Tuesdays. In Lucia’s experience, Tuesdays were far worse than Mondays, which at least had the advantage, in her childhood, of ending the religious fervor of Sundays. Tuesday explained why, when she found a complete stranger in her kitchen, waiting patiently in the shadows of dusk, she calmly put down her purse, flipped on the light and started coffee. Of course there was a stranger in her kitchen, it was Tuesday.
Southside explained why she didn’t call 911. Lucia had lived in Scranton’s Southside for over 15 years. When she had moved in, Southside had been a haven for the working poor, filled with converted Victorians, big apartments for low rents and many still had touches of the houses’ former glory: 100 year old hardwood floors, intricate woodwork, elaborate tiling. In the winter, Southsiders collectively froze, unable to afford to effectively heat drafty apartments with old windows and twelve foot ceilings, but in the summer, the apartments stayed cool, though few stayed inside. For three months, Southside became a block party, people unable to afford cable and internet amusing themselves by visiting porch to porch, children with few toys playing endless games of tag and catch in the streets.
Lucia loved it all, soaked up the community, the unfamiliar sense of belonging, until the housing boom hit Scranton. Suddenly, minimum wage workers could afford exotic mortgages to buy houses in more desirable neighborhoods, and her neighbors packed up their families and battered furniture and left for Bulls Head, the upper Hill Section, Green Ridge, neighboring cities such as Dunmore and Moosic, and, sometimes even Clarks Summit, the goal of every homeowner in the area.
After the families left, the drug dealers and pimps moved in, bringing with them junkies and prostitutes and the remaining Southsiders quickly learned everything they never wanted to know about crime. The Mayor, obsessed with raising downtown Scranton to its former off Broadway glory, abandoned Southside. They never voted for him anyway, damn Democrats, he was quoted as saying.
So Lucia was in a position to know that this man in her kitchen wasn’t some common criminal. A junkie would have grabbed anything shiny and left immediately, or trashed the place if he noticed that she didn’t have anything worth stealing. A rapist wouldn’t calmly watch her make coffee, thus giving her an opportunity to escape or throw boiling hot water at him. In a movie, he might be the underling of a drug lord, sent to teach her a slow, painful lesson, but Lucia knew from personal experience that pissing off a drug dealer led to immediate violence at his hands, in public, not weird melodramatics in private.
She studied him as the coffee brewed, matching his silence easily. Lucia had never been intimidated by silence. He looked familiar somehow, though Lucia was sure she’d never seen him before. He was pale, with long black hair, black eyes framed by long black lashes and perfectly arched brows. His jaw was strong, his nose Roman, his cheekbones prominent. Even seated, he was tall and slim and everything about him, from his unfashionably long hair to his black jacket to his black loafers bespoke the sort of casual elegance only old money created.
There was something very odd about him though . . .
He interrupted Lucia’s train of thought with exactly the rich baritone she expected. “Coffee’s done.”
“How do you take it?” Lucia supposed it was strange to offer your intruder coffee, but she was sure her grandmother would rise from the grave to slap her if she failed to maintain at least a basic level of courtesy. Hospitality had been grandma’s life. Well, Jesus had been her life, but hospitality had been a close second.
