I understood, slow, that Mrs. Vance had been taking care of both of us the whole time, in ways neither Otis nor I had ever been meant to notice.
Mrs. Vance had been taking care of both of us the whole time.
I went to see Otis the same afternoon I found out, sat down across from him in the same back booth I’d cried in the week before, and told him everything Franklin had explained.
Otis went quiet a long moment, turning his coffee mug slow between two enormous hands.
“She never breathed a word of it to me,” he said finally. “Not once, in fifteen years of paying that rent to a management company I always figured belonged to somebody I’d never met.”
“You did meet her,” I said. “Every Tuesday and Thursday, eight o’clock sharp.”
Otis let out a laugh that sounded half like a sob. “Guess I did, at that.”
“Guess I did, at that.”
“I’m not raising your rent, Otis,” I told him. “Not this year. Not any year I’ve got a say over it. This place is the only reason I had anywhere steady to land when I first got to this town. I’m not about to be the reason it stops being steady for you.”
Otis reached across that table and gripped my shoulder, hard, the way a man does when words aren’t quite going to cover the whole distance of what he means.
