Chapter 3: The Room Above the Laundromat
The flat-top ticked as it cooled, a sound like a spoon tapped slowly against metal. Sabrina worked the scraper along the far edge where the grease burned hardest, and the black came up in curls that smelled like onions left in a pan overnight. Behind her, Roy had already turned his back, wrapping the last of the brisket in foil.
Across the street, four floors up, the coffee had gone cold in Diego's hand twenty minutes ago and he was still holding the cup. He hadn't sat down. He'd been standing at the window on and off since nine, looking at the lit side of the diner the way you look at a screen when you don't care what's on it, except that he cared, and the caring had long since stopped feeling like anything he'd chosen.
The dining room was closed. Somebody had flipped the chairs onto the tables, and the neon sign over the register was off, so the only real light left came from the kitchen and the bug zapper buzzing by the back door. The fryer oil had gone quiet. That was the part she liked, those last twenty minutes when the whole place stopped shouting at her.
Duncan came around the end of the line with a stack of half pans against his chest. He set them down on the steel and started taped lids with masking tape, writing dates he didn't have to check. His hands knew this job cold. He worked with a black T-shirt on under the apron even in the heat, and he'd rolled the sleeves up past his elbows.
"That's been sitting out," Sabrina said, nodding at the bacon.
"It's fine."
She scraped. The curl came up, dark and brittle, and she flicked it into the trash barrel between her feet.
For a while the only sounds were the tape pulling off the roll and the scraper on the steel. Then Duncan set the last pan on the speed rack and walked the two steps it took to be beside her. Not touching. Just there.
"Hey," he said, quiet. "Why'd you stop answering me?"
She kept the scraper moving. If she stopped, she'd have to look at him, and the whole thing was easier at an angle.
"I've been working," she said.
"You've been working for six hours. You had your phone in your apron the whole time."
Roy's shoulder shifted at the grill, the way it did when he heard something he didn't want to be part of. He kept his head down, working a scraper of his own along the cold half of the flat-top.
Sabrina reached the end of the steel and turned. Duncan stood with one hip against the prep station, arms folded, and he wasn't angry about it. That was the worst part. He was only curious, and curious was a thing she couldn't fight with. You couldn't tell a man to take his face somewhere else.
In the apartment, Diego opened the drawer for a pen and closed it again the second he saw what was under the takeout menus. He stood in front of the drawer a while with his hand still on the handle. Then he walked back to the window.
"I got a room," she said.
Duncan straightened a little.
"Above the laundromat on Bellview. It's mine, it's eighty a week, and it's fine." She dropped the scraper in the sink and turned the water on it, hard, to hear it cover whatever he said next. "So I don't need a ride home anymore."
The water ran. Duncan watched her hands in it.
"That's what I am?" he said. "A ride."
She turned the water off. Steam came up off the sink and fogged the bottom of her glasses, and she wiped them on her shirt with two fingers.
"No," she said. "That's not what you are."
The clock over the pass said 12:41. Diego had stopped looking at it and started looking at the door of the laundromat instead, though there was nothing to see there yet but the buzzing sign.
Roy spoke without turning his head. "Walk-in light," he said. "Somebody kill it."
Sabrina walked back and did it. The walk-in breathed cold onto her arms when she pulled the door, and inside, the shelves were stacked and dated and orderly, and she stood in there a second longer than she had to, because it was quiet and nothing in there had ever asked her a question.
When she came out, Duncan had his jacket on. Roy was untying his apron at the back door, and he left without saying anything to either of them, which was how Roy left every night.
Sabrina pulled her apron over her head and hung it on the hook by the dish station. Her hands smelled like lemon cleaner and cold steel. She got her bag off the shelf under the register and she could feel Duncan waiting, keys in his fist, not pushing, just standing there in the doorway with the alley behind him gone dark.
"Bellview's on my way," he said. He said it easy, like it wasn't a question and also was. "You could come back after. Have a drink. I'm not going to do anything you don't put your hands on."
She looked at him, unreadable, and picked up her bag.
She didn't say yes. She didn't say no. She walked out past him into the alley, and he fell into step beside her, and the side door closed behind them, and the lock clicked over by itself.
Across the street, four floors up, Diego watched them come out of the alley together.
He set the cup down. He went for his coat.
He didn't run. He came down the stairs at an ordinary pace, and the street was cold and mostly empty, one car idling at the light by the laundromat and a dog barking somewhere behind the buildings. He stayed on his own side of the street and walked north, and he told himself he was just walking, that a man can walk. His hands were in his pockets and the small brass key was in the right one, and it had been in there since she folded it into his palm, and he had not decided yet what he was going to do with it.
Up ahead, the two of them crossed at the corner. Sabrina was talking with her hands out of her sleeves. Duncan laughed at something, one short sound that carried across the empty street, and Diego stopped under the awning of the dry cleaner and let them get further ahead.
The laundromat sign was still buzzing. It was the only thing on that block that was. They stopped under it, and Duncan said something with his chin tipped toward the stairs on the side of the building, and Sabrina shook her head and then, after a second, said something back.
Duncan looked at her a while. Then he put his hands in his jacket and walked off up Bellview toward his car, unhurried, and he didn't look back once.
Sabrina stood under the sign alone for a moment. She got her keys out of her bag, and then she went up the metal stairs, and Diego watched her go, and he watched the third window on the left come on yellow a minute later. There was