CHAPTER FIVE
Lydia was contemplating the birthday party photo when she gazed between the splintered columns of the store’s ground floor and saw a woman standing near the entrance, looking around as if lost in a forest. She was short and wide, wore red stretch pants and a Skate City! T-shirt, and carried a cane that was bottomed by a tennis ball. The moment she caught sight of Lydia behind the register she huffed loudly and began heading her way.
The woman placed a beaded cigarette case on the counter, lifted her glasses from a lanyard around her neck, and pulled a yellow Post-it note out of her bra. As she squinted into the note, Lydia saw that the part splitting the center of the woman’s gray hair was nearly an inch wide. A sad landing strip, shiny under the bookstore lights.
“You’re looking for something?” Lydia asked in her kindest voice.
“I think,” the woman gasped, “I’m looking. For you.”
“Come again?”
“Does that say Lydia?” the woman asked.
Lydia looked at the note. LYDIA, it said, written in dull pencil.
“It does.”
“And you’re Lydia?”
Lydia looked at the woman and considered lying.
“Can I recommend something to read?”
“Are you. Or aren’t you. Lydia?”
“I am.”
The woman paused for a moment and studied her with dissatisfaction. “Look at that ever-lovin’ hair,” she said. “You got bus tokens?”
“Bus tokens? No, ma’am. I use a pass.”
“Good. That’s cheaper. Take the Fifteen up Colfax. You might want to write this down. Because I’m not coming back. Take the Fifteen up Colfax. Past Smiley’s Laundromat. Get off at the James Dean mural. Walk straight down across Thirteenth. Big brick house near the corner. Bad grass and falling fence. I’m on the ground.” She squinted suspiciously before adding, “Joey didn’t say you’d be such a pill.”
“Joey?”
“Then again,” she added, “Joey didn’t say much at all, did he? See you after work.”
The woman scooped up her cigarettes and planted her cane and went out the door without a browse.
The door in front of Lydia was painted red and covered in scratches. Based on the bank of mailboxes by the entry and the circle of chairs on the porch—arranged around a parlor ashtray that was resting on a stack of phone books—this musty old Queen Anne home had been carved up and converted into a dozen or so small units. Joey had apparently lived in one.
Lydia and David’s apartment was six or eight blocks away, and she found it somewhat meaningful that Joey had also ended up living in Capitol Hill. The whole neighborhood was a hodgepodge of different styles and eras and people, all packed close to downtown on cramped streets with fantastic trees. It could be a bit rough and more turbulent than she sometimes liked, especially late on weekend nights, but Lydia loved how walking down a single block she might see a row of subdued Foursquare homes, a sixties-era high-rise, a simple brick deco apartment building, a Queen Anne pseudo-mansion like this one, plus a cross-section of Denver’s rich and poor, gay and straight, black and brown and white. It was one of the few places she’d ever lived where she felt as if she were moving while standing still. She wondered if Joey had felt that too.
Before she decided to knock, the door opened and within seconds, without eye contact, the balding woman from the bookstore was escorting her up the staircase.
“Up we go,” the woman said.
“Where are we going?”
“Up.”
The staircase stretched through the center of the old home. The woman still wore her red stretch pants but her cane was missing and her chapped grip clung to Lydia’s elbow as they climbed the stairs. In distant quadrants of the house she could hear doors opening and closing, a toilet flushing, men coughing. She still had no idea why she was here—Joey?—but the woman’s sense of purpose stifled any desire to ask.
When they reached the landing, the woman stopped and hunched forward, hands on her knees.
“Give me a second,” she said, struggling to catch her breath.
“If you wanted to tell me something,” Lydia said, aiming to be friendly, “you could have phoned the store. I’m almost always there. Saved yourself the trip, you know?”
“I wanted to see you first. Have a gander. Then if I trusted your looks I was going to let you in. If you seemed high-and-mighty, all of it was going into the trash.”
“All of what?”
“The stuff. In his apartment. Someone else has been assigned his place, moving in on Friday, so today’s the day it’s gotta go. Keep what you want. I’ll have the rest thrown out.”
“I think you have the wrong Lydia.”
“Got it all right here,” she said, pulling the yellow Post-it out of her bra. “Lydia. From the bookstore. Joey told me there was only one Lydia. Was he wrong?”
“I’m her,” Lydia said, feeling her skin go hot and tighten around her eyes. “So this is where he lived?”
“You really don’t know why you’re here?” As the woman blinked, a growth on her lower lid seemed to scrape her eye. “Then why’d he give me your name? You his auntie or big sister? Because you’re too old to be his lover, I hope.”
“I think I was just his bookseller.”
“Whatever that means,” the woman said. “Either way he wanted it all passed to you. An inheritance, you could call it, though honestly there isn’t much. The shithead probably burned half of it.”
“Burned it?”
“You’ll see,” the woman said. She climbed the remaining steps and steered Lydia into the dimly lit third-floor hallway. Lydia toed a gray smudge on the carpet and decided it was a onetime raisin.
“Can I ask when Joey arranged this?”
“Long before he died, if that’s what you’re getting at. But what you really want to know is why. Part of my job is to ask all the boys what I should do with their stuff if they ever get sent back to the pokey. Joey said, Lydia. From the bookstore.”
“To the pokey?” Lydia said. “What kind of a place is this?”
“Used to call it a halfway house, but anymore it’s ‘reintegration something-or-other.’ Really, it’s a home for wayward boys who are all grown up.”
“A home for felons.”
“Ex-felons. So you can see the problem. If they get picked up again while they’re living here, I’m stuck with all their crap. That’s how I know about you.” The woman reached for the handle and stopped. “Smell it yet?”
Lydia did: a burned pungent scent, soggy smelling, like a fire pit in the rain.
“What is that?” Lydia said.
“Joey,” she said, “in his infinite wisdom, decided to have a bonfire in his kitchen. He contained it inside a trash can, but still. Goddamned fire alarm goes off and he’s gone. And I mean gone: he never stepped foot inside this apartment again.”
“Was that the day?”
“That was the day. Good thing I had a master key and a fire extinguisher or we’d be standing on a pile of charred bricks right now. The handyman is supposed to try to get rid of the stench, but he’s waiting on you. To get your stuff. So today would be good. To get your stuff.”