Chapter 6 - The Eviction Notice
On Monday, August 18, at precisely 5:15 PM, the temperature in White Plains was ninety-four degrees with seventy percent humidity.
The asphalt of the parking lot outside The Highline at River’s Edge radiated heat like an uncooled oven, smelling of hot tar and automobile exhaust. Near the entrance to the underground parking garage, a yellow industrial dumpster sat half-filled with discarded Ikea furniture, broken plastic hampers, and cardboard shipping boxes with their labels torn off.
A 2004 Ford F-150 with a rusted tailgate and a cracked windshield stood idling near the loading dock, its engine knocking with that distinctive, uneven tick-tick-tick of an exhaust manifold leak.
Arthur Holt stood by the truck’s rear wheel, his white undershirt soaked through with sweat at the armpits and spine, holding a heavy roll of gray duct tape between his teeth.
Above him, on the fourth-floor balcony of Unit 408, Dalia stood gripping the black aluminum railing.
She was wearing an oversized gray Saint Jude’s College sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, black athletic leggings that were torn at the knee, and a pair of dirty rubber slides. Her hair was pulled back into a greasy, unwashed knot secured with a plastic pencil.
“I’m not coming down!” she screamed over the railing, her voice echoing off the concrete walls of the adjacent parking structure. “You tell him I’m not leaving! The marshal hasn't signed the warrant yet! I looked it up! They have to give me ten business days after the notice to cure!”
A man in a navy blue polo shirt with HIGHLINE MANAGEMENT embroidered in gold thread stood on the sidewalk below, holding a metal clipboard and a set of master brass keys.
“Miss Holt,” the manager said, his voice flat, exhausted, carrying that distinct, deadened cadence of someone who had done this fourteen times this summer alone. “The tenancy was terminated under Section 14 for non-payment of the accelerated balance following the revocation of the third-party guarantee. You waived the ten-day cure period when you signed the commercial student rider. If you are not off the premises with your personal effects by six o'clock, the county sheriff will execute the writ, and the remaining property will be deemed abandoned and transferred to the municipal waste facility.”
“It’s not abandoned!” Dalia shrieked, her voice breaking into a jagged sob. “My sister pays this! My sister is Vera Holt! She’s a partner at an advisory firm! Call her! Call her office on Park Avenue!”
“Miss Holt,” the manager said, looking down at his clipboard without a trace of emotion. “We received formal written notification from your guarantor’s legal counsel eight days ago. The account has been cleared. The guarantor has been removed. You have forty-two minutes.”
Arthur took the duct tape out of his mouth.
He walked toward the loading bay stairs, his heavy work boots dragging across the concrete. His breath was coming in short, shallow wheezes that made his ribs ache beneath his damp shirt.
He climbed the four flights of concrete stairs—the freight elevator had been locked out by management at five o'clock—and pushed through the heavy fire door into the hallway of the fourth floor.
The corridor smelled of air-conditioned carpet and expensive vanilla room freshener.
The door to Unit 408 was propped open with an empty plastic bottle of San Pellegrino.
Inside, the apartment looked as though a tornado had touched down inside a boutique department store.
Dalia’s wardrobe—three thousand dollars worth of Reformation dresses, Zara blouses, silk skirts, and high-waisted designer jeans—lay in mounds across the engineered hardwood floor. On the quartz kitchen counter, three half-eaten containers of takeout sushi sat rotting in the heat, the gray tuna curling at the edges, attracting a swarm of tiny fruit flies that hovered over the soy sauce packets.
Dalia was sitting on the floor in the center of the living room, surrounded by six black contractor bags. She was holding a framed photograph of herself and Vera at an apple orchard in Connecticut—taken six years ago, when Dalia was sixteen and Vera had just received her first promotion to senior associate.
In the photo, Vera was laughing, her arm hooked around Dalia’s neck, her hair blowing across her eyes, looking younger, softer, her face entirely free of the lines that now framed her mouth.
Dalia was weeping.
It was not the angry, theatrical performance from the wedding. It was the raw, guttural sobbing of a twenty-two-year-old child who had reached into the cupboard where the bread was always kept and found only bare, dusty wood.
“Dad,” she choked out, looking up as his heavy boots appeared in the doorway. “She really isn't coming, is she?”
Arthur leaned against the doorframe, his chest heaving, his hand pressed against the center of his sternum where a dull, hot pressure had been sitting since noon.
“No, Dalia,” Arthur said softly. “She isn't coming.”
“Why does she hate me?” Dalia’s voice was high, childlike, terrified. “I just... I was mad about the car. The transmission was slipping, Dad! I couldn't get to my internship! She has so much money! Why couldn't she just give me the three thousand dollars?”
Arthur looked around the apartment: the floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the Hudson; the recessed LED lighting; the stainless-steel refrigerator that had cost more than his first three cars combined.
“Because it wasn't three thousand dollars, Dalia,” Arthur said, his voice dropping into a register of profound, terminal sadness. “It was eighty thousand dollars. Over four years. It was her weekends. It was her twenties. She worked while you went to the beach. She saved while you bought four-dollar coffees and fifty-dollar dinners with your friends.”
He walked over, bent down with a groan that seemed to come from the marrow of his hips, and picked up a black trash bag.
“Get your shoes, Dalia,” he said. “The truck’s idling. Your mother made up your old bed in the basement.”
“The basement?” Dalia recoiled, her eyes wild. “The basement smells like mold, Dad! The ceiling tiles are falling down!”
“Then you can buy some paint and fix them,” Arthur said, his voice suddenly hard as an anvil. “Because that’s where you live now. Until you find a job that pays enough to put you somewhere else.”
At 5:58 PM, the black contractor bags were piled into the bed of the rusted Ford F-150, secured beneath an old blue poly tarp held down with two frayed bungee cords.
Dalia climbed into the passenger seat, slamming the rusted door with enough force to send a shower of red iron flakes fluttering down onto the asphalt. She didn't look at the building. She pulled her knees up to her chest, buried her face in her sweatshirt, and sobbed as the truck rattled out of the parking lot, its tailpipe coughing gray smoke into the ninety-degree heat.
May you like
Behind them, on the fourth-floor balcony, the building superintendent appeared with a cordless drill.
The sharp, high-pitched whir-whir-whir of the driver echoed across the courtyard as he drove three-inch steel screws through the jamb of Unit 408, sealing the door from the outside.
