Page 5 of The Tenant
“I think we should take in a tenant until you get back on your feet.”
I stare at her. Is she serious? “No. No way. I’m not living with a stranger.”
“Why not?”
That kidney donation idea is sounding better and better, although I might not get top dollar for it because of how much alcohol I’ve consumed over the last decade or so. “Because I’m not a twenty-year-old college student?”
Krista crinkles her nose. “You know, I had a roommate before we moved in together.”
“And youhatedher!”
Krista’s former roommate was a day care director by day and an amateur singer by night. During my visits to her achingly tiny two-bedroom apartment near Inwood Hill Park, her roommate would burst into song while showering, cooking, and sometimes in the middle of a sentence.
“So we’ll find someone more normal,” Krista says.
“In Manhattan?” I grumble. “Nobody is normal here. You won’t find anyone normal.”
She laughs and reaches for my hand, which is only partially covered in snickerdoodle crumbs. “I foundyou,” she points out.
No comment.
She slides closer to me on the sofa, resting her head against my shoulder. I brush the rest of the snickerdoodle crumbs off my T-shirt, then throw my arm around her shoulders to pull her close to me. What does she put in her hair that makes it so damn soft? There must be some secret ingredient in that girly shampoo she uses, because it’s just incredible.
“I don’t know what to do, Blake,” she murmurs into my neck. “I know you’re going to find something eventually, but… I’m worried.”
You and me both, babe.
“Maybe…” She holds out her left hand, where the diamond of her engagement ring sparkles under the overhead lights. “Maybe I should sell the ring. That will buy us some time.”
I suck in a breath. No. I donotwant her selling that. I mean, yes, it would buy us another two months of breathing room, but I don’t care. My dad with his struggling hardware store—passed down from my grandfather—got my mother an engagement ring with a fake diamond that wasstillembarrassingly tiny. I was so proud that I got Krista not only a real diamond but one that all her friends could be jealous of. If I made her sell that ring to keep us afloat…
No. I won’t let her do it.
I swore I would always take care of Krista, in sickness and in health. No, wait, that’s what Iwillswear when we get married. And if I don’t figure a way out of this situation, that’s never going to happen. She won’t marry me if I make us both homeless.
“Fine,” I say. “Let’s get a tenant.”
4
Single upstairs bedroom available immediately in Upper West Side brownstone on a quiet tree-lined street. Bedroom is fully furnished and has two large windows and lots of closet space. Large shared kitchen, dining area, and living room. Subway adjacent. No pets, no parking provided.
We havetwo prospective tenants coming to look at the spare room in the next hour.
I’m not optimistic. Since Krista posted our ad all over town and on the internet, we have had about a dozen people look at the room, and all of them wereawful. I’m not exaggerating. “Awful” is a charitable word for what they were.
One of them was a self-professed kickboxing fanatic. He then demonstrated by kicking a hole in our wall. So now we have to get that fixed. Another woman showed up with the most ferocious animal I’ve ever seen. She claimed he was a dog, but I’m not convinced it wasn’t a wolf or worse.
The worst one by far was two days ago—a short guy with a scraggly goatee wearing a white Linux hat. He grilled me relentlessly for twenty minutes about the internet capabilities of the place. After I did my best to answer his questions, he reached into the sack he was carrying and pulled out adrill. He said he needed to drill through the wall to check the wiring, and I had to physically stop him, or else he would have done it. I didn’t need a second hole to patch up.
Now we have a woman named Elizabeth coming in about five minutes, then another woman named Whitney in half an hour. I’m sure they’ll both be awful. But in case they’re not, we have cleaned the house from top to bottom. I even sponged off the inside of the refrigerator in case they look in there.
Krista places a plate of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies on our small dining table, and when I try to grab one, she swats at me. “That’s forguests.”
“Krista, this isn’t an open house. There are two people coming and, like, twenty cookies on the plate.”
She shoots me a look, and I withdraw my hand. Her gaze sweeps over me as she does one last check to make sure I’m wearing pants today, which Iam. I’ve even shaved, which makes me look significantly less like a homeless person.
“Do I meet with your approval?”
