The envelope held less than I had meant to bring, and Dorn was already turning her office sign when I reached the building. I caught the outer door before it closed, then stopped with my hand against it. Once I would have gone straight inside and called her name up the stairs. Now I knocked on the glass. She looked at my work clothes, then at the envelope. “I have a shift,” I said. “I won't keep you.” She unlocked the office and let me follow her in.
By then Karpis's guilty plea in the Hamm kidnapping and his life sentence had become public news. Men at the yard had talked over their dinners, some certain they had always known how his story would finish. I had nothing useful to add. My brief acquaintance gave me no knowledge of the case. When the talk turned to how a man ought to pay for what he had done, I carried my plate outside. I still owed Dorn money, and I had a Saturday installment counted twice in my pocket.
She emptied the envelope onto her desk and counted the bills without hurrying. “This doesn't clear it,” she said. I told her I knew. She entered the amount in her ledger and wrote me a receipt. There was no mention of the meeting or of what I had carried upstairs. I had half expected her to subtract something for that, although we had made no such bargain. I folded the receipt and put it in my wallet beside the earlier one.
In the entrance Ruth was standing beside a small table with one leg wrapped in sacking. A delivery man held out a slip for her signature while his helper waited at the curb. She signed, counted her change, and looked at the table after they left. It was narrower than the one I had damaged, with a drawer and a scrubbed wooden top. “Bought it?” I asked. “Yes.” She tried lifting the near end. The wrapped leg slipped against the floor, and she set it down quickly.
I put my tools beside the wall and offered to take the heavy end. She said I would miss work. “Not if we start now.” She considered me, then took off her gloves and tucked them into her coat pocket. We lifted together. At the first turn the drawer slid open and struck my wrist. I lowered my end onto a stair while she pushed it shut. We rested there, breathing through our mouths, until a tenant coming down squeezed past us.
At the upper landing I could not swing my end without backing toward the open stair. Ruth told me to wait. She went ahead, unlocked her door, and moved something inside. I heard chair legs scrape. Then she returned and took her end again. Together we brought the table level with the threshold. Habit sent my foot forward. I stopped it against the sill and asked where she wanted the table left. “Here will do,” she said. We lowered it just inside.
Her key lay on the drawer's little brass pull while she unwound the sacking. I kept my hands on the outside edge until the leg was clear, then let go. She could move the table farther herself; the floor was level, and there was room. I wanted to ask whether she slept better now, whether she ever thought kindly of me. Instead I stepped back into the passage. She ran her palm over a mark on the tabletop and said, “Thank you for carrying it.”
Dorn came upstairs with a shallow box containing the tools I had left behind: a plane, two screwdrivers, and a short folding rule. I had recovered my driving tools from the car, but these had remained in the kitchen cupboard. “Anything else?” she asked. I looked past her at the doorway without leaning through it. There were things I remembered buying that I could not honestly separate from things I had merely used. “That's mine,” I said, taking the box. “That will do.”
Downstairs I packed the tools into my work bag and checked the time. Another week's room rent would fall due before my next full pay, and the boardinghouse woman had already warned me against being late. Outside, Ruth's name remained straight behind the mailbox frame. I read it while settling the bag against my hip, then pulled the street door shut until the latch caught. At the corner I turned toward the yard. I could make the loading shift if I kept moving.