Wrong City

by Morgan Richter

  Chapter Seven

  Vish didn’t expect to hear from Troy again. They’d exchanged email addresses before parting, and he’d dutifully sent her his novel, along with a quick message thanking her in advance for any help she could give him but making it clear nothing was expected. It’d taken him much too long to compose the note, to find the right balance: polite yet casual, interested but not creepy.

  Two days later, he returned home from Comestibles and found Troy parked in front of his building. She slipped out of her car and fell into step with him as he approached the gate. “Vish! Sorry for just stopping by, but I wanted to let you know I read your book. I stayed up most of an entire night finishing it,” she said. “I passed it along to Greg at my agency, and he’s forwarded it to the literary desk, though it’ll probably take a while before they get to it. But I thought it was wonderful.”

  “Thank you,” Vish said. He glanced at her. She seemed sincere. Then again, she was an actress. “Thank you very much.”

  “So here’s the thing,” she said. She was turning pink again. “I also gave it to Freddie—Freddie Halterman, he’s the guy who created Interstellar Boys, and he’s brilliant and awesome—and I told him about you and how good your book is and how you’re looking for work...”

  She stopped. Vish’s heartbeat picked up a little. “Oh?”

  “Yeah, and he’s really interested in meeting you. He said he looked through your book, I’m sure he hasn’t had a chance to read it all the way yet, but I know he was totally impressed with your writing. I also know he wants to add more staff writers. I can’t say for sure that’s what he’s going to offer you, and I don’t want to get your hopes up, but he said to tell you he’d be interested in meeting you.”

  “Wow. Troy, thank you.” Absurd to think the creator of a television series might offer a writing job to an unknown, but maybe Troy’s opinion carried a lot of weight. “That’s great news.”

  “I thought we could have dinner. To celebrate.” She hoisted a bulging mesh bag. “I stopped at the farmers market. You might have plans already.” She shrugged. “If not, I thought it might be fun to cook together.”

  He hesitated, caught off guard by her enthusiasm. Troy’s brow wrinkled. “I come on strong, I know. I’m like this whenever I make a new friend. Some people get annoyed by me.” She smiled. “If you’ve got things to do, or if you’d just rather not, it’s no big deal, really. I won’t take offense.”

  “No, not at all. I’m glad you stopped by. Cooking dinner sounds like fun.” He held open the front gate. “Come in.”

  The crumbled hole in the corner of the building was still there, unfixed. Someone must’ve inspected it at some point, because now there was an orange safety cone in front.

  When they reached the top of the stairs, the neighboring door opened. Mariposa peeked out. “Hey, Vish,” she said. She looked at Troy with frank interest. “Who’s that?”

  “Hi, Mariposa. Mariposa, this is my friend Troy.”

  “Nice to meet you, Mariposa. I really like your sandals. Those are cute.” Troy smiled at her, all dimples and charm.

  Mariposa was immune to Troy’s dimples. She looked her over, up and down, and gave her a cool nod. “Thanks.” She shifted her attention back to Vish. “Do you know who’s moving in beneath you? I haven’t seen anyone, but they’ve been making tons of noise all day. Bumps and thumps.”

  “I don’t know,” Vish said. “Good that the building’s filling up, I guess. It’s been kind of weird with no one around.”

  “I know. It’s creepy.” Mariposa glanced back into her apartment. “I’m alone with Luis, so I better go.”

  “Nice meeting you,” Troy said. Mariposa ducked back inside without answering. As soon as the door was closed, Troy grinned at Vish. “She has a crush on you.”

  Vish snorted. “I seriously doubt that,” he said. He fumbled to unlock his own door, hoping Mariposa wasn’t eavesdropping.

  “Are you kidding me? She came outside as soon as she heard us coming. And she really scoped out her competition. Did you see the stink-eye she gave me?”

  “She might’ve felt shy. Maybe she recognized you.”

  Troy shrugged and moved past him into his apartment. “Maybe. Doesn’t mean she’s not sweet on you. Is the idea really so crazy?”

  “Yes. Yes, it is. For starters, I’m too old for her to even consider me that way.”

  “That’s probably part of the appeal. You’re old enough that her mother would wig out at the idea of you as her boyfriend, which makes it kind of fun and dangerous, but at the same time you’re sweet and gentle and bunny-rabbit cute, which neutralizes any real threat. That combination is catnip to teen girls. Trust me, I used to be an expert.”

  Vish raised his eyebrows. “Bunny-rabbit cute?”

  “Oh, yes,” Troy said. “Absolutely.” She winked at him.

  Was that good? Probably not—after all, she’d essentially just told him that she found him innocuous and kind of sexless. Did Troy like cute boys, or had she left that phase behind in her teen years? As Vish tried to work this out, she headed for the kitchen and plopped her mesh bag down on the counter. “This is going to sound like not much fun, but bear with me. I picked up tofu—it’s the firm kind, not the drippy crap, and it’s not bad at all if you cook it right—and then a bunch of vegetables and herbs and stuff. I thought we could do a stir-fry.”

  She was right. It didn’t sound fun. “Sounds great. Healthy.”

  “Do you drink?” Troy pulled a bottle of red wine out of her bag. “And if you do, point me in the direction of your corkscrew.”

  Troy was a good cook. Troy, from what Vish had seen thus far, was probably good at everything she did. Vish had worked for Jamie long enough to be comfortable in a kitchen; he chopped vegetables to Troy’s specifications, then watched as she cooked everything up with sesame oil and grated ginger and soy sauce. They drank while they cooked, the kitchen growing warm and filling with good smells.

  At one point, Troy excused herself to use the bathroom. A few seconds later, Vish was startled by a loud yelp.

  “Troy?” he asked.

  She opened the door, giggling. “You have to see this.” She beckoned him over. “I wanted to replace your toilet paper roll, so I checked under the sink,” she said. She pointed at the open cabinet covering the pipes. “I’m guessing it’s not usually like this?”

  The back of the bathroom wall had crumbled away, revealing a jagged hole. The edges of the hole were coated with what Vish initially took to be some kind of puffy plastic insulation, until he noticed it was moving. Grubs. Huge, soft, pale grubs, dozens of them, clinging around the edges of the gap, climbing up out of the darkness and into Vish’s apartment.

  Vish wasn’t squeamish, but the sight made him flinch. “God. Yuck. Sorry you had to find that,” he said. “The wall must have crumbled during the earthquake.”

  “Do you have a maintenance guy?” Troy asked.

  Vish shook his head. “The landlord lives in the building. I’ll get him.”

  Troy insisted on coming with him. Vish wished she wouldn’t. Vish liked to avoid the landlord as much as possible. Silas was strange and marginal. His apartment, in the back of the building on the ground floor beside the laundry room, always smelled like old fish and burnt cheese. He consistently shot down all Vish’s tentative suggestions—that he buy a lock for the dumpster to deter the scavengers who crawled in there each week to look for salvage, that he clean and fill the pool, that he replace the broken locks on the mailboxes—and Vish always left their encounters feeling whiny and ineffectual.

  Troy, on the other hand… No one could ever accuse Troy of being ineffectual. Troy was a cheerful force of nature. She rapped on Silas’s door and introduced herself with a firm handshake and a knee-weakening smile, then took him by the hand and pulled him upstairs to examine the hole in the bathroom wall before he could think of some way to blow her off.

  Silas flicked a soiled rag at the grubs to shoo them back into
the hole, then nailed a square of plywood across the gap. He grunted.

  “I’ll patch it later,” he said. “Get some plaster up over it, paint it, it’ll be good as new.” He straightened up and squinted at Vish. “Happened in the quake, you said?”

  “It must have,” Vish said. “I didn’t notice it until today.”

  Silas made some noise in the back of his throat. “Sure you kids weren’t messing around in here?”

  “Digging a hole to China?” Vish asked. “No. It happened in the quake.”

  Silas shrugged. “Well, you’d say that, wouldn’t you?”

  “This is a great building,” Troy said, her tone chipper. “These units are really roomy.”

  Silas looked at her, his scowl lightening. “They are, aren’t they? Wouldn’t know it from the outside exactly, but they’re not bad.”

  “I saw the for-rent sign on the fence,” Troy said. “Bad market right now, isn’t it?”

  “Goddamn economy,” Silas said.

  “If you cleaned and filled the pool, I bet the building would fill right up,” she said. “You can see it from the sidewalk. It’d be a huge draw.”

  That seemed unlikely—pools were common in the neighborhood, and they certainly weren’t a necessity this close to the beach—but when Troy said things, people listened. Silas started to look half-convinced, then he shook his head.

  “No one’d use it,” he said. “Summer’s gone.”

  “Does it matter? You’d fill up the building. It’d pay for itself right there.” Troy looked relaxed and engaged, like she was having a fantastic time chatting about pools with Silas, even though Silas was tedious and off-putting. This made Vish worry a bit, because she looked at him exactly the same way whenever they were alone together. Maybe she thought Vish was tedious and off-putting, too.

  No. It’d be the easiest thing in the world for her to vanish out of his life if she didn’t want to spend time with him, and yet here she was, dangling a promising job opportunity in front of him and cooking him a tasty meal. It had to mean something, something good.