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Still, I make a note of all the jobs that land within my narrow window of qualifications and compose cover letters for each of them. I resist the urge to begin them all withPlease give me a job. Please let me prove myself. Please give me back the feeling of self-worth that’s been missing from my life.
Instead, I write the platitudes all potential employers want to read. Stuff about seeking new challenges, adding to my work experience, reaching my goals. I send them off with my résumé. Three in all, joining the previous four I’ve sent in the past two weeks.
My expectations of hearing back from any of them aren’t high. Lately I’ve found it best not to get my hopes up about things. My father was the same way.Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, he used to say.
By the end, he ran out of hope, and nothing could have prepared him for what lay in store.
With the job search, such as it is, out of the way, I open a spreadsheet on my laptop and try to come up with a budget for the next fewweeks. It’s frighteningly tight. In the past, I relied on credit cards to get me through lean times. That’s no longer an option. All three of my cards are maxed and, at the moment, frozen. All I have to live on is what’s in my checking account, a figure that makes my heart sink when I check my balance.
I now have only four hundred and thirty-two dollars to my name.
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I now have only three hundred and twenty-two dollars to my name.
Thanks, wretched cell phone contract that I can’t escape for another year.
Unlike the deferments on my student loans or the temporary hardship agreements with the credit card companies, the phone was an expense I couldn’t put off. Already I was a week late with the payment and didn’t want to risk losing service. Potential employers can’t call a phone that’s not working. So there it went—another hundred and ten bucks gone in an instant.
I console myself with the fact that an unemployment check will be automatically deposited into my account at the stroke of midnight. It’s cold comfort. I’d rather be receiving an employment check for an honest week’s work.
Because my current cushy situation doesn’t feel honest.
It feels like freeloading.
Never take anything you haven’t earned, my father used to say.You always end up paying for it one way or another.
With that in mind, I decide to clean, even though the apartment’s already sparkling. I start in the upstairs bathroom, wiping down the spotless countertops and spraying the mirrors with glass cleaner. Then it’s on to the bedroom, where I dust and sweep the carpet with a sleek vacuum found in the hall closet.
The cleaning continues in the kitchen, where I wipe down the countertops. Then in the study, where I run a feather duster over the desk, the top of which has been cleared of the previous owner’s belongings. It strikes me as odd that so much of what she owned remains in the apartment. Her furniture. Her dishes. Her vacuum. Yet anything that could identify her has been removed.
Clothes in the closet? Gone.
Family photos? Also gone, although in both the study and the sitting room are discolored rectangles on the wallpaper where something used to hang.
I look around the study, acutely aware that I’ve moved from cleaning to snooping. But not in a prurient way. I have no interest in any of the dead owner’s dirty secrets. What I’m after is a hint of who she was. If this was the apartment of a CEO or movie star, I want to know who it was.
I search the bookshelf first, scanning the rows of volumes for signs of the dead owner’s profession, if not her outright identity. Nothing gives it away. The books are either classics bound in faux leather with their titles embossed in gold or bestsellers from a decade ago. Only one catches my attention—a copy ofHeart of a Dreamer. Fitting, considering the location.
It’s a hardcover, in perfect condition. So unlike my beloved paperback, with its cracked spine and pages that have been so thoroughly turned they’re now fuzzy at the edges. When I flip the book over, the author stares back at me.
Greta Manville.
It’s not an entirely flattering picture. Her face is made up of harsh angles. Sharp cheekbones. Pointy chin. Narrow nose. On her lips is the barest hint of a smile. It makes her look amused, but in a way no one else would understand. As if she and the photographer had just shared a private joke right before the shutter clicked.
She never wrote another book. I looked her up after Jane read meHeart of a Dreamer, eager to find more of her work. Only there wasnothing more to be read. Just that single, perfect novel published in the mid-eighties.
I putHeart of a Dreamerback on the shelf and move to the desk. Its contents are meager and disappointingly generic. Paper clips and Bic pens in the top drawer. A few empty file folders and old copies ofThe New Yorkerin the bottom ones. Definitely no personalized stationery or documents with names on them.
But then I notice the address labels stuck to the magazine covers. All of them bear not only the Bartholomew’s address and this apartment number, but a single name.
Marjorie Milton.
I can’t help but feel let down. I’ve never heard of her, which means she was, in all likelihood, your average rich lady—born with money, died with money, now has family squabbling over that money.
Disappointed, I drop the magazines back in the desk and continue cleaning, this time in the sitting room. I hit the biggies—carpet, windows, coffee table—before running a dust mop across the crown molding, my nose mere inches from the wallpaper.
The pattern is even more oppressive up close. All those flowers opening like mouths, their petals colliding. The oval spaces between them are colored a shade of red so dark it flirts with blackness. They remind me of eyes studding the wallpaper.