Page 18 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

He’s gone for forty minutes.

I don’t make coffee. I sit in the chair on the wrong side of his desk with my hands on my knees. The blinds tick against the frame every time the heating comes on. There’s a filing cabinet with a small brass lock and a key in it.

Twenty minutes in, a phone rings somewhere in the building.

Thirty minutes in, I get up to look at the wall. There’s nothing on it.

He’s been in my apartment more than I have this week, and I know almost nothing about him. I don’t know where he lives, whether he has a family, or how he got the crooked knuckle. He’s somewhere north of thirty-five. His accent comes from about eleven blocks from here: port-district flat, the same as the guys who worked the yards when I was a kid. Everything else about him costs money and is quiet about it.

The bag on the desk has gone cold.

I sit back down.

I told a stranger about the man in the lobby before I told anyone I’ve known for ten years. I did it without deciding to. At noon I got in the truck, drove across the city, then sat in his stairwell.

Forty-one minutes later, I hear him on the stairs. The door opens. He comes in with the cold on him, takes off his coat, and hangs it on the back of the door. Then he stands with one hand on the desk.

“He won’t approach you again,” he says.

“That’s it?”

“Not in the building, not in the garage, not on the street.” He lets that settle. “If a man in a gray coat is within twenty feet of you at any time from now on, you call me before you get out of the truck and keep the doors locked while the phone rings.”

I want to ask how he did it, but I already know the answer: not yours to carry. Instead: “It’s my lobby.”

“It’s my job.” He stands still. “He was told once, in the fall, and he was told again this afternoon. There’s a person above both of us who said it in words. He’ll hold to it because that’s what he’s paid for. He isn’t angry with you. There’s nothing in him that can be angry with you.”

I nod.

“That’s not supposed to help,” he says. “It’s supposed to be true.”

He puts both hands flat on the desk. The right has a crooked knuckle, healed wrong a long time ago. I’ve looked at it three times now. “I’m going to say one thing. Then I’d like you to go home and sleep.”

I don’t answer.

“Right,” he says.

At the door, I stop with my hand on the frame and turn around.

My keys are already out.

There are four on the ring—the truck, the apartment, the yard at Fin’s that has a chain on it now, and the spare to my own place.

The spare has been on that ring since I moved in. A man in Ottawa stayed eleven months during my second year and never had it. Another man here asked for it twice two years ago. I said I’d get it copied. I didn’t. Eventually he stopped asking, then stopped coming. On the way out, he said being with me was restful, except he had no idea who he’d been resting next to. He wasn’t angry. That was the worst part.

I work the spare off the ring. It takes a while. The ring is stiff, so I use my thumbnail. I do all of it standing in Marek’s doorway while he watches from behind the desk. Neither of us speaks.

I hold it out.

He doesn’t take it right away.

“The desk downstairs logs daytime visitors by hand,” I say. “In a book. Anybody who’s waiting for the elevator can read it, and you’re in it four times already this week.”

“That’s true.”

“So there’s no reason for you to be in a book.”

He comes around the desk to take it. His fingers are cold. They touch mine for about a second and a half. I keep my hand there until he has the key, then put it in my pocket.