Today he'd watched from his window as a limousine, an actual limousine, poured her out onto his sidewalk along with the kid and a man. The kind of man who got out of limousines. The kind with a suit worth more than Gumwood's truck and a face like the last thing you see, and she'd walked up those stairs with him, into the building Gumwood owned, laughing at something, laughing, and something in Gumwood's chest had been drinking since four o'clock and now it stood up.
She was his. That was just a fact of the building, like the plumbing. Everyone knew it. He'd waited three years.
He took the stairs loud on purpose and hit the door with the heel of his fist.
"Open up, it's me! Open up, I know you're in there!"
The door opened.
It wasn't her. It was the suit, filling the doorway top to bottom, jacket still perfect, not even a tie loosened, looking down at Gumwood with all the concern of a man reading a menu with nothing on it he wanted.
"Where's my girl?" Gumwood demanded.
"Are you talking about my wife?"
"She's not married—"
"Then are you talking about my wife?"
Same words. Same voice. Gumwood's brain slid off the sentence twice, and the sliding made him angrier than anything had all day, and he did what he'd been wanting to do since the limousine, he swung.
The suit wasn't there anymore. He'd moved the way expensive things move, no hurry in it anywhere, and Gumwood's fist hit doorframe, and the pain came up his arm like electricity while the man watched him with those pale eyes and spoke as though continuing a conversation from earlier.
"You should apologize, promise not to hurt anyone again, and I'll let you go. But only if you swear you mean it."
"I'll teach you how to apologize to me."
Another swing. Another glide, smaller this time, insulting in its smallness, like stepping around a puddle.
"One last chance."
And Gumwood, three years patient, four hours drunk, and one limousine humiliated, reached behind him and pulled the knife he kept for exactly no occasions like this one.
"I'm going to kill you."
Something changed in the doorway then. Nothing moved, that was the horror of it, nothing moved at all, and yet the temperature of the man went somewhere Gumwood's bodyunderstood before his brain did, the way animals understand weather.
"Don't say I didn't warn you."
Gumwood charged.
Behind the apartment door, Louis heard the crash of a body hitting the landing wall and did what seven-year-olds do when they've been told to stay put. He went to look.
His hand was already on the doorknob when the fight ended.
It ended in one motion, fast and almost beautiful, a single clean arc that took Gumwood's legs out from under him mid-swing and left him folded against the banister before the sound of the impact had finished traveling down the stairwell. By the time the door actually opened, there was nothing left on the landing to see but a man asleep on the floor in a posture no sober person achieves by accident, and Valerio straightening his cuffs like he'd just finished signing a document.
"Papa? What happened?"
"Your landlord," Valerio said, smooth as silk, not a hair out of place, "is extremely intoxicated."
Louis studied the body with the clinical interest he brought to all evidence. "He's not snoring. Don't drunk people snore?"
"Only the amateurs." Valerio's voice stayed easy, unbothered, already herding the moment back toward normal. "Don't imitate this man, Louis. Excessive, uncontrollable drinking doesn't make a good man, or a conscious one. Remember that."
"...Okay." Louis considered this with real seriousness, the way he considered all adult wisdom, and tucked it away for later use. "Should we call an ambulance?"
"Someone will attend to him. Go on back inside now, and shut the door for your mother."
