Page 27 of Levi

The kitchen is short on counter space with an old refrigerator that hums like a tour bus. It’s the room that changes my appraisal though. The cabinet by the stove is full of spices, labels faded, lids loose from use. Under foil in the refrigerator there’s shredded beef with peppers and olives, golden rice packed underneath. I don’t know what it’s called but I recognize home-cooked labor when I taste it.

He told me twice to eat whatever’s in the kitchen, so that’s what I do and I don’t feel guilty about it. Standing up, with the beef cold. It’s the best home-cooked meal I’ve had in years, and he didn’t even know I’d be the one eating it.

It’s weird, though. When Dante goes out, there’s not a hair out of place, and then he comes home to this pitiful kitchen and cooks like his grandmother is grading him.

After I eat, I check out his bathroom. It smells like him at quarter volume. The counter is a row of small expensive jars lined up. The Dante the world gets is carefully assembled right here every morning, two feet from a bathtub with a rust stain.

I uncap the cologne and breathe it once, straight, no mixer. Then once more, because nobody’s here to judge me. I set it back on its exact footprint, because he’d notice a drift.

His closet is organized like a store. Shirts hung by color, shoes lined up on a rack, the brown loafers with two more pairs beside them and one casual pair at the end. A shelf of t-shirts, soft and expensive. One pair of broken-in jeans. The jeans stop me cold for a second. Sometime, somewhere, maybe in Miami, there was an off-duty Dante walking around casually in faded jeans and a t-shirt. Damn, I bet that would be something worth seeing. I don’t dwell on that picture as long as I’d like to. The dresser drawers are folded as neat as the bed.

The bed itself I consider trying out for about four seconds, which is three too many. He’d spot the wrinkles right away. Touching his bed is a step too far gone, even for me.

The second bedroom tells a story of his career in boxes. Yard signs stacked face-to-face, a carton of flyers, his photograph on every one of them smiling with confidence as if the closing already happened.

Dante Reyes.

The flyer smile shows teeth. He’s never once shown me teeth when he smiles. Actually, he’s never smiled at me at all. Wonder what it would take to get one of those smiles out of him?

The entire coast along these parts probably knows his name, and now my duffel bag does too. The stack of flyers runs four hundred deep and he won’t miss one. It goes flat against the bottom of my duffel.

Beside the flyers there’s a box of business cards, and I take one of those too, but the card gets a legitimate reason. I should have one phone number in this town that doesn’t report to Freddie. It goes in my back jeans pocket, where it’ll stay.

The small, familiar gap between the boxes and the wall is where I land.

Chapter 10: Dante

The work crew’s van is waiting at the gate when I return from the apartment. Tex’s bag of ribs is riding in the back, next to a humidity meter. By Saturday I need solid proof the weed smell is gone. Jonathan Mitchell doesn’t buy opinions.

The crew wants the outside sealed and the inside left alone. I pull the sliding glass door shut. Seven hours, starting now.

I walk into the kitchen and spot four sub sandwiches sitting on the kitchen counter, warm as the room. Levi bought six yesterday and ate one or two. The rest he didn’t think to refrigerate. The kitchen already reeks of spoiled meat or mayonnaise. I throw them in the trash and carry the bag outside to the trash bin at arm’s length.

Tex’s bag of ribs goes on the middle shelf of the refrigerator. There’s half a rack and a double order of cornbread, because Stormy always packs extra. I don’t leave a note.

Benji’s hydrangeas are wilting in their vase. Days of Gulf air and they folded. The flowers go on the list with the baseboard. Everything in this house is rapidly dying, costing me money or both.

I set up in the living room and start pulling comps for Saturday. Jonathan’s client is a divorcée with a settlement. Women like her don’t buy square footage. They buy a feeling, and the feeling is that nothing has ever gone wrong here. I have until Saturday to install it in this house.

Then I hear a strange noise coming from the hallway.

Water has a sound when it’s somewhere it shouldn’t be. The laundry room is where it’s coming from. I run toward it. Foam is coming out of the machine’s seal and crossing the tile, six inches deep at the threshold. The commercial Miele washing machine is German, engineered like a vault. Right now, it’s blowing bubbles.

On top of it sits a box of dishwasher pods.

Levi’s clothes are in the machine. He loaded a wash, dropped in dishwasher pods, pressed start, and walked out to the curb. The pods are stored under the kitchen sink. The liquid detergent is eight inches above the washing machine. He picked the one that required a walk and a hunt to find.

I cancel the cycle. The seal gives up another gallon of water when I crack it. The staging towels are Egyptian cotton, forty dollars each, and now they’re mops. I get down on my knees in good shoes and push foam toward the drain. The shoes are from a shop in Coral Gables where the owner knows my name. They will not survive this.

Daniel, the head crew member, leans into the hallway. “The tenant again?” he asks.

“Yes, the tenant.”

He shakes his head and goes back to his work. Forty-five minutes gets the floor dry. The baseboard nearest the machine has gone soft at the bottom. It comes out this week. I add it to the note of damages on my phone.

The bottle of detergent is the size of a toddler and has a picture of a washing machine on the label. I rerun the load with the right soap and set the bottle on top of the machine, label out, so this never happens again.

Daniel packs up at noon. The system stays sealed until five. I check the humidity meter. Fifty-one percent and falling, the first thing in this house to behave since Benji and I left it Friday night.