Chapter 26: The Apartment
The lease came in a manila envelope with the landlord's name printed on it in the kind of typeface that charges by the letter. Four pages for the store, one page for the apartment upstairs, and a rider at the back about the furnace.
Kate set it on the counter between the register and the donation bin and said, "Renewal time, boss."
A year ago the Covenant had guaranteed that lease. I had not asked them to. I had found out about it the way I found out about most of that winter's kindnesses — afterward, in the paperwork, in Rita's handwriting on a carbon copy. The club's name sat under mine on the guarantor line like a hand under an elbow. It had kept a roof over Micah and me when my credit was a rumor and my wages were an apology. I had been grateful. I had also been keeping a list, in the back of my enrollment notebook, of everything I intended to hand back.
The list was not about pride. Pride is a luxury item and I shop at my own store. The list was about weight. A thing carried for you is a thing you owe carrying to, and I meant to be square with the world before the world sent a bill.
"There's a change I'd like," I said.
Kate's pen stopped. "You're not leaving."
"No. I'm staying. That's the change." I turned the lease around so the signature page faced me. "Strike the guarantor. I'll sign it alone, or I won't sign it."
Kate looked at me the way she looks at donated electronics, like she was deciding whether the thing would run or spark. "Wren. The whole point of a guarantor—"
"The whole point was last year," I said. "Last year I was a girl with a dead wagon and a brother and a story nobody believed at the county office. This year I have a year of rent receipts and a store that made its nut since March. The landlord can run my name. It runs now."
She called him in front of me, on speaker, no softening in the retelling. He was quiet a moment, then said the store's numbers were the store's numbers and he was not a sentimental man, and the guarantor line came off with one stroke of a pen. A year of my life, and the hand under my elbow withdrew because I asked it to, and nothing fell.
Rita witnessed the signature. Kate signed as store director, and Rita signed below her in the witness block, and the two of them stood there in the quiet between the racks like it was a christening, which in a way it was. You sign a lease alone and something gets named. It gets named yours.
"You could have told Hammer first," Rita said, not scolding, just doing the accounts out loud.
"I'll tell him tonight," I said. "He'll pretend to be insulted for about a minute. Then he'll ask what's for supper."
"He'll ask if the furnace rider got renewed," she said. "That man trusts no furnace he hasn't threatened personally."
That afternoon I sold the wagon. People who knew that car expect a ceremony, and there wasn't one. A man from Two Dot who restores old wagons as a hobby his wife calls a condition came with a trailer and an envelope of cash and kicked every tire like the tires owed him money. The engine had been dead since January. The seats were mostly memory. He was buying it for parts, and parts is what it was, and I signed the title on the hood while Micah held the pen cap like a pallbearer.
"It took us a lot of places," Micah said.
"It took us the places that mattered," I said. "It can rest now. Cars are allowed."
The hatchback came the following week. Small, silver, eight years old, with a heater that could win arguments and a previous owner who had kept every oil receipt in a zippered pouch like scripture. I paid for it with my wages — every dollar mine, counted out of the coffee tin a bill at a time — plus the store's winter bonus, which I argued about accepting for exactly one minute before Kate told me that arguing with a bonus was a rich person's hobby and I should develop cheaper ones.
It is not a beautiful car. It starts. In Coldwater Creek, in my family, that is the whole review: it starts, and it is mine, and Micah's lanky self fits in the back with his knees in his pockets.
That night I parked it under the apartment window and sat with my hands on the wheel, listening to it tick as it cooled. A year. I had started the year as a person things happened to. I was ending it as a signature on page four — mine, witnessed, filed, and paid up through spring.