Then he took a ring of keys out of his coat pocket and set it down on the white tablecloth, and it landed heavy enough that the water glasses jumped.
Forty-one keys. Every rental Rick owns, plus the boiler rooms, plus the crawlspace hatch on Sycamore that nobody but Dean has opened since 2004.
Dean said, “You’ll want to get these labeled. I never had to.”
And then he did the thing I did not expect, which was to look past his brother at a table in the back where four of Rick’s tenants were sitting, and say, “Mrs. Okonkwo, would you tell him about the furnace?”
She stood up. Seventy-eight years old, in her church clothes, at a retirement dinner she’d been invited to as a guest.
Christmas Eve of 2019. Furnace out in a duplex on Vine with three grandchildren in it and the temperature going to nine degrees. She called the number on her lease, which is Rick’s office, and got a recording. She called it four times.
Somebody gave her Dean’s number. He was at our table with the ham already carved. He was gone two hours and came back with his hands cut up.
She was not the only person in that room with a version of that.
What Rick never understood — what he has genuinely never once understood — is that the reason he has not had a code violation in this town since 1996 is not that he is a good landlord. It’s that the city inspector’s file on those properties runs to two hundred pages and the correction sign-off on almost every one of them is in my husband’s handwriting, because Rick would forward the notice and never mention it again.
The inspector, Randy Pilcher, was at that dinner too. Retired now. He brought a folder because Dean had called him a week before and asked him to.
Clipped in the front of it was a complaint letter from 2011, from a tenant on Third Street, which the city had filed as a complaint because that’s the only kind of letter that office receives. It isn’t one:
“I do not want to make trouble for anybody. I want it written down somewhere by the city that the man who comes to fix things is not the man whose name is on my lease, and that he has never once asked me for anything, and that I have no way to thank him that he’ll accept.”
Randy read that out loud into a room of business partners with a microphone somebody handed him.
Rick did not finish his retirement dinner. He came to our house eleven days later and sat in the kitchen and asked my husband what he wanted, and Dean said the same thing he’s said his whole life, which is nothing.
So Rick did the only thing left. He hired two full-time maintenance men in February and he pays them properly, and he has quit calling at two in the morning, and in April he introduced Dean at a chamber lunch as his brother.
Twenty-eight years and one word. That’s all it ever needed to be.