out of your hair.”
Fink and the other guy start giggling again. Doug gives them an exaggerated raise of the eyebrows and says, “The little lady wants me to show her upstairs.”
At the word upstairs my temples throb. I hadn’t thought about what it would be like to actually go inside. But if Sukey lived here, it couldn’t have been that bad.
“Why don’t you give old Dougie a hand up, honey.”
He belches with so much vibrato I wonder if he’s been classically trained.
My eyes flick to the crutches leaning against the wall. Of course.
I hold out my arms. He puts down his now-empty beer can and grabs my wrists in a fireman’s hold. The warmth and dryness of his hands surprises me, like baseball mitts left out in the sun. I lean back and pull while he wriggles up on his leg, and when he’s more or less standing he clamps a hand on my shoulder to brace himself while I hand him the crutches. I adjust my footing and we almost lose our precarious balance, but we find it again and Doug gets his crutches in place under his arms and then he’s standing on his own.
For a second, we eye each other, catching our breath. Doug hop-steps over to the greasy glass door of the Imperial and pulls it open. I wait behind him, casting one last glance at the bright, sunny street before I step inside, hoping it’s what Sukey would have wanted me to do.
chapter ten
“Me and Sukey-girl were neighbors, eh. We shared a wall.”
The elevator is broken, so Doug and I are climbing the stairs to the fourth floor. The stairwell is dark, narrow, and carpeted with what appears to be pureed roadkill. So far, we are on step number twelve and making such slow progress I’m pretty sure I’ll have gray hair by the time we reach the fourth floor. He places the rubber tips of his crutches on a step, braces himself, and hoists his good leg up. This process is complicated by the fact that he is totally hammered and keeps putting his crutches at crazy angles and having to start again.
“We were real good neighbors. Sukey-girl was a sweetie pie. She gave me Snoogie. That’s my kitty cat, eh.”
As Doug rambles, I remember Sukey dabbing yellow paint on my nose: I have my own studio, Kiri. Right downtown.
Why would she lie? I would have given her my entire allowance every week. I would have given her my birthday money. I would have begged Mom and Dad to let her move back in. Anything so she didn’t have to live in a place like this.
Step fourteen. Doug plants his crutch in the middle of a half-eaten egg salad sandwich that’s lying on the step. He doesn’t notice and swings himself up anyway, then pauses to take a rest. The stale, eggy stench of the sandwich fills up the entire stairwell. Doug burps.
“Almost there, honey.”
I roll my eyes. Almost there, unless you count a million more steps full of belching, dirty jokes, and rogue egg salad sandwiches.
Doug interprets my expression correctly for once and scowls.
“What’s a matter? You got a TV show to watch?”
He squints at me reproachfully. When he looks at me like that, I do feel kind of ashamed for being impatient with an old disabled man trying to climb a million stairs on crutches, even if he is an obnoxious drunk. I bite my lip.
“Sorry. It’s just, my friend’s waiting with the van.”
“I know, curly. You got somewhere to be.”
He lifts the crutch that was on top of the egg salad sandwich and we start climbing again. The sandwich, horrifyingly, sticks to the bottom of the crutch and rides along until four steps after the second-floor landing, when it finally peels off. To make things worse, Doug clams up and proceeds in wounded silence while I drag along behind him. I never thought I’d wish for Doug to start talking, but now that he’s not, there’s nothing to distract me and I start to notice things I’d rather not notice, like the sound of a violent argument taking place a few floors above us.
Once we leave the stale sandwich behind, the stairwell smells sweet and rank, like a recycling bin full of soda cans gone syrupy in the heat. There’s trash everywhere: food wrappers; nasty, scrunched-up paper towels; shoes and clothing that look like they were dredged up from a murder scene at the bottom of a swamp. I’m pretty sure