Page 93 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

He stops.

He looks at me. He’s been asking me for money in this exact voice since I was nineteen years old. I’ve never said that word to him. He doesn’t know what to do with his face.

“No,” I say again. “I’m not paying your rent.”

“Right.” He nods at the bag. “No. That’s fair.”

“It’s not because of the season. It’s not because I’m short. I’ll have money. It’s because I’ve been paying it since I was fifteen, and it hasn’t worked. One of us has to stop, and it isn’t going to be you.”

Fin stands in my kitchen with a chisel in his hand. His eyes are wet.

“Okay,” he says.

“Go ask the landlord for a month’s rent for the roof job. He’ll take it. You’d have done it in March if you weren’t waiting for me.”

“Yeah.”

“Take your coat off,” I say. “There’s a chicken in the fridge that’s been there since Monday. I’m not throwing it out.”

He doesn’t move for a second.

Then he takes his coat off and hangs it over the back of the chair. He comes to the counter while I get the pan down from its hook.

“That’s Mom’s pan,” he says. I tell him I know. When he asks what he can do, I give him the onions and the bad knife. He complains about the knife for eleven minutes while I start the chicken. By the time the onions are in the pan, he’s talking about the window frame instead of rent. I let him. Fin keeps talking while he chops. Dinner smells like my mother’s kitchen, before either of us had bills in our names.

24

The license goes back on a Friday morning, at a counter on the ground floor of the regulator’s building, between a man renewing a real estate registration and a woman with a stroller.

There’s a certificate in a cardboard tube that I carried across town on a bus. The clerk takes it out, checks the number against a screen, and puts it in a tray with three others.

“Do you want a receipt?”

“Yes.”

She prints one. It’s four inches long. It says SURRENDER — VOLUNTARY and a reference number. I put it in my wallet behind a dentist’s card, because that’s where receipts go.

Then I go and close the office.

It takes until three. The desk goes to the man from the sewing-machine repair shop downstairs, who’s wanted it for two years. He pays me sixty dollars and takes it away on a dolly. Eleven boxes of files go to the accountant taking my clients. The chair stays. The kettle stays. A framed certificate hung on one wall for nine years; I pull its nail with pliers. Then I fill the hole with white plaster from a tub under the sink.

At half past four, I stand in an empty room over a sewing-machine repair shop with a bag in my hand. Downstairs, a man does four short bursts and one long one on a machine in the window. He’s done it every working morning and afternoon of my professional life.

Then I lock the door and put the key through the mail slot of the insurance broker on the first floor.

Kieran is on the sidewalk at the bottom of the stairs. He’s leaning against the front of the closed bookmaker’s with his arms folded, in a T-shirt, in August, with a summer’s worth of sun on his forearms and his hair grown out past what he usually lets it get to.

He doesn’t push off the wall.

“Hello,” he says.

I stand on the second step with the bag in my hand. My heart is beating hard enough that I feel it against my healed ribs. He looks broader through the shoulders than he did in April. Healthier. The sight of it hits before I’ve decided what I’m allowed to feel about him being here.

“How long have you been down here?”

“Since about one.” He shrugs. “I’ve been outside this office three times since June. Twice in the truck. Once, I got up to the second landing.”

“Why didn’t you come up?”