Chapter Three

“Will you take a load of stuff and put it in the washing machine for me?” my mother asked.

It was Saturday morning. Our machine is on the blink and she doesn’t want to buy a new one this month.

“It never rains but it pours,” she says. Our car has to have a new differential, whatever that is, and my brother Teddy went to the orthodontist last week and he has to wear his braces another year.

“Sure,” I said. I was glad. I would get a chance to visit Mr. Richards. He is sort of the assistant superintendent of our building. He makes change for people for the washers and dryers, and fixes leaky faucets, and once in a while, he shovels snow.

We have been friends for quite a while. He is a retired bartender and has a big tattoo on his arm that says “Home Sweet Home.” I had been wanting to have Al meet him. We figured out night before last that Al and I have known each other for exactly three weeks. It feels like forever. Some people you just feel like you have always known. That is the way it is with me and Al and with me and Mr. Richards.

He has the cleanest, shiniest kitchen floor I have ever seen. You can practically see your face in it. Nobody but me knows how he gets it that way. It is one of the things that makes him so special.

I rang Al’s bell, but softly. I gave it just a little poke. Her mother has to do a lot of traveling and entertaining, as she is the buyer for Better Dresses, and you never know when she has maybe got in at one o’clock in the morning or something. She wears a sleep shade for her eyes and plugs for her ears. Al showed them to me but sometimes, even all stuffed up with all those things, she can still hear the bell.

Al came to the door and she did not have her hair in pigtails yet. It looked nice.

“I like your hair that way,” I said. “Why not wear it to school like that?”

“It’s a mess,” she said. Without her glasses and her hair in pigtails, she looked different.

“I’ve got to go down and put some clothes in the washing machine,” I whispered, just in case. “Come with me and we’ll go see Mr. Richards.”

She said, “In a sec,” and when she came back she looked the way she does every day. It was a disappointment.

“Pleased to meet you,” Mr. Richards said to Al. They shook hands and he asked, “Got time for a little shooter of Coke?”

I had just finished telling Al he talks this way on account of being a retired bartender, so it was nice he proved I wasn’t making it up.

His apartment is right behind the furnace room, so it is always warm. “You in the building?” he asked Al, putting out the glasses. “Set ’em up,” he said and slid three glasses down the kitchen counter.

“She’s new,” I said. “She’s in 14-C.”

“You got enough heat up there in 14-C?” Mr. Richards wanted to know. “We had plenty of problems with that one, I can tell you. Last tenant said it got so cold he didn’t need the refrigerator. Just left everything out on the table. Care for another?”

We all had another shooter. I never used to like Coke until I started drinking it this way.

“Don’t worry,” Al said. “You don’t know my mother. She would not hesitate to let you know the minute anything was not right.”

I think Mr. Richards’s eyes are blue. They are so narrow in his face it is hard to tell. I told him once that I thought he looked like the captain of a whaling ship. I could see him squinting out over the horizon. “Not me,” he had said. “Them waves get to my stomach every time.”

“You have a nice place here,” Al said.

Al is a very observant girl. She says if she does not get to be a specialist in internal medicine, she may be a newspaper reporter. I would not put it past her.

“I like your curtains,” she said, “and that’s a pretty plant. What kind is it?”

“That’s a geranium,” Mr. Richards said, looking pleased. “I been treating it like a baby, better’n most babies, if you want to know. Lots of sun, not too much water. Some day maybe, when my ship comes in, when I find that there pot of gold, when I break the bank at that place they wrote the song about, I’ll move where it’s warm. All the time. I’ll get me a house with nothing but flowers and plants around. No grass, no nothing. Just flowers and plants.”

Mr. Richards was really getting carried away. He tied a couple of rags around his sneakers and started skating around his linoleum.

I was very pleased. I had told Al he skated around his floor when he got excited. Or sometimes just for fun. It relaxes him, he says.

She only said, “I don’t believe it.”

One thing about Al, she never comes right out and calls anyone a liar.

Now I just smiled at her. I wanted to say, “I told you so,” but I didn’t. Which I thought was kind of nice of me.