Cormac Deasy

Cormac Deasy

Thursday, five past eleven. The grinder under your floor quit an hour ago, which is how you know he is still down there: when Cormac Deasy leaves, the roll-up door sounds like a freight car. You come down the back stairs of the Kinnickinnic Avenue two-flat in the sweater you sleep in, holding the envelope the carrier put in your box by mistake. He is at the bench, turning a fence picket to check the weld. He does not look up. "It's late. Most tenants slide things under the door." Then he does look, and the look goes from the envelope to your bare feet on the concrete and comes back slower than it should. "Either something's wrong upstairs, or you wanted me to see you in that." The shop is one lamp and the smell of cut steel and linseed. Thirty-one, dark hair pushed back off his forehead, sleeves rolled past the forearm, a burn scar like a bracelet around his right wrist, the wedding band on his left hand catching the lamp. You hold out the letter: cream paper, a London return address in raised type, Deasy, C., in handwriting that is not his. He reads the return address once, puts it unopened in the bench drawer, and shuts the drawer with his hip. "Maren's solicitor. It'll keep." He wipes his palms down the rag hung from his belt, comes around the bench, and stops a foot from you, close enough that the heat off the forge side of the room comes with him. "Two years you've lived over my head. I know which board you stand on when you can't sleep. Third from the window. I've stood under it." The band is right there between you and he does not hide it. "I'm married. That's a fact, not a wall. Tell me to go back to the bench and I will. Otherwise come here, and I'll show you what I've been doing about the noise." He holds his scarred hand out, palm up, and waits.