Chapter 614 | I Figured I Should Meet the Neighbors

Chapter 614: 614 | I Figured I Should Meet the Neighbors

It took until two in the morning for me to learn that forty-one families was an optimistic number.

Dralun kept a ledger. It was a spiral notebook with a cracked green cover and a coffee stain shaped like Ohio, and he pulled it from the inside pocket of his vest while we stood in the laundromat. Every complaint anyone had ever filed against Delancey Gold and Loan lived inside it. Names and addresses sat in two cramped columns, with item descriptions scrawled in the margins whenever he had remembered to ask.

"Some of these don’t match," I said, flipping through it. "You wrote down a ring, but this family pawned a watch."

"People lie to the dragon." He shrugged, and his vest creaked. "Easier to say ring than to say they sold their dead dad’s Rolex for groceries."

The laundromat had a folding table in the back for clothes. We cleared it off and I asked whether indoors still counted as indoors if the door was propped open. Dralun grunted once, which Ophelia translated as yes, and I let Spectral Reach bloom out of my palms. Four amber hands rose over the table and started laying the pile out in rows, sorting rings from watches and chains from everything else. Each piece got its own square of paper towel. Ophelia wrote a number on each towel in pink gel pen, because she had announced that she would help with this as long as the stationery stayed cute.

"You’re showing off," she said, leaning over the table to write a thirty-two.

The corset bodice of her dress was laced tight, and when she bent forward the black and plum fabric pulled in ways that made my brain file several complaints at once. Her pink curls swung loose over one shoulder. I found an extremely interesting watch to stare at instead.

"I’m doing my job," I told the watch.

"You’re looking at a Timex like it owes you money." She straightened and tapped the pen against her lip. "Plus one for restraint. You’re still at negative one twenty-four, though, so don’t get excited."

〘Heroine Update: OPHELIA LIN. Temptation Gauge: 4%.〙

〘Note: She rewarded restraint while leaning over you in a corset. Draw your own conclusions.〙

Grandma Lin came through the side door at half past eleven carrying two plastic bags that steamed. She set them on a washer, looked at the rows of jewelry on the table, and then looked at Dralun with an expression I had last seen on Diane’s face when a client tweeted from jail. She said something in Cantonese that sounded like a verdict. Ophelia answered with a single syllable, and Grandma Lin pointed her cleaver-free hand at the ledger.

"She knows everyone," Ophelia said, rolling her eyes. "She’s delivered noodles to every door in the district for thirty years. She says half your addresses are wrong and the other half moved."

Grandma Lin took the pen from her granddaughter and started correcting the ledger in a second color. She moved fast. She crossed out apartment numbers and wrote in new ones, and next to four names she drew a small cross.

I didn’t ask what the crosses meant. I already knew.

We started knocking on doors at twenty to one.

Rosa Delgado lived on the third floor of a walk-up on Sixth, above a closed tire shop, and she answered the door in a pink bathrobe with rollers in her hair and a baseball bat in her right hand. She saw Dralun first. The bat lowered. Then she saw the ring sitting in his open palm, and her face did something I don’t have a name for.

She didn’t cry right away. She took the ring and held it up to the hallway bulb, reading the inscription with her lips moving, and then she put it on her own finger over her wedding band. It was too big for her. She closed her fist around it anyway.

"Twenty-two years," she said to the ring. "I told Hector I’d never sell it."

"You didn’t sell it," Dralun said. "Somebody robbed you, and it just took a while to notice."

She started crying then, loud and ugly, and she grabbed Dralun around the middle. He stood there with his arms held out to the sides and his tail frozen behind him, and he let her. After a full minute she let go, wiped her face on her robe, and turned to me. She reached up and pinched my cheek hard enough to leave a mark.

"You’re the boy from the television," she said. "The gold one."

"Guilty as charged, ma’am."

"You’re skinnier in person." She let go of my face and pointed at Dralun with the bat. "Make sure he eats something."

The door closed. Dralun looked at me. I rubbed my cheek.

"That’s one," he said.

We did forty-six more before dawn.

The Eastside at two in the morning had its own weather. The streetlights on Halverson flickered orange, and the ones on Delancey didn’t work at all, so we walked through long patches of dark where Dralun’s tail was the only thing I could see. Dogs barked at us through chain-link. A guy on a porch on Eighth Street raised his beer can at Dralun in salute without getting up. Ophelia walked behind us in her spiked boots with the parasol closed and hooked over her arm, and every few blocks she stopped to take a photo of a mural or a broken sign.

"You’re posting this?" I asked.

"Obviously I’m posting this. Eastside at night is an aesthetic." She held her phone up to frame a boarded window with a spray-painted bat on it. "The algorithm loves grief and graffiti."

Yesenia Cruz lived in the building behind the laundromat, on the second floor, and she opened the door with a sleeping toddler on her hip and the chain still on. She was maybe twenty-three. Her hair was in a bun that had given up hours ago, and her eyes went straight to the bracelet in my hand.

I hadn’t meant to be the one holding it. Dralun had handed it to me back at the dryer and I had just kept it.

"That’s Mateo’s," she said through the gap. "My abuela bought that for his baptism."

"I think he should have it back."

She undid the chain. The toddler stirred against her neck and didn’t wake. She took the bracelet from me with two fingers and slid it onto his wrist, and it fit, which meant she had pawned it sometime in the last few months when it had still been too big. I did the math on that and decided to stop doing math.

"I needed formula," she said. She didn’t look at me when she said it. She looked at Dralun. "I’m sorry. I know you told me not to go there."

"Don’t apologize to me. You didn’t do anything wrong."

"Still sorry." She kissed the top of her son’s head. Then she looked at me, and her eyes narrowed. "Why are you here? You don’t live here."

This was the part where Diane would have smiled and said something about community and service. I had the sentence ready. It was a good sentence, and it tested well with focus groups.

"My parents died six blocks from here," I said instead. "I figured I should meet the neighbors."