Free Super in the City by Daphne Uviller Page A

one single scrap reflected anything I’d ever, in my dullest, tamest dreams, given a second thought to: receipts for washers and extension cords and faucet handles and drill bits and plywood and Sheetrock. Old invoices and canceled checks to electricians, exterminators, the fire department, an ironsmith. Tax assessments, water/sewer bills, battered repair logs, sprinkler inspection reports, fuel oil storage permits.
    In the few moments that weren’t riddled with panic, anxiety, and confusion, I sometimes felt like I was perusing the unearthed papers of an old friend and discovering clues to the parts of him I didn’t know. Finding an old engineer’s report was like coming across an EKG— I didn’t know Joe had a heart murmur! I didn’t know the bricks of my building’s east wall needed to be repointed! Occasionally, sifting through James’s questionable record- keeping meant learning about the essence of mychildhood home. But mostly, it meant a passionate new relationship with antacids.
    Before I’d spread them across the floor, the tatty records had lived in close quarters in three large file boxes, all jumbled together. When Lucy, who admitted she probably had just a soupçon of OCD, heard about this, she snuck out of her office and was at my door an hour later to minister to me. She arrived dressed for work: sweatpants, one of her father’s old army T-shirts, and her thin blond hair pulled back in an eighties- era terry-cloth headband.
    Lucy had insisted on helping all the Sterling Girls move into their respective apartments, and she was still peeved she hadn’t been able to fly to California to help Abigail unpack out there. We all knew where to find things in one another’s homes because they were organized in almost precisely the same manner. Our dressers held underwear and bras in the top drawer, sweaters and foldable shirts in the next drawer, and jeans in the bottom one. In our closets, from left to right, were pants (by weight), skirts, dresses, and at the far right were blouses and random un-foldables. Sweaty workout clothes aired out on permanent hooks on the back of the bedroom door. It was the same story with the kitchen, the bathroom, the bookshelves, and the CD racks.
    “Here’s another plumbing- looking thing,” Lucy said, handing me a coffee- stained yellow carbon copy to put in the “plumbing stuff” pile. Only after every last scrap had been laid out and organized would Lucy let me start putting papers away in the color-coded folders with color- coded labels to store in the color- coded rolling storage crates she had bought. Lucy was the only non- CPA I knew who had her own personal stash of “sign here” stickies. She wandered through the aisles of stationery stores the way some women haunted shoe stores: longingly, lovingly, and always leaving with something she didn’t need but couldn’t live without.
    I surreptitiously glanced at my watch. Tag had promised tounexpectedly stop by to tell us how gorgeous it was outside and suggest we go kayaking from Pier 66.
    “Do you or don’t you want me to help you?” Lucy demanded, following my glance.
    “No, I do,” I assured her. “This is great. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
    “You’d still be sitting here in a near- catatonic state.” She handed me an invoice. “This goes with tax records. Do you have any snacks?”
    I jumped up. “I’ll go get some!”
    “Sit
down.
We’ll take a break at two- oh- five.”
    Deep breath. “Okay.” I reluctantly grabbed another mush of papers and started smoothing them out. We’d been at this for two hours already. But just as I started running a bored eye down a tax assessment, the intercom buzzed.
    Tag!
    “I’ll get it!” I yelled, jumping up. Lucy just shook her head in disgust. I bounded down the creaky, carpeted steps to the front door.
    On the stoop was a tall man who immediately scrambled my social sensors. He wore a navy blue jumpsuit embroidered with the name