Prologue: The Elevator

The first pages of The Favors, a novel by Jay Uno.

The car pulled up outside 1187 Jerome Avenue a little after eleven, and Tony said what he always said, which was nothing. He’d been driving buses since before I was born, and he’d given up talking around the time he gave up smoking. I said thanks. He lifted two fingers off the wheel. That was our whole friendship, and it was a good one.

I had been up since five. Eleven hours of overtime, most of it in the driver’s seat of a coach bus in a depot in Brooklyn, learning how far a forty foot bus keeps rolling after you tell it to stop. Farther than you’d think. Tony said that was the whole lesson. Give it more room than feels natural, then give it more than that. I had the new license in my wallet, the one with the CDL on it, and I kept touching my back pocket on the ride home like a kid with a lottery ticket. Big coaches paid better than the shuttles. Better was the plan.

There was a fire truck at the curb. Two police cars behind it, lights going, nobody in a hurry. I remember noticing that, how slow everybody was moving, and deciding it was somebody else’s problem. That’s what you do in the Bronx at eleven at night. You see the lights, you count floors in your head, and you decide it isn’t yours.

The lobby was empty. Somebody had propped the inside door with a folded flyer for a church on Burnside. The super had mopped that afternoon, and the floor still had that wet shine in the corners where the mop never reached the middle. My brothers lived in that building. Héctor on seven. Ernesto Jr. and Mateo on the ground floor, behind the door with the Yankees sticker. Marisol’s mother on nine. Half my family stacked in one tower like a filing cabinet, and I didn’t think about one of them as I walked past their doors. I was thinking about my bed.

The elevator in that building smelled like the elevator in every building I ever lived in, like pine cleaner losing a fight. I pressed 4. The doors took their time. The car shook once and started up.

I leaned my head back against the wall and closed my eyes, and I swear to you I was thinking about grass.

A yard. That was the plan that summer. Three girls under five in a studio the super had cut in half with a wall of sheetrock, living room on one side, bed on the other, and the kitchen so small you had to choose between opening the oven and opening the refrigerator. Sofia was four and ran everywhere. Camila was almost two and climbed everything Sofia ran past. Valentina was eight months old and hadn’t figured out yet that she was the baby, which I respected. I wanted grass for them. Not a park, where you have to watch everybody. A piece of ground with a fence around it where you could open the back door and let them go. I didn’t know anybody who had that. That was the point.

The doors opened.

I heard the radio first. That flat static, and a woman’s voice reading numbers into it like she was bored. Then I saw the hall, and at the end of the hall, my own door, 4L, open. Not cracked. Open all the way, with the living room light falling out of it across the hall tile like something spilled.

There is a kind of stillness that has nothing to do with being calm. Your body knows before you do. My hand was still on the strap of my bag. I could hear somebody moving around in my apartment, somebody heavy, in shoes, on a floor where nobody in my family wore shoes.

I didn’t move. I want to tell you I ran down that hall. I didn’t. I stood in that elevator and watched the doors start to close on me, slow, and I let them.

I’ve had more than twenty years to think about why. The best answer I have is that as long as those doors were closed, it was still a night when I came home tired and thought about grass. I was buying myself two more seconds of that night. I’m not proud of it. I’ve stood in a lot of doorways since, and I’ve watched a lot of people do exactly what I did. I never blame them for it. Nobody wants to walk into the rest of their life.

My father had a rule. He said it at every party he ever threw, standing on a kitchen chair on Clinton Street with a speaker wire between his teeth.

Todos traen un plato. Todos traen una botella. Nadie le debe nada a nadie.

Everybody brings a plate. Everybody brings a bottle. Nobody owes anybody.

He meant it. He built a whole life on it. He came to this country with one suitcase for five people, and he worked an oven six nights a week for forty years so that nobody could ever say he owed them a thing.

He was wrong about the last part. It took me most of my life to find out how wrong he was, and how wrong I was for believing him, and I started finding out that night, in that elevator, with the doors closing.

Because by then I had people who owed me. I hadn’t collected them on purpose. You don’t, where I grew up. You just stand up for somebody in a hallway when you’re sixteen, or you drive somebody to the hospital with his face open, or you take on a girl and a baby at seventeen without running, and the people watching remember. A corrections officer who liked the way I carried myself. A quiet kid from high school who had grown into somebody nobody bothered. A cousin at Children’s Services. A cop who was family the way everybody back home is family, through somebody’s aunt’s husband’s cousin.

I’d never called in a single one of them. I didn’t believe in it. I was my father’s son.

That night, I called every one of them.

But you can’t understand that night without Clinton Street. So that’s where we’re going. Back to a fifth floor walkup with the bathtub in the kitchen, and a man getting off a plane in 1975 with his mother, the three youngest of her children, one suitcase, and two rules.