Ilana struggled with a poorly packed box of books. Must have been the last one she packed because it wasn’t full and when the weight shifted she felt something pull in her wrist.
She decided against taking a break, figuring that would just give the wrist time to hurt more.
Heading out the front door to grab another load, a guy about her age with an overstuffed backpack who looked like he was in a hurry waved.
“Welcome to the Mingot Arms,” he said. The guy had a wholesome, cereal commercial smile.
Ilana hoped the smile matched the demeanor.
The little brick six unit was overpriced, but well maintained and was adjacent to the Hearns Greenway bike path. She could have done way worse.
When her car and the little trailer she borrowed from Ratz was almost empty, a woman was standing in the doorway to the stairs in a rather tattered housecoat.
“Hi, I’m Evelyn. Don’t smoke on your porch. It wafts up to my windows. I’ll call the landlord. You wanna smoke you gotta-”
“I don’t smoke, Evelyn. Relax. I plan on spending a lot of time on the porch, but you don’t have to worry about smoking. And if I have a guest, I promise they won’t smoke eith-”
“Don’t have a lot of guests, honey. It’s noisy. And watch out for Herb.”
Evelyn turned and walked upstairs without further explanation.
When she was done moving the last of her boxes, she brought a beer out onto the porch and settled back into the tie-dyed, cloth-covered springy recliner her mom had given her for her first apartment a decade ago.
She put her bare feet up on the cement wall of the porch, watching bikes and a few rollerbladers cruise down the path.
Ilana knew she’d be on the path tomorrow and she smiled. The smile evaporated as she realized the guy with the nice smile had a bike lock attached to his backpack.
He was probably Herb, the guy Evelyn warned her about. It made her sad. Or maybe Evelyn was an old crank and Herb was–
“Well hello, pretty newcomer,” a voice to her right said, dragging out some of the syllables like a circus ringmaster in a horror film.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Jimmy Doom's Roulette Weal to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.