No, not a chance. Nothing about me was remarkable enough for a man to prioritize talking to me over someone like Allegra. I felt embarrassed for considering it.
Now that I thought about it, that phone call he’d been on did sound shifty. Maybe he was some kind of con artist who preyed on the vulnerable and went to death cafés to find his next unsuspecting mark. He could be a real estate broker or a life insurance salesman, or maybe he was selling overpriced funeral services. I’d helped enough families with funeral arrangements to know it was a ruthless way of draining people of their savings at a time when grief clouded their judgment. I was always on high alert for that type of swindler to make sure my clients weren’t taken advantage of.
It all began to make sense. I’d mentioned my grandmother’s death and he thought he’d found his next target for whatever scam he was peddling. Jerk. Now I didn’t feel so guilty about lying. I snuggled deeper under the thick alpaca blanket and returned to my scrolling, this time with more focus. I was just about to hit Play on Pretty Woman when an onslaught of syncopated, irritated honking stopped me. It was so aggressive that it transcended my high tolerance for New York noise. Enveloping my shoulders in the blanket, I shuffled over to the window to investigate.
Like a blood clot wreaking arterial havoc, a mover’s truck blocked the narrow one-way street below. A line of burly men dutifully transported boxes like ants, immune to the blaring of horns. For once I could empathize with the honking drivers—who schedules movers for nine o’clock at night, anyway?
My empathy quickly devolved to self-pity as I spotted an unsettling development unfolding in the street below. The industrious trail of movers was leading right up the front steps of my building.
The new neighbor was here.
8
One of the many things I loved about George was that he was never in a hurry to go outside to relieve himself. I suspected he’d trained himself to hold it in out of sheer laziness, even when his last bathroom break was eight hours ago. That meant I could delay our exit from the building until late at night, after the movers had gone. Hopefully the new neighbor would be busy inside their apartment unpacking by then.
I waited until eleven o’clock before I wedged him into his coat and grabbed his leash. Since he usually liked to take his time sniffing the stairwell on the way down, I lugged him in my arms, creeping along the second floor to avoid rousing the noisy floorboards. Enjoying the luxury of being carried, George watched me quizzically as if to point out the ridiculousness of it all. When we reached the mailboxes, I realized I’d been holding my breath the whole way down.
But my attempt at stealth was pointless. As I pushed through the front door, a woman around my age was walking up the front steps, a brown paper take-out bag in her hand. Tucking a lock of dark hair under her wool hat, she smiled broadly.
I felt like a mouse caught snacking in the kitchen.
“You must be Clover!” The woman skipped up the last few steps to join us at the top of the stoop. “I met Leo when I picked up the key the other day and he told me all about you.” She stuck her hand out to shake, even though my arms were obviously occupied by fifty-five pounds of bulldog in a plaid winter coat. “I’m Sylvie.”
I held on to George like a shield, shifting his weight to my hip so I could extend my hand out beneath his hefty backside.
“Hello,” I said, a little annoyed at Leo. “Welcome to the building?” I didn’t mean for it to come out as a question, but the slip in intonation betrayed me.
Sylvie’s hazel eyes reflected amusement. “And who is this handsome guy?” She stroked the backs of her fingers across George’s head and he grinned goofily at her, tongue flopping lazily out the side.
“Uh, this is my dog, George.” I cringed. Of course he was a dog.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, George,” she said in the kind of cartoonish voice humans reserved for animals and babies. “And you too, Clover. I’m looking forward to getting to know you!”
A stunned half smile was all I could offer. Sylvie was like a bee buzzing erratically around my head—perhaps if I stood really still and ignored her, she’d leave of her own accord. But the clumsy silence didn’t seem to bother her and she maintained her expression of mild amusement.
“Well, I can see you and George are on your way out for a walk, so I’ll leave you to it,” she said, fishing in her coat pocket for her keys. “My pho is getting cold, anyway.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said, walking quickly down the remaining steps. “Have a good night.”
“You too! Oh, and Clover—” Sylvie began searching her keychain for the newest addition. “Let’s get coffee sometime!”
“Oh, okay. Sure.”
Without looking back, I power-walked as far away from the building as possible before George had a chance to settle on a place to squat. Anxiety gripped my throat and the walk I’d done thousands of times suddenly felt unfamiliar—the streetlights seemed more intrusive, the sidewalk cracks more treacherous. I hurried toward the library, still denying George’s attempts to exercise his right to stop and sniff.
I felt ambushed. And annoyed with myself for not being more prepared with an excuse on the spot. My nerves made me agree too quickly to Sylvie’s invitation. Once you’ve had coffee with someone, you can’t go back to polite nods in the stairwell. And the more you talk to them, the more reasons they might have to reject you.
I’d made that mistake with Angela, an Australian woman who’d lived in the second-floor apartment ten years ago. A few weeks after she moved in, she’d invited me to try a new teahouse in our neighborhood. Surprised and flattered, I even let myself get a little excited about the idea of making an adult friend who wasn’t Leo. As Angela and I sipped on our matcha lattes, I thought our social outing was going well. I wasn’t too nervous and I’d even made her laugh a couple of times. But when I told her what I did for a living—essentially, that I chose to watch people die—the conversation instantly became stilted. Out of nowhere, Angela remembered she had somewhere else to be and hurried out of the teahouse without finishing her drink. And for the remaining year she lived in our building, she hardly spoke two words to me.
Now I knew how to recognize that reaction. I’d seen it countless times since then, whenever I mentioned my job to other people. The way their bodies tensed, how they avoided eye contact. The way they mysteriously never had time for a conversation. It was as if my mere presence might somehow expedite their mortality.
I wasn’t going to let myself fall into the same trap with Sylvie. It was safer to reject her before she could reject me.
9
“Why do we die, Grandpa?”
I was six years old, sitting opposite Grandpa in a booth of the diner a few blocks from our apartment. In the month since I’d come to live with him, his habitual weekend breakfast spot had become mine by default. He preferred the corned beef hash; I loved the French toast.
“That’s a big question for a little girl,” Grandpa said. “But it’s a very good one.”
He dipped his teaspoon into his black coffee and stirred it as he thought. I’d watched him perform the same action so many times in the past few weeks that I wondered if the answers to all hard questions lay in the bottom of a coffee cup. Grandpa lifted the spoon and tapped it three times—it was always three times—on the left side of the cup.
“You see, Clover, with so many people being born every day, there’s not enough room or resources for us all on this planet. That means people need to die to make space for other people to be born.”