Chapter 242

• STORY 92- ODD JOB IN 5B- (a)
• My building was old – the kind of old that wasn’t quite charming enough to be deemed unique or even quaint, but old enough that random things would stop working or fall apart. I’d come in the lobby and find a single strip of wallpaper, a gold foil with a raised velvet pattern from the early 1970s, detached from the wall, and curled in on itself on the floor. Sometimes the buttons refused to light up in the elevator, or the door would open and close three or four times before finally shutting; I’d gotten into the habit of using the stairs, even when my arms were full of groceries.
• So it wasn’t unusual to go get my mail, or retrieve a load of clean clothes from the shared basement laundry room, and find Isaac working away at something or other. As near as I could figure, Isaac was the landlord’s cousin – or second cousin by marriage, or maybe just the adult son of a long time family friend. At any rate, he knew the landlord, and the landlord must have more or less had him on the payroll permanently, to deal with the drooping wallpaper and the leaking sinks.