Page 11 of Levi

“Then we understand each other. She comes down from Atlanta on the weekends, so I’ll have her on this coast next Saturday regardless. Whether I walk her through your door or through that house in Seaside depends entirely on your air.” He takes a last unhurried look around, and his gaze stops at the sectional, floated eight inches off its original mark on the floor. He doesn’t mention it. “Get your air situation sorted, son. I’d hate for her first impression of the Gulf to be your tenant’s last night here.”

He shakes my hand on the way out. Good grip, dry palm, two pumps, done. The Destin couple leaves with a folder of comps they’ll use against me later, and the Pensacola guy leaves last, still filming as he goes out the door.

By eleven I’m alone in the house. I stand in the middle of the best work of my career and the air conditioning hands me last night’s weed every time it breathes.

I have one week to make this house smell like that man was never here.

I take out my phone and start fixing the problem. The HVAC company confirms Monday at eight and I book a second crew for Tuesday that I’ll cancel if I don’t need them, because a deadline this size doesn’t get one plan. The remediation service quotes twenty-four hundred and I authorize it without negotiating, which I will never tell anyone I did.

I start a new note titled with the seller’s address and begin the list. The cashmere throw. The rug, if the cleaning saves it and full replacement if it doesn’t. I add the remediation, the service calls, and leave room at the bottom, because this list isn’t finished growing. Someone will receive it, itemized, with my signature at the end. I haven’t decided who deserves it more.

The cause of every line item is in my apartment, doing whatever a guy like that does with an unsupervised morning.

I call Benji from the car, headed for the apartment.

He answers on the first ring. “I’ve been staring at my phone. Tell me.”

“Jonathan smelled the weed from the foyer.”

“Oh my God. I wiped the vent covers down with eucalyptus myself. From the foyer? He smelled it standing in the foyer?”

“He still has a potential buyer. Recently divorced, settlement money, wants a finished life. He brings her next Saturday if I can promise him the house smells like nothing. If it doesn’t, she tours another listing instead.”

“Saturday. Okay. It’s workable. We’ve turned around worse than this with less.”

“The service crew is coming out Monday morning, the remediation right behind it.”

“The smell isn’t the problem, Dante. A crew can fix the smell. What’s your plan for the man?”

“He needs to stay out of the house when it matters.”

“That’s a goal, not a plan. He had one night in there and you rolled up a four-figure rug this morning. What’s he doing right now?”

“Sleeping in my apartment, presumably.”

“You hope that’s all he’s doing. And Monday, when the crew seals the house for seven hours, where does he go? And Tuesday? You can’t list a property and run a daycare for a grown man at the same time. That guy is not a smell, Dante. You can’t rub eucalyptus on him and open a window.”

“I don’t have a plan. I have a man with a paid booking and no car. A buyer with one weekend in her calendar, and a week standing between them. I’ll handle him the same as a difficult seller. Find out what he wants. Price it and give it to him.”

“He’s not a seller, Dante. He’s a—”

“He’s an occupant. Occupants have terms. Everyone has terms. I need to find out what his terms are. That’s all.”

Benji exhales, and I can hear him deciding not to argue with me before noon. “Fine. I’ll tell the florist to start a tab.”

“Tell her it’s a thirty-day arrangement.”

I pull into my parking lot at noon. My front door is standing wide open. The stairs to the second floor are exterior metal, and they clang under me as I run up them.

The kitchen chair is what’s propping the door. He carried one of my two chairs across the apartment and wedged it into the threshold so the door couldn’t swing shut behind him. Inside, the air conditioning is fighting the heat through the open doorway and losing, and it’s losing on a second front, because the sliding glass door to the balcony is standing wide open too.

Every door in the apartment is open. Pushed flat against the walls, the bathroom, my bedroom. The couch hasn’t been touched. The quilt on my bed is squared off just as I left it. Nothing in the kitchen has moved. I told a man to make himself at home, and the only things in my home he touched were the doors. All of them.

For ten seconds I think he’s gone. Walked out, hitched a ride, problem solved and immediately replaced by a worse one, because a missing tenant with a paid booking is not a vacancy, it’s a liability with my apartment key.

Then I reach the second bedroom.

He’s on the floor. There’s a gap between my boxes of signs and the back wall, and he’s in it, flat on his back with his boots on and one arm crossed over his chest, asleep on builder-grade carpet laid straight over the slab. He didn’t take a pillow from the couch. He didn’t take the quilt off my bed. He slept last night on a sectional in a Gulf-front house that rents for two thousand a night. And today, offered a couch or even a bed, he chose the floor of a storage room, facing the door.