Chapter 118: An Address
The sealing order came through in March, eleven months after we filed the petition.
The DA did not object. Nobody appeared.
It took the judge about ninety seconds, and I was not required to attend.
I attended. I sat in the third row and watched ninety seconds of my own life and then went to work.
Then I served it.
Eleven agencies. Each one requiring a certified copy, each one with a different address.
Certified copies were three dollars each. Postage was forty-four dollars and change. I have the receipt.
I did the certificates of service myself, at the kitchen table, eleven of them, on a Sunday.
In May I applied for a flat on Delph Street. One bedroom, first floor, one thousand and fifty a month.
The letting agent ran a check.
It came back clean on the state side and flagged on one reseller, which is what I had told him would happen.
I had expected that, so I had the certified order in a folder in my bag, and I put it on the desk.
He read it. He asked what vacated meant.
I told him. He said he would have to ask the owner.
Two days. Then yes, with three months up front and a co-signer, and I did not have a co-signer.
I offered four months instead. Four thousand two hundred dollars, which I had, because of a storage unit off Reddish Road.
He took it. It is not a good deal and I knew it was not a good deal and I took it anyway.
I moved on the seventh of June.
Two trips in a borrowed van, both of them under an hour.
A mattress. A kettle. Nine boxes, seven of which were paper. Two saucepans. The folder.
I got a table off the kerb on Ossory Road.
Oak veneer, one leg shimmed with a beer mat folded into four.
I bought one chair for eleven dollars at a church sale. I bought the second chair fourteen months later.
I want to be accurate about the second chair: I did not buy it for anybody. I bought it because the first one broke.
The car came back in the autumn, through Feld's office, as part of tidying up the Halloway estate of things.
Title in my name.
It had always been in my name. Nobody had ever bothered to change it, in nine years.
Dark blue estate. Ninety-one thousand miles more than when I last drove it. A child's sticker in the rear footwell.
The faded university parking sticker was still on the back window. Nobody had scraped it off either.
I drove it once, on a Sunday morning. Out to Fenner and back. Forty-one miles.
It pulled left. The heater worked. It smelled of somebody else's air freshener and faintly of my mother's car, which was the same car.
Then I sold it to a man in Halcott for two thousand four hundred dollars, cash, and he did not haggle.
Before he came I stood in the lot with a razor blade.
I took the university parking sticker off the rear window.
It took eleven minutes. It came off in flakes, not in one piece, the way old vinyl does.
I brushed the flakes off the tailgate with the side of my hand and they went into the gravel.
I did not keep them. There was nothing to keep. It was eleven minutes of scraping and then the glass was clean.
I put the two thousand four hundred into the account.
It went out again inside five months, on rent and on a dentist.
The dentist was six hundred and eighty dollars for two teeth I had cracked inside and left for four years.
That is what the car became. Two teeth and about eleven weeks of rent.
In November I put my name on the mailbox.
That is the part of this whole account that people are surprised by, and I do not know why.
Box four, in the lobby, next to the meters.
Aluminium, with a slot for a card behind a little window of scratched plastic.
The previous tenant's card was still in it. HOLLIS. Written in biro, sun-bleached to grey.
I did not take it out. I did not want to. It cost nothing to leave it there and it was not mine to throw away.
I used a strip of white label tape and a marker pen and I wrote MERCER on it and pressed it down over the glass.
It went on crooked. About three degrees off, low on the right.
I looked at it for a second and I left it crooked, and it is still crooked, and I know exactly how crooked it is.
That is the first time my name had been on a door since October of 2019.
Not on a cell card. Not on a bed list. Not on a caseworker's sheet, or a bond file, or a docket.
On a mailbox, in a lobby, on a street where the bus comes at twelve and forty-two past the hour.
Marisol came round once, in the December.
She stood in the doorway of the front room and looked at the two chairs for a while.
She said, “You need a rug,” and put a bottle on the table and did not stay for a drink.