In the lobby, the security guard waved goodbye warmly, perhaps with a tinge of embarrassment for him, to the broker and said mumbled something unintelligible. I was clearly not the first person who had come to see the apartment.
It was nice enough, but I didn’t like the neighborhood. A bit too run down for me, with empty lots and abandoned-looking warehouses in between the sleek skyscrapers that had been popping up for the past couple of years. A few plazas seemed to be in the works, and already some stores looked like they were being remodeled but overall, the derelict cars and shoddy people meandering in the streets overshadowed their efforts. Might have been a good investment opportunity, but it could take years before the area really picked up. Even so, I didn’t think about that at the time.
The early morning rains were starting to evaporate under the rising sun, and the streets were sweltering. I asked a lady were I could buy something to drink close by. She was standing in a small patch of grass in front of the building, wearing a blue apron and hotel slippers. Her dog was grey, and stared absent-mindedly across the street. He wasn’t on a leash. They had probably done this a thousand times before. She probably had a kettle boiling upstairs in her flat, and had timed it with the right level of heat so by the time they went back upstairs, it had just begun to boil. She probably scooped the coffee out of a ceramic dog-shaped jar, also a Yorkie, without looking, staring instead out to sea at the ships floating in the distance, gray and blurry from the mid-morning glare.
The store’s cement floor looked like it hadn’t been polished since the late 90s, and the clerk didn’t break the theme. I browsed through the metal racks, green and black where the paint had peeled off, till I reached the refrigerators in the back. I got a small Coke in a glass bottle. An opener dangled from a blue string by the door. Beer and soda caps formed a small pile under it, like someone had scooped them together but could not be bothered to pick them up. The rest of the store looked like that.
The whole street looked like that.
Walking back to my car, the glass bottle brought back memories of going to work with my father on Saturdays. I’d always get a quarter and run down into the docking area to get a soda. The machine was all the way in the back, past the sea of beams and crossbars and other at-the-time humongous iron parts all neatly stored in towering racks. They probably still look big, but I haven’t been back there since I was a child. Of course, I’d always get sidetracked on my way to the soda machine, sometimes by a challenging-looking climbing spot. I never made it past the third rack level. Up there, the hangar’s roof echoed tremendously. If I spotted one, I’d snatch an employee’s hardhat to add some excitement to my expeditions.
My father would always scold me for staining my jeans rust-brown and getting my sneakers dirty. Said my mom would get mad. Said we could get ice cream if I didn’t get my clothes any dirtier. Of course, I always did. And of course, we always did anyway.
A few days later, I brought the story up to my mother. She didn’t remember it at all, but she did say not to buy in that neighborhood because the buildings were full of structural problems, built quickly and on the cheap, instead of solidly like other older buildings in the city. My father agreed, and said I should be looking for bigger apartments in any case, because I should be having a family soon.
We were having pasta with fresh tomato sauce. I brought up this article I'd read about how using canned tomatoes, particularly San Marzano tomatoes, was better for most applications, like sauces.
Submitted May 04, 2017 at 10:33PM by LittleHelene http://ift.tt/2pKC1HK PointlessStories
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