The basement, when he took them there, turned out to be under the bakery next door. Both shops and the narrow passage between them had once belonged to the same man. After the hurricane the water had come in over the sill and made a series of marks on the cinder blocks, one brown wave above another. Vernon had written the dates beside each mark as the water went back down. On the highest he had written GOD WILLING NEVER AGAIN.
There were shelves along three walls, and a dehumidifier at the end of an orange cord. A green trunk sat on bricks in the middle of the floor. From his shirt pocket Vernon produced a key large enough to be a prop in a play.
“This is not company property,” he said.
“Are you worried I’m going to say it is?”
“I’m worried you’ll get tired, and your lawyer will say it is, and you’ll let him.”
She thought about this. The basement smelled of damp cereal and dried lavender. Over their heads a metal peel knocked gently on a brick oven.
“I can tell you that if anything in that trunk affects the sale, I’ll tell the other side about it,” she said. “I can promise to keep people’s personal information out of their hands unless the people agree. And I can promise to stay in the room when the lawyers start talking.”
“Well,” he said. “You’ve grown up enough to make an inconvenient promise. That’s something.”
He opened the trunk.
Inside was a collection of ordinary family albums. Some had imitation leather covers. Others had the transparent pockets that eventually fuse to a picture like melted cheese. One was covered in blue cloth with a stain shaped vaguely like the state of Michigan. Miriam picked this one up first. Inside were the pictures of couples that had hung in the little room. Here was the couple who kept coming back, in the picture she remembered, with the husband in a raincoat holding a baby wearing only one shoe.
“Where did the other shoe go?” she said, which was a particular question among all the ones she could have asked.
“Your mother was bouncing it on her head to get the baby to look up.”
On the back of each picture was a number. Some were written in ink, some in pencil, and a few had been done in the red crayon her mother used for marking buffing wheels. Miriam found B-6148 in the third album, under a picture of an old man at a corner stand, holding a hand-lettered sign that said STILL OPEN. Across his shoulder hung a string of mittens clipped together in pairs. There were cigarette packets behind him, and under the counter an umbrella with a duck’s head on the handle.
Daniel took the photograph in his hands as carefully as if it contained a living piece of his grandfather.
“I used to hide in that umbrella bin,” he said. “He’d shut me in there till I laughed and then he’d go, What an unusual noise for an umbrella to make.”
There was a white rectangle where a second picture had been removed. Vernon turned the page. In a pocket underneath, folded twice, was a list of seventeen numbers. Along the top her mother had written COLLECTION FOR MATEO. Underneath, in a hand Miriam did not know: Returned except as indicated. A thick line ran through every number but B-6148.
“Who returned the others?” she asked.
“I did.”
“Why didn’t you return this one?”
“I didn’t have it.”
“Who did?”
Vernon reached over to close the album. “That’s a hard question because you think you know what I mean by returned. I didn’t return sixteen rings. I returned sixteen people’s money.”
On the floor above them the baker dropped something heavy. They heard her swear, once, heartily. The dehumidifier hummed to itself.
“What had they paid for?” Miriam asked.
“A place to work when the store on the corner got sold. Your mother asked everybody to buy a bench.”
“My mother got them to invest in this company?”
“No. That’s what your trustees are about to sell you, child, and this is why I wanted your eyes on it. She got them to invest in the shop across the street.”
Chapter 4 — The Yellow Copy
Upstairs the woman in the bicycle jersey had finished her leaf. She held it against the light so they could see the ridges stand up like those in a real leaf, only these were made of silver wire and shadow. Its final destination, she said, was over the zipper on her brother’s jacket. He had had a stroke and couldn’t work the little pull anymore. He used to teach botany.
Alma wanted to know how you got something so straight to go round like that. The woman pulled out the stool beside her and gave her a piece of copper to try. Daniel stayed with his daughter. Miriam, Vernon and Ada went to the empty bench at the back.
Vernon had brought up the album and the list. He had also brought a bundle no larger than a pack of playing cards, done up in a red rubber band. Ada went to cut the band with a pair of blunt scissors.
“Don’t,” he said. “I can use that.”
“It’s turned into the rock they find with dinosaurs inside.”
“Still stretches.”
It broke between his fingers. Ada put the two pieces on the bench. “Keep those. Maybe they’ll breed.”
He grinned. Watching them, Miriam began to have a sense of the cost of this place that had very little to do with what any of its contents would bring at a sale.
The cards were yellow copies of receipts. They recorded amounts ranging from forty dollars to two thousand five hundred. Each bore the initials of the person who paid and a promise to repay the advance within five years, together with interest at two percent. At the bottom was a square for a signature. On the copies in her hand the squares had all been cut away, leaving the paper shaped a little like a chair.
“People gave your mother their savings once they saw the eviction notice,” Vernon said. “Store across the street had a lease that could be broken if the landlord got an offer over a particular amount. It was a miserable lease and my fault for signing it. Your mother wanted to put up everything herself, but she had you and a new roof to pay for. Mateo got up a collection. People brought cash mostly. A couple brought things we could sell with permission. Beatriz brought that ring.”
“Why write a repair ticket?”
“Our insurance only covered customer property on the premises if there was an intake ticket. We checked everything into the book and kept the cash in a separate box. The plan was to sell what we had to and put the rest back in people’s hands. We had buyers ready. When a person got paid or got their piece back, we cut off the signature as a receipt for us. Kept it with the accounts upstairs.”
“Did Beatriz ever get paid?”
“No.”
“Was the ring sold?”
“Your mother said she bought it herself. Said she’d get around to telling Beatriz once she’d found a way to do it that didn’t hurt her pride. Then the banks came back and the offers went up and our little collection looked smaller every day.”
They had nearly lost everything. Vernon described a winter during which the heating oil froze in the line, the hot-water pipe at the bench exploded, and the first prospective lender had come through the shop in a new blue suit and slipped in a pool of plaster intended to hold a clock case for gilding. On his way down he had put a foot through the drum of a Victorian musical box. Afterward they had taken to referring to him as the musician, because what else could he have been doing in their shop? The next banker demanded security that nobody could provide. The third banker made an offer that would have taken the next forty years to pay off.
“Then came a man called Samuel Pike,” Vernon said. “He worked for the company that owned the buildings on the north side of Dean Street. He said that before they spent their money on music boxes and slippery floors, they wanted to know what kind of people we were. Josephine showed him the tickets. She took him to meet folks. He shook hands, kissed babies, had the fish dinner up at the fire hall. Then he said okay.”
“Why is he dead in all the pictures upstairs?” Ada said. “Because I’ve got a thing or two I’d like to tell him.”
“Pike was my mother’s partner,” Miriam said. “He was my godfather.”
“Well,” Ada said gently, “the fish dinner probably wasn’t all he got out of the deal.”
Pike had loaned the workshop the difference between what the neighborhood could raise and the purchase price of the building. In return he wanted the right to use its name and say his flagship maintained its own local repair workshop. People liked knowing where their things went. He also asked for an option to buy the space at the end of twenty years, should the workshop ever cease operating. It was supposed to prevent a future owner selling up to a gambling business or an operator of one of those storage places where it cost you nearly as much again to get your things back through the door.
“The building stayed in a trust,” Vernon said. “The folks who bought benches got a vote about what happened to it. Josephine and Pike had the final two votes. Except she never came to a meeting after she got sick. And he stopped coming when the neighborhood looked enough like it does now and the fish dinners were gone.”
“Is that the asset in my purchase agreement?”
“We’ve never seen your purchase agreement. We just got a piece of paper in January telling us what an excellent opportunity our retirement presented.”
Ada opened a cabinet on an envelope addressed to VERNON PRICE, CARE OF CURRENT OCCUPANT. It contained a letter from the estate of Samuel Pike congratulating Vernon on the successful conclusion of his long career and enclosing a form for him to sign acknowledging that no commercial repair services had been performed on the premises since the previous October.
“Did you sign anything?”
“Do I look retired to you?”
“You look like a man who turns soup around before he eats it.”
“Never been that hungry.”
Miriam called Caroline. Her assistant answered just as the first ring finished. That meant she had already been holding her phone, probably composing something she was glad to have the option not to put in writing.
“Have you found Ada’s complaints?”
“Yes. They’re there. Marked as routine enquiries, resolved at first contact. They got forwarded to a contracted service desk after her fifth attempt.”
“Can you get the schedule attached to the option on the Price workshop? Any notice or inspection that supported the exercise. And tell me what names are on the trustee list.”
“Yours, Peter’s and Thomas Pike’s.”
“Mine?”
“Signed in February. You executed a book of consents at the end of the month. That’s one of them. I’ve got your confirmation email.”
Miriam remembered the night. She had been in Philadelphia on a hotel bed with her laptop between her knees and a paper bowl of noodles turning to glue beside her. Her son had called her on video to show her an elm tree at the end of their road, wrapped in fluorescent yellow against the next morning’s trimming. He had made her promise to call the city to make sure it was a trim and not a removal. She had called, and then she had signed her name eleven times.
“Read me exactly what I signed.”
“‘Consent to classification of unstaffed service location as inactive under schedule C, pursuant to certification by regional operations.’ There’s no street address on the page with your name.”
“On the pages before it?”
“Yes.”
“So I signed anyway.”
“I put it in the book.”
“And I signed it,” Miriam repeated, because as a child she had learned mostly the wrong lessons about how to protect a woman she paid. She had learned to be generous with other people when what she needed to be was exact about herself.
The four million was an appraisal of the site with vacant possession. In the purchase price it represented nearly half the estate’s expected recovery. In the bank’s calculations, Caroline said, it represented a large part of the security for the rest. Nobody would call it four million if the building was full of tenants with rights and jobs and a loan that had long since been paid.