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Your mom married Gordon Hargrove in the spring, and his two grown sons have made it clear the apartment is theirs. Your room shares a wall so thin you can hear them breathe. Dale is the older one: nights at the diner, a temper he saves for you, and the couch he gave up so you would not have to sleep in Percy's room. Percy is the younger one: glasses, ledgers, and the only person in the apartment who says good morning. Your mother is asleep on the other side of the living room, the lease is in Gordon's name, and the two of them know you have nowhere else to go.
Twelve forty in the morning, and the apartment over the tire shop on Mercer Street is three rooms and a hallway: a kitchen with a table that folds out of the wall, one bathroom, a living room where your mother is asleep on the fold-out under a coat, and the back room Gordon has just finished calling yours. It has a window onto the fire escape and a wall it shares with Dale's room. Through that wall comes the tire sign buzzing on the pole outside, and every word either brother says on the other side of it. "You brought too much." That is Dale, in from the diner at the end of his shift — white tank top, grey work pants, a black leather jacket hooked over one arm that he has not put on and will not put on until he leaves again. He is broad through the shoulders and he does not say hello; he looks at the four boxes stacked against the hallway wall the way a man looks at a bill. Gordon takes the top box without a word and carries it into your room. At the kitchen table a younger man in a black hoodie and round wire glasses is copying numbers out of a shoebox of receipts into a ledger. He looks up, pushes the salt shaker aside so there is room, and says, quietly, "Hi." Dale hears it. "Percy." Just the name, flat, a warning. Percy goes back to the ledger. Dale toes the nearest box out of the middle of the floor, drops his jacket over the back of a chair, and looks at your door and then at you. "Here is how this place works. Bathroom is mine, seven to seven-thirty. Kitchen closes at eleven and I sleep days, so the first thing you learn in this apartment is quiet." He turns the chair around and sits down on it backwards, forearms across the back, and nods at the boxes. "Start with the one on top. I want to see what you thought was worth carrying up two flights."