The unit.
My apartment is a unit now.
"Thank you," I say, and I mean it, genuinely, because he could make this harder and he's choosing not to. "I'll be out before evening."
He nods, collects his letters from the table, and stands. At the door he pauses, and for a moment I think he might say something else, something human and soft that lives underneath the landlord part of him. Then he thinks better of it, or decides it won't help, or maybe just doesn't have the words. He leaves.
I sit at the kitchen table, holding myself together. Right now, I want to scream, cry, or break something, but I feel empty, so I get up and start packing.
I have four duffel bags and a cardboard box, and it turns out that’s enough. That’s the part I keep stumbling over as I move through the apartment, pulling things off shelves and out of drawers. I’ve lived here eight months, and I own two bags and a box worth of things that matter. Everything else can stay. The chipped thrift-store plates. The throw blanket pilling at the edges. The welcome mat I bought when I moved in because I thought this might become a place worth welcoming people to.
The books come with me. Obviously. You don’t abandon books.
The small framed photo of my mother comes too, wrapped in a sweater so it doesn’t break.
The prenatal vitamins I bought three weeks ago and have taken with almost aggressive devotion definitely come with me.
I’m sitting on the floor beside the box, trying to work out how to fit the books, the spare blanket, the vitamins, the charger, and the three edible things left in my fridge, when someone knocks on my open door.
Rosa.
She’s a beta who lives across the hall. She’s sixty-two, makes tamales on Sundays, and once let me sit in her apartment allafternoon watching telenovelas without asking why I needed to be anywhere but my own home. That sort of grace should count for more in this world.
She looks at the bags. The box. Me on the floor.
Her face goes soft and careful, and that’s when I feel it, the collapse right behind my ribs that comes when someone is simply kind to you after you’ve been holding yourself together by force.
"Mija," Rosa says.
And I start crying.
Just a woman on the floor of an apartment she's being evicted from, three months behind on rent, twenty dollars to her name, a baby coming that she wants desperately and has no idea how to support, crying in front of her neighbor because Rosa saidmijaand that was apparently all it took.
Rosa comes in and sits on the floor next to me. She does it slowly, with the careful effort of a woman of sixty-two who has mentioned her knees more than once, and she puts her arm around me and says nothing useful, which is the most useful thing she could do.
I tell her everything.
It comes out in the order it arrives rather than any logical sequence. The restaurant job I lost four months ago when it closed, which was not my fault and also not any comfort. The three interviews that went nowhere. The two that went somewhere and then didn't. The bills that stacked while I told myself I'd catch up, until I really didn't, and then the envelope stage began, where all the mail looks the same and you stop opening any of it. The pregnancy test. The two minutes on the bathroom floor, that cocktail of terror and something that wasn't quite joy but was pointed in that direction. The not telling anyone. The telling Anna, my sister, who lives in Cedar Ridge with her alphas and her life that works, and the relief of itfollowed immediately by the guilt, because Anna would want to help, and I've been trying so hard not to be someone who needs help like this.
Rosa listens to all of it.
Then she says, "How far along are you?"
"Fourteen weeks."
She nods slowly, processing, organizing, the nod of a woman who has seen worse and knows what to do next. "I have something for you," she says. "But first, let me ask you something." She looks at me very directly. "Can you cook?"
I think about this.
"Yes," I say.
In my head: tacos. I can make tacos. Good ones, actually, with the right seasoning and my mother's pico and Anna's rice. Scrambled eggs. A soup that got complimented once. Pasta with things in it. Quesadillas. A general working knowledge of heat applied to food resulting in something edible.
"Yes," I say again, with more conviction. "I can cook."
Rosa pulls out her phone. "My friend Dolores has a daughter. Carmen. Carmen works at a resort, private island, very fancy, she's the island’s manager. They had a chef lined up for a three month contract and he quit two days ago." She looks up at me. "Got greedy. They said no, he walked." She shrugs. "Carmen texted me last night. They need someone fast, they leave tonight, and the agency they use doesn't have anyone available on short notice."
Tonight.