Chapter 19: Two Months
On the ninth of September Ivy told me she needed the bed.
She did it properly.
Fourteen days, in writing, on house paper, signed.
“You're not being put out,” she said. “You're being moved along. There's a difference and I want you to hear it.”
“I hear it.”
“You're the first one in two years I've had to move along for a good reason.”
The good reason was that I had a job and a pay stub and eleven weeks of clean tests.
Sabine found me the room. Sabine found everybody everything.
Nine Corbin Street, second floor, back.
A hundred fifteen a week, paid Mondays, no deposit if you paid the first two weeks up front.
One window. A dresser with three drawers, the middle one sticking.
A hot plate on a shelf. A bathroom shared with two other rooms.
And a door with a lock in it, and a key to that lock, on a ring, in my hand.
I stood in that room on the twenty-third of September with the key in my hand.
I locked the door from the inside and stood there.
Then I unlocked it and locked it again, because I wanted to hear it twice.
I moved on a Tuesday and it took one trip.
Plastic bag. Certificate. Six envelopes with a rubber band around them.
Two forms. A comb. Three photographs. Four hundred and twelve pages in a grocery bag.
Everything I owned went up one flight of stairs in one trip and I have never been able to decide whether that is a sad fact or a clean one.
The file went in the bottom drawer, flat, with a towel over it.
Then I did not open it for two months.
I want to be accurate about those two months, because people hear that and assume it was some long dark ceremony, and it was not.
It was work.
I finished the 2019 cabinets in September and started 2018.
Four hundred pages a day, four days a week, plus Saturdays.
I saw Kandace Pruitt every other Tuesday for fifteen minutes and she never asked me one question about housing again after the box got checked.
I walked two point four miles each way.
My shoes went through at the ball of the left foot in the second week of October and I glued them.
I ate. I slept badly, but I slept.
That is the whole of it. Two months of a woman with a job, walking.
Three times in those two months I took the file out of the drawer.
The first time was the third night in that room.
I put it on the bed, looked at it for maybe two minutes, and put it back.
The second time was in the first week of October. I got as far as putting my thumbnail under one of the paper bands.
The third time I did not even lift it.
I opened the drawer, took the towel off, looked at the cover sheet, put the towel back, and shut the drawer.
Here is why. I have had a long time to get this right.
I am going to give both halves, because both halves are true.
The first half is the one everybody accepts. I did not want to read the worst night of another woman's life in a police narrative on a Tuesday.
The second half is the one people find harder.
I was afraid it would be correct.
Four hundred and twelve pages of correct. Every form filed, every box checked, every signature where a signature goes.
Because if it was correct, then it was finished, and everything I had been carrying for six years was just the price of a thing I had done with my own hand in a kitchen with my aunt.
And I would have to put it down and go be thirty.
There is a version of me that never opens that drawer. She is not a tragic person. She scans documents, she pays her rent on Mondays, she is fine.
I think about her more often than anybody would guess.
What changed was nothing. That is the part I insist on.
Nobody called me. Nothing arrived in the mail. No dream, no anniversary, no sign.
People want the anniversary. It was not the anniversary.
The anniversary that year was a Thursday. I worked it, and came home, and boiled two eggs.
On the twentieth of October, a Monday, I stopped at the dollar store on Route 6 after work.
I bought a box cutter, two ninety-nine, the kind with the snap-off blade.
I did not need a box cutter. There were no boxes in that room.
I bought it, and I walked the rest of the way home, and I put it on top of the dresser where I could see it.
It sat there for one day.