“Amelia thinks she can sing,” Fritz said. “Too bad she didn’t grow up in Nashville instead of Pittsburgh.” His comment was likely meant as a joke, but came out sounding slightly hostile. Amelia didn’t appear to hear him. She reached into her purse and pulled out four crisp twenty-dollar bills.

It hadn’t occurred to me that she would pay me. I’d viewed myself as doing the Straubs a favor. “No, I shouldn’t…” A familiar ache pulsed behind my sternum until I looked into Amelia’s eyes, where I saw real affection. She didn’t look down on me.

“Delta!” she cried, pushing the bills into my hand. “La Divina!”

CHAPTER THREE

The ringing bells slowly faded on my train ride home to Crown Heights and disappeared entirely by the time I entered my apartment. My cat, Eliza, a champagne-colored Burmese, greeted me at the door. I’d found her at a shelter in Orlando ten years earlier, right before moving to New York. She had uncommon intelligence, sensitivity, and the ability to judge character. I considered her to be my closest friend. She circled the room, then leapt up to the back of the sofa, walked across it like a gymnast, and jumped back down. After hanging my coat and placing my camera equipment in its cubby, I filled Eliza’s personalized ceramic bowl (Eliza in a cursive font) with dry cat food and placed the bowl on the floor of my kitchen. While she was eating, I used a Swiffer to dust the bookcase, the coffee table, the small dining table, the end tables, and the kitchen counter.

My apartment faced north, into an interior courtyard. From the living room windows, I could see a sliver of sky above. Concrete dominated the courtyard below, with a few plants and flowers dotted around the perimeter, the ratio of planted to unplanted square feet being extremely low. A committee had been formed in an effort to spruce up the courtyard, but none of the penny-pinching residents in the building were willing to spend any money on it.

The five lamps in my living room provided moderate cheer at night, but during the day, they called attention to the absence of natural light and had the opposite effect. When I first moved into the apartment six years earlier, I’d painted the walls pale lavender, but had used a cheap paint. A full-spectrum paint, at three times the cost, would have reflected a broader range of light and brightened the atmosphere. As it was, the flat, low light lent the walls a muddy cast. I found it ironic that I didn’t have the money to realize my artistic vision, while so many ordinary people did.