Chapter 2 - The Weight of Scarcity
The kitchen of our apartment above Presley Judd’s hardware store measured roughly nine by eleven feet, which meant that if you opened the oven door, you couldn’t pull out the silverware drawer without executing a complicated choreography involving your left hip and the kitchen table.
It was a Tuesday evening, exactly four days after the dinner at the steakhouse, and the radiator in the corner was making its seasonal transition from silence to a rhythmic, deafening clang that sounded like a skeleton beating on a galvanized tub with a wrench.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
I sat at the Formica table with a yellow legal pad and a ballpoint pen that was running out of ink, scratching numbers into columns while the overhead fluorescent light flickered with a low, neurological hum.
Rent: $850 (Due on the 1st - NO GRACE PERIOD)
Electric: $142.50 (Past due)
Groceries: $68.40 (Remaining)
Car Insurance: $94.00
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TOTAL AVAILABLE: $1,154.90
TOTAL OBLIGATIONS: $1,184.90
SHORTFALL: -$30.00
Thirty dollars. It wasn’t a mountain of debt. It wasn’t a corporate bailout or a failed investment portfolio. It was thirty dollars—the exact cost of a generic box of winter boots for Faye, whose sneakers had sprung a leak in the left sole during Tuesday’s rainstorm.
A sharp knock sounded at the exterior stair landing outside our door.
Faye, who was sitting on the lopsided sofa doing her third-grade spelling homework with a stub of a pencil, looked up. Della didn't even look up from her coloring book; she was busy organizing her remaining crayons by height, a nervous habit she had developed over the last year.
I stood up, squeezed past the edge of the oven, and pulled the wooden door open.
Presley Judd stood on the landing.
Presley was sixty-eight years old, wore men’s flannel shirts year-round, and had a shock of iron-gray hair that looked like it had been combed with an eggbeater. She owned the entire brick building—the hardware store downstairs, our apartment, and the vacant commercial space next door that used to be a dry cleaner’s. She also owned a pair of sharp, uncompromising blue eyes that missed very little.
In her arms, she cradled a heavy, steaming casserole dish wrapped in a damp dish towel, alongside a brown paper grocery bag that smelled unmistakably of garlic and roasted onions.
“You left your back porch light off,” Presley said without preamble, stepping past me into the tiny kitchen without waiting for an invitation. She set the casserole dish squarely on the center of my carefully calculated financial columns.
“Presley, I told you, you don’t have to keep doing this,” I said, though my stomach gave a traitorous, involuntary rumble at the scent of the food.
“Shut up, Linnea, and clear some space before I drop this lasagna on your tax forms,” she retorted, her voice gravelly from forty years of smoking menthol cigarettes she had finally quit back in ninety-eight. “I made too much baked ziti. If I eat it by myself for three days, I’ll turn into a bag of imported cheese. Consider it rent relief for the draft coming through your south-facing window.”
She reached into the grocery bag and pulled out a quart jar of homemade applesauce, a half-gallon of whole milk for Beckett, and—to my absolute astonishment—a brand-new, unwrapped pair of navy blue children’s rain boots with yellow duck handles on the sides.
She set the boots on the floor by the door with a dull thud.
“Size three,” Presley muttered, not looking at me. “Found them in the back storeroom behind some old paint cans. Leftover inventory from the hardware store’s liquidation sale back when my brother ran the sporting goods side. They’ve been sitting there collecting dust. If they don’t fit Faye, give them to a neighbor’s kid.”
I looked down at the boots, then up at Presley’s weathered face. The skin around her eyes crinkled in that familiar, defensive way she had whenever she was being exceptionally kind and didn’t want anyone to make a sentimental production out of it.
“Presley... how much do I owe you for the milk and—?”
“You owe me zero dollars, Linnea Thorn,” she snapped, turning toward the door with her hands planted firmly on her wide hips. “What you do owe me is a little peace and quiet on a Tuesday night instead of hearing you up here scratching numbers into paper until two in the morning like a starving monk. Your light’s been burning till dawn three nights this week. You look like a ghost.”
“I’m just... balancing things,” I said weakly.
“You’re drowning in a puddle,” Presley said bluntly. She paused with her hand on the doorknob, turning back to look at me with an expression that softened just enough to reveal the deep, stubborn core of affection she had quietly harbored for us since we moved in two years ago. “My cousin runs that commercial bookkeeping service over off Mill Street. She needs someone who knows how to use an Excel sheet without calling tech support every five minutes. The pay is hourly, it’s remote after the first week, and she doesn’t care if you work in your pajamas at midnight.”
My breath hitched. “I... I only have experience in medical billing and warehouse inventory.”
“Numbers are numbers, kid. Money is just numbers that got dressed up for church,” Presley said, pulling the door open. “I gave her your name. She’ll call you Thursday. Don’t blow it by being polite.”
The door clicked shut behind her, leaving the apartment dead silent except for the rhythmic, arrogant clang of the radiator.
I walked over to the table, pulled back the damp dish towel from the ziti, and stared down at the melted mozzarella bubbling at the edges of the ceramic dish.
Faye walked over, her socks sliding silently across the linoleum, and picked up one of the navy blue rain boots by its yellow duck handle. She held it against her shin, her eyes wide.
May you like
“Mom,” she whispered, a small, tentative smile breaking through her serious face. “They fit.”
For the first time since we walked out of that steakhouse four days ago, the knot in my chest loosened just a fraction.
