Page 7 of The Vacancy In Room 10

“Uh. I’m supposed to ask you about borrowing a cat?”

“Is the cat for your own use?” he says, oddly formal and without hesitation, as if this is an everyday request.

“Um...108.”

“Does Sylvie have a mouse? She never shuts the front door. They can walk in.”

“They can. Yes,” I say, and he nods as if we understand one another about a very important subject.

“I prefer if you take Sister Christian. I usually give out Clawdia for such things, but she has a sour stomach,” he says.

I look around wondering how to figure out which cat to grab.

“So just...?” I give a confused twirly gesture with my hand, looking for which cat to snag.

“She’s the beautiful black Siberian in the sink.”

I go into the kitchen and see four cats on the counter. One fat black one curled up in the sink. I pick her up like I’m holding Simba over a cliff and walk to the front door.

“She can bring her back tomorrow. Sister Christian likes to take her time, but she’ll get it.”

After I drop the cat off, I see the little mouse scurrying along the concrete pathway on the side of the building, which is lucky because I never planned to let Sister Christian massacre the poor thing anyway. I was going to come back with a hunk of Gouda and a butterfly net, but instead I take off my Thunderbirds ball cap and scoop up the would-be cartoon mouse and release him into the wooded area behind the building. I name him Fig and wave goodbye as he stitches his way through the leaves and brush until he’s gone.

On my way back to the office, I notice the girl in front of Henry’s door is gone. I wonder if it’s his wife.

Everyone’s heard about his suicide, of course, and the whispers in a place like this travel quickly and come with many versions. It doesn’t matter that the papers posted that he was found in the river. Around here he was found “hanging from the rafters,” forget that there are no rafters, or he was “found in his bed with a gun in his hand,” although no gunshots were reported. And of course, there are a few that refuse to go in the pool now because they say he was found face down floating in his own blood, and they fished him out in the middle of the night, which is why no one saw it.

It makes sense, though, the crazy gossip. The Sycamores is where the broken people live. Everyone is a bit off in their own way. Everyone seems to be filling a void or mourning a deep loss of some kind. Since I’m the one they call to fix leaky toilets and clogged pipes, I hear more than I want to. Maybe they tell more than they want to, too—a knee-jerk reaction that accompanies their loneliness, and I’m just the person who happens to be there to absorb it all.

There’s Babs who glides around the pool all day in a unicorn floatie drinking gin martinis, who calls me to reach things in high cupboards in her apartment on a weekly basis even though we’re the same height, and then she forces me to sit and eat a lemon Bundt cake or apple crumble and drink powdered Lipton tea—and I always do.

There’s the guy in 119 with the face tattoos who’s been spotted eating SpaghettiOs out of the can on the balcony on more than one occasion, who tells me that Gwen in 201 has the herpes. Gwen in 201 tells me that Leonard in 111 got his dick stuck in the vacuum and had to go to urgent care, and Leonard tells me that Gordon in 104 steals Amazon packages, so look out. Then there’s Rosa. She’s one of the “pool girls” along with Crystal and Jackie. They’re a permanent fixture at the plastic poolside tables while their kids beat each other with pool noodles and eat Flamin’ Hot Cheetos all day. Sometimes Letty and Tina join them, but Letty and Tina have jobs, so they have less time to chain-smoke and argue over cards and who owes who change from the 7-Eleven Big Gulp run, and which contestant on The Bachelor deserves love and which ones are just whores who are trying to grow their Instagram accounts.

Rosa’s quiet. She’s one of the people who doesn’t air her dirty laundry and who I know little about. A few others keep to themselves, too, but most folks are like Crystal with three young kids and another on the way—but no father in sight—who spends her days poking at her phone with her long corn-chip fingernails, perpetually FaceTiming God knows who. And there’s her partner in crime, Jackie, who doesn’t seem to possess an inside voice. She’s rarely seen without a blue Big Gulp and a pack of Camels in hand, and her voice can be heard far and wide, arguing about who’s cheating at Go Fish and gin rummy, who can “fuck off” and “suck her dick” because she ain’t gonna be disrespected.

I walk across the concrete patio, wiping cat hair off my denim shorts, and pull up a chair next to the pool girls. A giant box of malted milk balls and Junior Mints are melting in the sun. Crystal must have taken her kids to the movies. I take a sticky milk ball and pop it in my mouth. The girls stay focused on their game of Crazy Eights. Rosa holds up her empty hands showing that she’s out, meaning she won, and the others moan and call her a cheater the way they do every game no matter who wins. I really don’t see the point of it all.

“You seen that chick up there?” Jackie asks, nodding to the strip of balcony outside Henry’s apartment. “It’s the wife, yeah?”

“It must be,” I say. I saw the email from the owner today, saying his wife was continuing the lease for now and planned to move in, which I find desperately sad. If that were me, I’d want to be as far away from the place as possible. I guess she has her reasons, though. I don’t plan to share this information with the pool girls, of course.

“That’s rough,” Rosa says, reshuffling the cards.

“Hard to believe he’s...like, dead. He was so nice, ya know?” Crystal says.

“And hot,” Jackie adds, flicking a cigarette butt into the air.

“Inappropriate!” Crystal snaps.

The butt lands in the pool, and one of the kids starts wailing and splashing water at it as if it will attack him.

“For Christ’s sake, Kevin. Just toss it out...just... God, take a pill!” Crystal stomps over and fishes the butt out of the water, flicking it onto the wet concrete. “Happy!?” Kevin stops crying, and she returns to the table, picking up the hand Rosa’s dealt her.

“Ya want us to deal ya in?” Jackie asks me as the toddler on her knee pushes a melted Junior Mint into her ear. She swipes at it with a napkin and sets the child on the ground. The constant chaos of misbehaving and screaming children seems only a minor annoyance to these women—something that just exists in the background that they’re forced to address now and then in order to keep the children alive, but requiring no effort beyond that basic instinct of not letting them starve or drown.

“Nah, I gotta patch a hole in the drywall in 102.”

“How the hell do you know how to fix drywall?” Rosa asks.

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