Page 33

No payroll for six men. No hardware store, chain, lock, county road rental, deposit. A credit of eleven thousand four hundred against the principal in January that I can’t source, and it’s going the wrong direction anyway. The same monthly transfers to my brother’s business that have been there for five years. Every month, the account management fee Marek’s own firm charges me: six hundred dollars.

He’s paid a payroll out of a bag, moved my brother two hundred miles, put a lock on a gate. He bills me six hundred dollars a month for the privilege.

I go through it again. Twice.

Then I sit on the kitchen floor with fourteen statements fanned out across the tile, my hip going solid. The harbor is black beyond the window except for the green cranes. I don’t sleep.

The moving company opens at eight on Saturday.

The woman who answers is helpful in the way of somebody who has three things going at once. I give her the date, the origin, the destination. I say I’m reconciling accounts for the buyer, a sentence I’ve heard Marek use that apparently works on anyone.

“Four thousand one hundred and sixty,” she says. “Paid on the day, card, in full. Do you want the reference?”

“Please.”

She reads it out. I write it on the back of a grocery receipt.

At eleven fifteen, I transfer four thousand one hundred and sixty dollars from the one account I still have full control of into the business account of BRANDT FINANCIAL, the details of which are on the bottom of every one of the fourteen statements on my kitchen floor.

In the reference field I put: movers.

At two twenty in the afternoon, my phone buzzes.

Reversal received. 4,160.00. Ref: movers.

The money is back in my account before I’ve eaten lunch.

I stand at the counter and read it four times. There’s no message with it. He’s simply sent it back the same afternoon, in full, with the same reference. I understand exactly what he’s saying to me.

I make eggs at four and eat them standing up.

Then I clean the whole apartment, which takes two hours—bathroom, floors, the inside of the refrigerator, the tracks on the balcony slider that have had grit in them since I moved in.

At seven I sit down in the chair by the door, which is his chair now, and I wait.

Five hours.

I don’t put a light on. I don’t put the television on. I sit in a hard chair in the dark in my own apartment with my coat over the arm and I go through it, in order, the way I go through a shooter.

Nobody made him drive to Alder Street on a Sunday night. Nobody made him carry boxes for a man with one hand until midnight. Paying the movers himself, then taking both copies of the receipt, isn’t part of his job. Neither is sending four thousand one hundred and sixty dollars back the same afternoon without a note.

He isn’t doing his job. He hasn’t been doing his job since the first week of December, when the four a.m. alerts stopped.

I’ve known that for a while. What I haven’t known, until a Friday afternoon standing in front of a woodstove with my brother telling me a man took both copies of an invoice, is what to do with it.

I know what I am. I’ve been paid for in this life. Every hour I’ve ever spent on the ice was bought by somebody working doubles at a scrapyard. I’ve spent nine years sending it back six thousand dollars at a time. I’ve never resented it. I’ve never been able to put it down, either.

So I know exactly one way to say thank you that isn’t with money, and it’s not with my mouth.

That’s not true. It’s exactly with my mouth. That joke is bad. I sit in the dark with it for another two hours.

At midnight, the key turns in the lock. He does it quietly. I hear the key. Then the door opens. He stands in the dark hallway with his bag on his shoulder, coat still on. He stops when he sees me in the chair.

“You’re up.”

I stand up.

“There’s a reversal on your account from this afternoon,” he says. “I need to explain how that works. I have an old rule. It isn’t about you. I don’t take money from⁠—”