Chapter 1 - The Cold Pavement
The cold came up through the pavement first, and then through the thin soles of her shoes, and then it stopped being cold at all and became a kind of sound.
Lily had been standing outside the entrance of the Grand Meridian Hotel for two hours and forty minutes.
The evening had looked promising at six o'clock. There was a charity banquet in the ballroom — the kind of event with a coat check and an ice sculpture and cars that arrived one at a time and stopped under the portico exactly long enough for a woman in heels to step out onto dry ground.
She had brought eleven bouquets. She had wrapped every one of them herself that afternoon, sitting on the floor of the apartment with her back against the stove, using ribbon she had bought at a discount because the spool was short and the color was slightly off.
Eight had sold by seven-thirty.
Three remained, and the three were the smallest, and she had arranged them first, which meant they had been sitting in the basket the longest and had begun to look tired at the edges of the lilies. She had turned them twice already, so the bad side faced her.
She held the basket up against her chest and smiled at a man in a camel coat.
"Fresh flowers. They're fresh, sir. I can do a discount."
He looked through her at the doorman.
The doorman was watching the street. The man in the camel coat was already through the doors, and the warm air came out of the lobby in one long breath and touched her face and then withdrew, like a person changing their mind.
A woman in silver earrings walked past and said, without slowing, "You're blocking the entrance."
Lily was standing six feet from the entrance.
"I'm sorry," she said.
Another guest waved her off with the back of his hand, the way you wave off a cab that isn't yours. Two men in their thirties glanced into her basket and one of them laughed and said something to his friend she didn't catch, and they both laughed, and they went inside, and the door closed behind them with a soft, expensive sound that she had heard about four hundred times that night.
She kept smiling. This was a technique and she knew it was a technique, and she had decided a long time ago that knowing it was a technique did not make it less true. If you smile, they look. If they look, they might stop.
Very few of them stopped.
She counted while she waited, because counting was a way of not thinking.
Her mother's medicine, the monthly one, was one thousand two hundred and forty dollars. She had six hundred and ten in her coat pocket, and the pocket was held on by a single stitch she had been meaning to fix for three weeks. If she sold all three bouquets at full price she'd have seven hundred and fifteen. The gap wasn't a gap anymore. It had stopped being a number and become a room she couldn't leave.
There was also Noah's school trip in March. Forty dollars. There was the electric bill, which had gone to a second notice with a red stripe across the top. There was the ceiling over the kitchen, which leaked at the corner whenever it rained, and which she had patched three times, and which she was going to have to patch again, and she had already worked out that a proper repair would cost ninety dollars and she had also already worked out that ninety dollars was Noah's shoes plus the trip plus half a week of groceries.
So the ceiling would get patched again.
She had learned not to add the numbers up in public. Something about the total showed on her face. There had been a woman at the train station in November who had looked at her and pressed a five-dollar bill into her hand without buying anything, and Lily had taken it, and had felt something she had spent the entire walk home trying to name, and had finally named it: it wasn't gratitude. It was exposure.
At 8:05 she looked into the basket and did the thing she always did, which was to reach in and turn the bouquets so the good side faced out.
Then a security guard came over.
He was in his fifties with a bad knee and he did not want to do it. She could see that. Somehow that almost made it worse.
"Miss. You can't be at the entrance. You have to move on."
"I'm not on the property—"
"I know." He said it quietly. "Event manager radioed. You have to move."
"Okay," Lily said. "Okay. I'm going."
She apologized. She always apologized. She had apologized to a woman who had insulted her ten minutes earlier and she did not know how to stop doing it, and it was on a list of things about herself she intended to fix when there was time.
She walked to the curb. Behind her the doors kept opening and closing and the music kept getting out in small pieces — a string quartet playing something with a lot of movement in it that nobody in the room was listening to.
Then she stopped.
She stopped because there was nobody left to perform for. That was the thing about the curb. You could stand at the curb and there was nothing to hold your face up anymore.
Her shoulders came down.
She looked at the three bouquets in the basket, and the ribbons she had tied that afternoon, and the lilies that had gone soft at the edges, and she blinked hard, twice.
She had been awake since ten to four that morning. She had walked three miles to the market on the other side of the city and three miles back with everything she could afford on her back. Her mother had been coughing at night since Thursday, and the cough had changed on Saturday — gone deeper, settled into the chest — and neither of them had said anything about the change because saying it would have made it official.
She stood on the curb and let the disappointment sit on her for four seconds. Not longer. Four was what she allowed.
Then she straightened up, because that was what she did, and she looked across the street to work out which direction to walk home.
May you like
There was a black car parked there. It had been there when she arriving. She hadn't thought about it once.
The back door opened.
