He’ll say it’s cold.
Let him.”
He said it was cold.
At the signing.
“Your mother doesn’t trust me,” he’d said, laughing, and had signed a lease with M. Marchetti Properties LLC — a twenty-year term at a rent my mother set low, “so he can build something, and so I can watch him do it.”
She watched.
She watched him put his name on the awning and never once mention hers.
She watched him tell the newspaper he’d “found the space himself.”
She watched him send me in at four-thirty for eleven years, and she said nothing, because she was a woman who had come to this country with a notebook and had learned that you say nothing until the paper is ready.
When she d*ed, four years ago, the building came to me.
Only me.
Vincent had been at the reading of the will.
He had heard “the building at 1400 Delmar Avenue, including all commercial leases,” and he had heard it the way men like Vincent hear things, which is as noise between the parts about him.
