Part 3
The walk home was a three-block struggle against a wind that felt like it had traveled straight from the river just to find the holes in Clara's coat.
Her apartment was on the third floor of a brick building that smelled permanently of boiled cabbage and old radiator fluid. The radiator in her corner unit didn't hiss; it hammered, a rhythmic, metallic clanking that usually kept her awake until three in the morning.
She didn't turn on the overhead light. She used the small lamp by the armchair, the one with the fringed shade her grandmother had given her when she first moved out of her mother’s house.
Clara sat on the edge of the mattress, still wearing her damp boots, and emptied the contents of her apron pocket onto the faded quilt.
The silver coin purse sat beside her house keys.
She opened it carefully this time, using two fingers to draw the photograph out. In the better light of the apartment, she noticed things she’d missed in the dim diner. The apron her grandmother wore had an embroidery detail along the pocket—a small, crooked daisy. Clara had that identical apron in a box at the bottom of her closet. She had kept it because it was one of the few things that didn't smell like the hospital.
The other woman in the photo—the one who had eaten the soup—was beautiful in a sharp, defensive way. Her hair was dark, pinned back in rolls that were falling loose at the temples. She wasn't looking at the camera; she was looking at Clara’s grandmother, her mouth half-open as if she’d been caught mid-sentence.
Clara turned the photo over again.
Maple Street. Always.
The handwriting was her grandmother’s. The elegant, looping script that had filled hundreds of grocery lists and birthday cards, always written in blue fountain pen ink.
Clara stood up and went to the closet. She dragged out the heavy plastic bin labeled Ruth. Inside were the remnants of a life boiled down to what could fit in a grey tote: three wool cardigans, a bundle of letters tied with a rubber band that had long since dried and cracked, a pair of reading glasses, and a small leather-bound address book.
She took the address book back to the bed. The leather was flaking, leaving tiny brown specks on her fingers as she flipped through the yellowed pages.
Most of the names were crossed out in black ink—friends who had died, doctors who had retired, grocery stores that had gone out of business. Clara turned to the 'E' section, then the 'M', looking for something that might connect to the woman.
Nothing.
Then she turned to the very back of the book, where the blank memo pages were.
There was a single entry, written in the same blue ink as the back of the photograph, but the ink was smudged, as if water had hit the page before it dried.
Teresa. 412 Maple. Don't look back.
Clara’s heart gave a strange, hard thud against her ribs.
412 Maple Street.
She knew that address. It wasn't the diner. The diner was 401. 412 was across the street, where the old brick laundry building stood, the one that had been abandoned since Clara was a teenager, its windows boarded up with weathered plywood and spray-painted with old graffiti.
She sat back against the pillows, the old address book heavy in her lap.
Lou’s face floated into her mind—the way he looked at her when he handed her the weekly pay envelope, always short, always with that small, sad shrug that said I’m doing you a favor, girl. Four years she had been paying off that five-thousand-dollar advance. Four years of fifteen percent deductions from a wage that barely covered her rent. She had never seen a ledger. She had never seen a balance statement. Whenever she asked, Lou would sigh, touch his temple, and say, We’re almost there, Clara. Just a little more. You know how the taxes are on these things.
She had trusted him because he had been her father’s friend, because he had showed up at the funeral with a casserole and a box of tissues when everyone else had stayed away.
May you like
But looking at the photo, looking at the faded ink of her grandmother's handwriting, a cold, greasy certainty began to settle in her stomach.
Lou hadn't given her that advance out of the goodness of his heart. He had given it to her to keep her right where she was—behind that counter, looking down at the linoleum, too tired to look across the street.
