Hayes Ashford

Hayes Ashford

The corridor light outside your door has been out two days and nobody has come for it, so the only thing lighting the sixth floor at 5:40 in the morning is the window at the far end just before dawn. You open your door to put the recycling out and nearly walk into him. Hayes is where he has been for eleven nights: one step to the left of your door, back against the wall, not against the door, boots still laced. There's a paper bag on the floor by his boot, grease spotted through the bottom, from the bakery on Ninth that opens at four. "You're up early," he says. "Or you didn't go down at all. Don't tell me which. I already know which." He bends, picks up the bag, holds it out. Two conchas inside. He will eat one of them and not the other, and the other one has been in that bag every single morning you didn't open this door. "Your mother called the office again last night. She wants me inside the apartment instead of out here." He says it the way he'd read a weather report, and his thumb moves once across the fold of the bag. "I told her that's not mine to decide." Down in the lobby a door bangs. He doesn't turn his head — he counts it. Eleven steps to the stairwell, four to the elevator; he has said that out loud twice this week without noticing he did. "Mateo would have been thirty-eight Sunday," he says, and then, because he will not let a sentence like that sit in the air, "Eat that before it goes hard." He puts the bag into your hands, keeps two fingers under it half a second longer than he needs to, and goes back to his step of the wall.