Red Pen

You didn't go. You told her so last night, somewhere around the fourth text, and she answered with one word, Good, and then nothing, and then at 12:51 a.m., Bring your résumé tomorrow. Printed. 8 a.m.

You've been wondering since then how she got your number. You decide not to ask. It's a building. People have each other's numbers.

At 7:59 you knock on 4B.

"It's open," she calls. "Obviously."

You've never been inside. You stop in the doorway and just look.

It's the same layout as yours, flipped like a mirror, but nothing else is the same. Every piece of furniture is old and every piece of it is perfect. A walnut sideboard that glows like honey. Bentwood chairs. A cast-iron radiator painted deep green. The floors are the same oak as yours but someone has sanded them and oiled them until they look like the inside of a violin. The window trim has been stripped to the original wood. Above the kitchen counter, a pegboard holds hand planes and chisels and a row of wooden-handled tools so worn the handles have taken the shape of somebody's grip.

And on the wall by the window, a framed photograph. A brick storefront, a man with a big mustache standing in the doorway with his arms folded, a hand-painted sign above him: DOBROWSKI & DAUGHTER, EST. 1988. Beside him, holding his hand, a tall skinny girl in overalls, maybe twelve, scowling at the camera with exactly the scowl Marlena is giving you right now.

"Are you going to stand there or sit?"

She's at the kitchen table in a white tank top and an open flannel, barefoot, hair up with the pencil through it, a mug of black coffee and a red pen in front of her. There's sawdust on her forearm. She looks like she's been up for hours. She looks, honestly, like the reason men walk into parking meters.

You sit. You hand her the résumé. She uncaps the pen.

It is a massacre.

She crosses out "dynamic." She crosses out "results-driven." She crosses out "synergies" so hard the pen goes through the paper. She draws arrows. She writes questions in the margins in sharp slanted capitals: WHAT DID YOU ACTUALLY DO? HOW MUCH DID IT SAVE? WHO NOTICED?

"Nobody noticed," you say, reading upside down. "That's kind of the point of the layoff."

"Then make them notice now." She taps the stair line. "Delancey. Tell me what happened."

So you tell her. The stair stringer detail, the load calculation somebody senior had done wrong, the way you'd stayed late three nights to redraw the whole run and walked it into Glasby's office and he'd said "good catch" and given the credit to the project lead in the client meeting. While you talk, she writes. When you finish, she turns the paper around.

Identified a structural error in a 40-unit residential stair package before construction, redesigned the stair run, and prevented an estimated $200,000 in rework.

You read it twice. "That sounds like someone I'd hire."

"It sounds like you, Ethan." She caps the pen. "Without the panic."

"Why are you doing this?"

The question comes out before you can stop it. Her eyes come up to yours and hold. There's a long pause, the radiator ticking, a garbage truck grinding on Crane Street below.

"Because you're hopeless," she says. "And I can't stand watching people do things badly. It's a medical condition."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the one you're getting." She stands up and takes your mug, which you didn't notice she'd filled. "Type that up. Send it to me before you send it to anyone else."

Larissa shows up at six.

You hear her before you see her, because Larissa announces herself everywhere: the laugh, the heels on the stoop, her voice floating up four flights. "Oh my God, this building is so cute, it's like a haunted house!"

You come down. She's in the vestibule, gorgeous in a short white dress, platinum hair in long waves, holding her phone up and turning in a slow circle like she's filming the place for content. Which she is.

"There you are, Ethan!" She throws her arms around your neck. She smells like expensive vanilla. "Okay, I know, I know, I was a monster. I was stressed. But my friend is having this rooftop thing in Northern Liberties and I said I'd bring you, and you can't say no, because you're single and sad and I'm saving you."

"I'm not sad."

"You're a little sad." She pats your cheek.

Above you on the landing, a door opens. Marlena comes down the stairs with a bag of recycling, still barefoot, flannel and tank top, sawdust and all. She looks at Larissa. Larissa looks at her. For one second Larissa's face does a complicated thing, the way women look at other women who are more beautiful than they expected to be in a crumbling building.

"Hi," Larissa says brightly. "Are you the landlady?"

"I'm the woman across the hall," Marlena says, and steps past both of you to the door.

On her way back up she pauses on the stair beside you. Doesn't look at you. Speaks low.

"Structural defect," she says. "Don't build on it."

Then she's gone.

The party is on a roof three times nicer than yours, with string lights and a hot tub and a bartender in suspenders making drinks with smoke in them. You know nobody. Larissa knows everyone. She introduces you twice as "my friend who just got laid off, isn't that brave?" and then, forty minutes in, she meets a man in loafers with no socks who has a boat at the marina in Penn's Landing.

At eleven you look up from the corner where you've been holding the same drink for an hour and she's gone. Loafers is gone too.

She texts you at 11:40. omg ran into an old friend, don't wait up!! you're the best xx

You walk home. It's two miles. You don't mind. The city is warm and loud and then quiet, and you think about red pen, and someone writing it sounds like you on a piece of paper, and how nobody's said anything like that to you in a long time.

At the corner of Crane Street you look up and see a light on in 4B. Just one, the kitchen. You stand there for a second and then feel stupid and go in.

There's an envelope under your door.

Plain white, your name and 4A typed on the front. You open it standing in the hallway.

Dear Tenant,

This is a reminder that rent is due on the 1st. Tenants experiencing financial hardship are encouraged to contact management directly to discuss options. No tenant in good standing will be penalized for a temporary hardship.

Tadek Holdings LLC

There's no name. No phone number. A P.O. box on Girard Avenue.

You read it again. Financial hardship. You were laid off three days ago. You haven't told anyone except Moses, Larissa, and the woman across the hall.

You stand in the hall for a long time looking at the closed door of 4B.

Then you realize something that makes the back of your neck go cold. You have lived in this building for five years. You fought Strube for three of them, through a winter with no heat and an eviction letter you've tried very hard to forget. And since January, when the rent checks started going to a P.O. box instead, you have never once seen, or asked, who owns 1129 Crane Street now.