He came about the boiler

Anthony Avenue, between one seventy-five and Mount Hope Place. Up the hill off the Concourse. You know the Bronx at all? Okay. Then you know.

Six floors, sixteen apartments. We were in 3C, back of the building, so you got the airshaft instead of the street. Nilda liked that on account of the buses.

Two hundred and twelve a month. I used to say two twelve out loud to people like I was reporting a crime.

My mother had 2C, directly underneath us. She got in there eight months after we did because the old lady passed and I was down at the landlord's office that same week with my hat in my hand. That's how you did it. You didn't stand around being polite about it.

Mrs. Fischer was on five with the cats, last one left up there from the old days. Camacho on four drove a bread truck for Arnold. Nando was the super, lived in the basement by the machine room, and Nando drank, but he was never not there.

The landlord was Sammy Kirschner. He had us and two more on Walton. He wasn't the worst one going, I'll say that, but you had to get him on the phone before eleven in the morning or forget it.

So the boiler quits. January, eighty-one, a Thursday night, and by Friday everybody's got the oven door open and Camacho's got a kerosene heater going that should've killed us all. Cold like you don't get cold down here. Down here cold means you put on a sweatshirt to take the garbage out.

The guy Sammy sent was Richie. Richie Vitale. Big through the shoulders. Forty or so, and he was already going in the front. He had a Ford van with the ladder rack and a radio in it he never once shut off. He carried his own thermos and he still stood there and drank my mother's coffee, because she brought it down to the basement and you don't say no to that.

He got it going Saturday. Then it went again in February and that one was four days, and that was the bad one, that February. My mother had both my girls down in 2C under a blanket watching her programs.

Then he came back in March and there wasn't anything wrong with it.

He knocked on 3C and said he wanted to bleed the riser on our side while he was in the building. I said come in. He was up there about forty minutes, and twenty of that we were in the bedroom, and then he washed his hands at my kitchen sink and stood by the window and drank his coffee standing up.

He came back the next Tuesday.

Nilda worked the counter at Valencia Bakery on Jerome, six to three, and she had the bus after. The girls were down with mami, and mami kept her door open with the chain on because she liked to hear who was coming up the stairs. That was the whole arrangement of the afternoon.

Richie carried the toolbox up every single time. Every time, two years, and he didn't need it. That was for the hallway.

We talked about the Yankees. We talked about his brother who had a medallion and did nights out of LaGuardia. He had a kid playing hockey in Pelham Bay and he'd tell me about the ice time, five in the morning up at some rink in New Rochelle. The ring stayed on. It never came off.

Two years, near enough. Eighty-one into eighty-three.

One time before Christmas my mother came up for the big pot, the aluminum one she made the pasteles in, and she knocked, and I told her through the door I was on the phone with the union. She said okay, nene. She went down. And the next day she didn't ask me nothing, and she never asked me nothing, not that year and not any year after, and she lived to be ninety-one.

You want to know what I was thinking. I was twenty-six. I had the apartment and I was studying for the transit exam at the kitchen table at night.

I took the exam in eighty-two and they called me in eighty-three and I went to days out of the 207th Street yard, which meant Tuesday was gone. Then that summer Sammy sold all three buildings to some outfit and they brought in their own people, All Boro, big blue trucks, two young guys who left the lobby door propped for an hour. First thing they did was paint the stoop rail green again, right over the last green, and it was tacky into September.

I don't remember the last time Richie was up there. You'd think I would. I don't.

We moved to Soundview in eighty-six for the room, and my mother came with us, and I did thirty-one years total and got out. My arm here, that's eighty-eight. My cousin had a shop on Webster and I did Saturdays and a drum of thinner went up. Guys at the post here see it and they figure something else and buy me a beer, and I don't correct them.

Nilda got the diagnosis in November of oh-eight and she went the following September. Eleven months. I was there for the eleven months.

I know what you're waiting on me to say about that. I don't have it. She had the girls and she had me in that chair every day at the end of it, and I'm not going to sit here now and take that off her.

We're in Kissimmee now, going on twelve years. Millie's over in Poinciana, fifteen minutes. I got the screen porch. I sit out there in the morning before it gets stupid hot and the little lizards come up the outside of the screen. The people behind me got a pool pump that kicks on at seven and you get used to it.

Four grandkids. The littlest one is Nilda, we call her Nildita, and she's seven, and she's got the same thumbs. That's a thing I noticed. The thumbs.

Millie's boy, he's nineteen. He told me the man who does their pool is a narcissist. I said he's a pool man. He said no, Grandpa, look it up.

He's the one showed me you can type a name into the computer and it gives you people. So I typed it. Middle Village, Queens. Eighty-four years old. There's a number and I wrote it on the back of a Publix receipt, and it's in the kitchen drawer with the batteries and about a hundred twist ties.

We haven't talked since Reagan.

You want coffee? Let me put it on. I got the Bustelo, the real one in the yellow can, and I got my mother's little cups. Four left out of six. Sugar's in the cabinet behind you, second shelf.