to spin. It stopped, and she pulled off three separate plastic-wrapped bags, each with a number of hangers in them twist-tied together, also with tags stapled to the front of the plastic.
“Do you take all this on the bike?” I asked, looking at the duffels and the dry cleaning, wondering how Cary could possibly drive the scooter and hold everything at the same time.
“Something much cooler than that,” Cary said as the woman behind the counter handed over what looked almost like a folded-up stroller. Cary unfolded it, and I saw it was a wheeled cart. He gave it a spin. “See?”
“Much cooler,” I agreed.
“Leon Russo called, wanted to make sure we were bringing his soon,” she said, flipping though some papers on the desk. “Apparently he’s got a date tonight.” She arched an eyebrow.
“Gotcha,” Cary said. “We’ll go there first.” He stacked the bags in the cart, picked up the dry cleaning, and smiled at me. “Ready to go?”
I nodded and walked out the door he held open for me. “So it looks like I’m your wingman.” Cary groaned, which I took as a compliment. He started pulling the cart behind him while also carrying the dry cleaning—which seemed like a lot for one person to do. “You’re going to let me help, right?”
“Sure,” he said, giving me a quick smile. “Absolutely.”
* * *
Cary wouldn’t let me help.
He told me that he did this all the time by himself, so he was used to it. But I felt incredibly guilty as I walked along next to him, eating the snacks that he’d bought me, while he pushed the cart.
After a few stops, I was starting to get the hang of it. In a doorman building, we just left the laundry or dry cleaning at the desk in the lobby. In a walk-up, we buzzed, and when the door was opened for us, we went right to their doors, leaving the cart behind on the ground floor. Cary kept trying to get me to wait in the lobbies of the walk-ups, but I was having much too much fun peeking into these New York apartments. There was the couple we could hear screaming at each other as we got close to the door, but who were then perfectly pleasant as they picked up their laundry and wished us a good night—and then went back to screaming the second the door had closed. The apartment that had vinyl records stacked everywhere; the apartment that had three cats that came to the door along with their owner, sitting on the doorstep at his feet and looking up at us with big green eyes like they were all assessing our job performance. And if I hadn’t gone with him, I wouldn’t have found out to my shock that Mr. Russo—he of the hot date—had to be pushing ninety.
“Chip?” I asked Cary now, as we walked down the street toward our fourth building. I figured that if he wouldn’t let me help, I could at least offer some snacks.
“Thanks,” he said, shifting the dry cleaning to his other arm and taking some Doritos. “That’s really nice of you.”
“Well, you did pay for them.” He laughed. “You can have anything else you want too,” I said, holding out the bag, then remembered what Pete in the bodega had said. “Well—except for the peanut M&Ms, I guess.”
“Yeah, I’ll give those a miss.”
“Is it a bad allergy?” I asked, as Cary tipped his head toward Sixty-Third Street and we both turned down it, my feet falling into step with his. “Do you need me to take the bag away?”
“I’m fine when things are, you know, sealed in packaging. It’s just when they’re out and about that things turn deadly.”
“Deadly?” Cary nodded. “Jeez. So Mr. Peanut isn’t a friendly cartoon mascot to you. He’s, like, a serial killer.”
Cary turned to me and gave me a smile that was wide-open, like I’d just surprised him. “Exactly,” he said with a laugh. “Other people see an anthropomorphic peanut; I see evil in a top hat. Fun fact—”
“About Mr. Peanut?” I raised my eyebrows.
Cary laughed. “I’m full of them.”
“You’re full of something,” I parried back, then wondered a second later if I’d gone too far, but he just rolled his eyes good-naturedly and continued on.
“Mr. Peanut was actually designed in a contest by an eleven-year-old kid. He earned five dollars for it.”
“Five?”
“Well, five dollars went a lot further in 1906. But then Planters paid his way through college and he became