Good luck, James, she thought. I wish you the best.

Not that he’d ever actually asked you out, Simone reflected wryly.

The cab now approached her neighborhood—Greenwich Village. For Simone, there was no other place to live in New York City. It was, truly, a village. A neighborhood.

The cab dropped her at Tenth Street. “Hm,” her boss said, looking out the window at two men, constructed like bodybuilders, kissing passionately as they stood on the steps of the building next to hers.

He said, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” The famous line from Seinfeld.

Simone smiled, then looked at the main kisser. What a waste.

Then she said good night to her boss and stepped out of the cab, grabbed her suitcase from the trunk. She paused to let a stocky homeless woman wheel her packed grocery cart past—filled with everything but groceries, of course. Simone thought about giving her some change. But then she reflected, why do I think the woman’s homeless? Maybe she’s an eccentric millionaire.

She climbed the stairs to her apartment, smelling that odd aroma of the building, which defied description, as did many of the buildings here. What on earth was it?

Eau de Old New York Apartment.

Insecticide, takeout Chinese, takeout curry, ancient wood, Lysol, damp brick, cooked onions.

Her cat more or less forgave her, though he didn’t have much to complain about. The kibble dish, tended to by her neighbor, was filled with manna from heaven. The water, too, was full and the radio was playing NPR, which was Ruffles’s favorite. He seemed to enjoy the pledge drives as much as This American Life.

Simone checked messages—nothing urgent there, though she noted no caller-ID-blocked numbers. She’d had a lot of those recently. Telemarketers, of course.

She then unpacked and assembled a laundry pile. Simone had never returned from a trip without doing her laundry the night she was back.

Clothes cooties, she called it.

Thanks, Mom.

Simone pulled her sweats on, gathered up the clothes and a cheerful orange bottle of Tide. She took the back stairway, which led to the basement laundry and storage rooms. Simone descended from the second floor to the first and then started down the steps that would take her to the basement. This stairwell was dark, though there was some illumination from downstairs, the laundry room presumably, or maybe the storeroom. She flicked the switch several times. Then squinted and noted that the bulb was missing and not just—it had fallen to the stairs and shattered.

It was at this point that Simone started feeling uneasy.

But she continued, walking carefully to avoid as much of the broken glass as she could in her Crocs. On the basement level, another bulb was broken, too.

Creeping me out.

Okay, that’s it. Hell with OCD issues. I’ll do the laundry tomorrow.

Then squinted and saw, with some relief, that she’d have to wait anyway. There was a sign on the laundry room door. Out of Order. The sign was battered and torn. She’d never seen it before; when the washer or dryer weren’t working, Henry had always just hand-written a sign, informing the tenants when they could expect the machines to be up and running again.