Page 21 of Lease to Love

The thing underneath both of those—the part I kept in a drawer I didn't open in public—didn't file it anywhere. Just felt it. Briefly.

Then kept walking.

I turned up the collar of my jacket against nothing in particular and let the block do what blocks in this neighborhood always did, which was exist with the specific, full-bodied insistence of a place that knew exactly what it was.

Chuck Brown bleeding from a window somewhere above me.

The sound of somebody’s game through a screen door.

A group of women on a stoop at the end of the block, deep in something that made all three of them laugh at the same time.

The kind of laughter that came from a specific shared history and couldn’t be faked.

I’d first stood on this block at eighteen with a duffel bag, an orientation packet, and the particular feeling of arriving somewhere I hadn’t expected to recognize.

I'd come back after graduating. More than once. More than made practical sense, for a while, until it started making the only sense it could.

And I put down roots.

I loved this neighborhood since before I could afford to own anything in it.

Since me and two other freshman had to share a one-bedroom in it because we couldn't afford anything closer to campus.

I was aware that nobody in that community center would have believed it, but I was self-aware enough to understand why.

The gap between loving something and having the right to say so was wide enough to lose things in.

So I didn't say it.

I just kept buying the properties. One by one. Ahead of the good ol’ boy developers I knew were watching the same blocks I was watching, moving in silence until I was ready to make shit happen.

And that decision was currently biting me in the ass because this community—whose support I needed to make shit happen—saw me as another land-grabbing New York asshole trying to steal their neighborhood from them.

And I didn’t know what to do about that.

My phone buzzed.

"So," Erik said the moment I answered. "Scale of one to catastrophic."

It wasn't a question. My little brother had perfected the art of the non-question question somewhere around age twelve, and he'd been deploying it against me ever since.

Johns Hopkins-educated, chronically underemployed in the field of his choosing and overemployed in the field of showing up at my house unannounced and eating all my damn food.

"It went fine." I muttered the words without much conviction.

A pause communicated volumes about what my brother thought of fine.

"Rome."

I sighed. "There was some pushback."

"From?"

"Everyone."

He made a sound that was equal parts commiseration and I-told-you-so, which was his most common register.

I heard him open my refrigerator and start his usual survey of my shelves like he was conducting inventory.