open the heavy back door and stepped into the alley.
The Blend was pleasantly situated on a street corner. Our front faced brightly lit, well-traveled Hudson. Our long, side wall featured a line of French doors. Stretching the length of the first floor, the doors paralleled a quiet, residential side street with sidewalks wide enough to use for outside seating in good weather.
The back of the Blend was my least favorite part of the property. Like all alleys, ours was a gloomy strip of unadorned concrete that ran the length of the building. We kept our Dumpster back here, which was emptied twice a week by a private hauling company.
I moved toward it now through the chilly wet drizzle. Although New York enjoyed temperate Octobers, with days as high as seventy, tonight’s weather had turned downright raw. The clouds were thick, and the early evening already looked darker than our Italian-roasted Sumatra. Eager to get back inside, I lifted the Dumpster’s lid with one hand and heaved the green plastic bag inside the metal container.
For a split second, I glanced up, toward the end of the alley. That’s when I saw it—a dim outline slumped against our building’s brick wall.
My god . . .
I stood and gawked for a stunned five seconds. Then I let go of the Dumpster’s lid, barely registering the earsplitting clang of the heavy metal.
There’s a body, I realized. There’s a body in my alley.
THREE
LONG after the fact, what I did next would seem less than brilliant. Okay, yes, in retrospect, I probably should have run back inside and yelled for help. I should have been too upset to be intrigued, but I wasn’t.
Why exactly I felt no fear, I couldn’t swear to. Maybe what I witnessed on 9/11 makes all other potential threats seem trivial. Maybe now that my daughter has left home, I’m done with being circumspect 24/7. Maybe it was simply a residual by-product of excessive caffeine consumption, but I’d reached a point in my life when potential threats no longer cowed me. Something spurred me forward . . . in this case, through the shadows behind the Blend.
For a moment, I couldn’t make out much more than a silhouette at the end of the alley. The misty darkness was too thick, the streetlight’s illumination stopping at the sidewalk. I considered this might be a homeless person, even though the homeless were much more prevalent in the funkier East Village than the more affluent West, and when they took to sleeping (or passing out) on the New York pavement, authorities picked them up and delivered them to city shelters.
Shelters weren’t a picnic. The homeless avoided them for many reasons, including fear of theft—of what little property they had—and violence, or unwillingness to comply with the shelter’s rules. But the imperfect system was better than some of the bleaker alternatives.
When I’d first managed the Blend, in my twenties, I’d come across a homeless man during a morning walk. I’d dropped Joy off at kindergarten and was in no hurry to return to our little apartment. Matt had stumbled in during the wee hours, zonked after an endless flight from somewhere—Hawaii, Mexico, Costa Rica . . . take your pick. Silly me wanted to surprise him by doing his unpacking, but I was the one who’d gotten the surprise. I’d found it buried at the bottom of his Pullman: a box of condoms.
For a few pathetic seconds, I’d tried to tell myself that my young husband had bought the box upon touchdown at JFK, anticipating his return to our bed. But it was far too easy to examine the box and see that there were not in fact twenty-four foiled packets inside, as the black box with the purple lettering proclaimed. There were fourteen.
During his three weeks away from me, Matt had used ten condoms—and I doubted very much he’d used them during the ninety-minute taxi ride from Queens to Manhattan.
It wasn’t the last time Matt would stray. For years he would deny it. The condom box, he would later explain, was something he’d had on hand for weeks before the trip and packed in case I decided to fly out and join him for a weekend. I’d accepted such a lame excuse for the same reason all wives of cheating husbands do: I didn’t want my marriage to end.
On that particular morning, the morning I found the condoms, I was still too much in love with Matt. I also loved managing his mother’s coffeehouse, baking