Page 20 of Lease to Love

“Every one of them.”

She sat back down.

I kept my face neutral. I was good at keeping my face neutral.

The meeting didn't recover.

Not that it had been entirely in my corner to begin with, but whatever warmth I’d managed to generate over the preceding twenty minutes evaporated so completely it was like it had never existed.

The questions that followed were shorter, sharper, less curious and more prosecutorial. When the vote came—a preliminary vote on whether to allow my proposal to move to the next phase of community review—it wasn't close.

I thanked them for their time, because that was what I did.

And I meant it. I always meant it.

Then I packed up my laptop and my presentation materials while the room organized itself around me into clusters of conversation that didn't include me.

I caught Ms. Langston near the door as a young woman with locs helped her gather her things.

"Ms. Langston." I kept my voice level. Respectful. "I'd like to speak with you, if you have a few minutes."

She considered me for a moment.

Not unkindly—that was the thing about her that surprised me, the thing I hadn't expected. The look she gave me wasn't contemptuous.

It was careful.

The look of someone who had been given every reason not to extend trust and was choosing, deliberately, not to extend it.

"I don't," she said.

Then she walked out.

She left me with the distinct impression that she was not a woman who said things she didn’t mean, and not a woman who changed her mind without a reason worth her time.

I'd need to give her one.

Outside, the night air hit like something you'd earned.

Hot and thick with August, smelling of cut grass and someone's exhaust and whatever was frying in the kitchen of the Haitian place two blocks east.

Langston Park at nine o'clock on a Wednesday.

My place was six blocks from the community center. I’d walked this route a thousand times, in every season, in every mood, in clothes that ranged from a Howard University hoodie with a broken zipper to the Brioni suit I was currently sweating through.

The route hadn't changed. The blocks had.

Some of them in ways that made my jaw clench if I let myself look at them too long, so mostly I didn't.

The men on the corner of Fourth registered me in my suit and tie and made their collective decision to ignore me without deliberation.

The woman crossing the street with a stroller clocked me and adjusted her path.

A teenager on a bike slowed, looked, and kept going.

The New Yorker in me filed it and moved on. You didn't perform feelings for people who hadn't earned the performance. That was basic.

The businessman noted it as a big fucking problem he still didn't have a solution for yet.