jacket was on the hook. The milk crate sat in its corner. His phone lay on the mattress beside him, screen dark.

He picked it up and opened the contacts. He scrolled to L.

It was just the initial.

His thumb hovered over the contact.

From the north the 6 was already building again, the approach coming through the glass. The maximum noise arrived and pressed through the room and his thumb stayed where it was. His eyes moved between the water stain on the ceiling, the painted-shut window, the name on the screen.
From the north the 6 was building again. The noise arrived and pressed through the room. His thumb stayed where it was while his eyes moved between the water stain on the ceiling and the name on the screen.

The train diminished south.

His other hand had gone flat and still on his knee. The hand had gone there on its own. His body knew it before he did.

He was going to give himself one more night. Tomorrow was Saturday and Saturday deliveries ran $22 on a good day. He already knew $22 would not change anything. He was giving himself one more night anyway.

A siren went on Third Avenue. It was close enough to hear but far enough away that nobody in the building moved.

He waited twenty-two seconds.

His thumb was still over the contact.

---

End of Chapter 1