Heat Wave

Cold Open

⚠︎ BOILWATCH EMERGENCY

HEAT WAVE INCOMING

RISK LEVEL: CRITICAL

EVERYONE WILL GET EMOTIONALLY STICKY

RECOMMENDATION: ACCEPT YOUR SOFTNESS

A cannelloni at the top of a ladder on the corner of Salt Street had the loudest phone on Marinara Row, and at ten to seven on the opening morning of La Sagra della Farina it went off in his shirt pocket with all the others, in the most aggressive tone anyone had heard all summer.

He was the Feast Committee’s youngest member, at sixty-one, and therefore its ladder.

He had the last string of bulbs in one hand and the Committee’s clipboard under his other arm. The Committee had one clipboard. It had had one clipboard for as long as there had been a Committee, and the member who held it was in charge, and this morning that was him, at the top of a ladder, with his pocket screaming.

Until the phones, it had been a perfect morning, and he had made it that way himself. The arches of lights ran six blocks up the Row, strung on Monday, tested on Tuesday, not one bulb out. The booths stood in a line down the north half of Salt Street, built in two days by men who complained the whole time and came back the next morning to complain about the same booths. On the Lot’s stage at the end of the block the sifting sack sat on its stool, tied at the neck, waiting for dusk and the First Sifting, when the oldest baker on the Row would shake a sieve over the crowd for a good grain year and everybody would go home white to the shoulders.

The striped awning was up on the Guess the Number booth. The colanders were stacked for the ring toss. The strength bell had its card taped to it, in the same polite hand as every year: NOT YOU, TONY. The light came down the Row the color of good crust. It was cool. A cannelloni could stand at the top of a ladder in it and feel, for once, the right shape.

Two doors down, the night-shift baker was rolling his shutter down on a night’s bread, and his apron was screaming too. The pigeons went up off the arches all together, which they did for brooms and trucks and nothing else.

He got the phone out with the hand that was not holding bulbs.

He went down it a line at a time, looking for the number. There was no number. BoilWatch always gave a number. A number was something a Committee could argue with. You could hold a number up against the sky and say, That is not eighty-seven, I have lived here sixty-one years and I know eighty-seven, and somebody would agree with you, and the motion would carry.

He looked at the sky.

It was perfectly clear. It was the pale blue of cold water in a clean pot, not a cloud on it from the top of the Row to the Bridge.

He looked back at the phone. EVERYONE WILL GET EMOTIONALLY STICKY. He had been married thirty-four years, and he had not been emotionally sticky since the last time anybody saw the Feast’s Golden Scoop, and nobody had seen the Golden Scoop in fifteen years. ACCEPT YOUR SOFTNESS. He did not accept it. He had a clipboard.

The Committee did not cancel for weather it could not see. It had not canceled for the rain the summer the Long Strand dissolved halfway down the Row; it had judged the puddle. The Feast was older than the oldest panel in the Museum, and its banner said so, SINCE THE FIRST SACK, and you did not take down a thing like that because a phone had raised its voice.

Below him the painted line, the Feast’s southern edge, ran down the middle of Salt Street from the foot of his ladder to Broth Street. It was as white and as clean as he had ever seen it, so clean it looked fresher than it had any right to. Nobody on the Committee had painted it. Nobody on the Committee had ever asked who had. On the far side of it, by noon, there would be a counter-booth that the Committee had not seen for forty years, and he would not see it today either, which was also procedure.

Around him the Row was coming out of its doors to look at its phones, and then at the sky, and then at each other, like diners when a plate broke in the back and nobody wanted to be the one who asked.

The cannelloni put his phone away.

“I’m fine,” he said, to the Row, to the arches, to the sack on its stool. “This is fine.”

He took one step down the ladder.

Something in his filling settled, the way a sack of flour settled when you set it down after carrying it a long way, and the middle of him sagged after it, and his shoulders went where his middle went. The string of bulbs, which he had been holding up toward the last arch over Salt Street, came down by itself, a little at a time, until it hung at the height of his knees.

The cannelloni looked at the bulbs. Then at his knees. “Oh no.”

Chapter One — I Paid for That Wood

Lilly LoMein, twenty-two, turned her phone face down on Lao Lao’s step at five to seven and read the street instead, because the street had never once told her to accept anything.

The air was cool. After a tone like that it had no business being cool. Her strands hung loose and separate, each one minding its own business, which happened about twice a summer and never on a day that ended well.

From the step she could price the whole block by the stair. Salt Street was one cobbled lane with a white line down its middle that everybody stepped over and nobody claimed. Across the line, on the north corner, was Nonna’s Pasta Shop, gold letters on red, with Nonna and Ricky stacked above it; behind Lilly, the older storefront, Lao Lao’s, with Lao Lao and Lilly stacked above that. The two women behind them had faced each other across that line for sixty years and agreed in all that time on nothing but the hour to open. Next to Nonna’s rose the walk-up, a BOIL-RITE building five floors high under a water tower shaped like a colander, which leaked like one, and inside it, by Lilly’s count, nine people who would need water before noon and three who would not open the door to get it. Down the north half of the street the Feast’s booths stood in a line with their awnings furled, and on Nonna’s brick by the corner was the scorch mark where Ricky’s kindness board had burned in August.

Beside the scorch mark, where the Honesty Board had hung for four weeks, there was nothing.

At seven the grandmothers came out with their brooms and swept their halves with their backs to each other, and Lao Lao swept around Lilly’s shoes as if Lilly were a planter delivered to the wrong address. Lilly waited until the last bristle had stopped at the line. Then she crossed to look. Zip-tied to the empty bolt holes at eye level was a printed notice in the type the city used for parking. It said:

REMOVED: FIRE HAZARD (HEAT EMERGENCY).
THANK YOU FOR YOUR UNDERSTANDING.

It was not signed. Nobody on the street had seen who put it there, and Ralphie Ravioli, twenty-seven, who was already standing in front of it with a clipboard, had not seen either. He wrote while she watched, pressing harder than the notice deserved: Removal: authorized? Status: removed.

“It thanks us,” Lilly said.

“It thanks everybody,” Ralphie said. “That’s what makes it hard to log.”

Mr. Kugel came up from Broth Street at four minutes past seven, holding a pot of tea in both hands. He was eighty-four, and he had walked the pot over from the Lokshen Kugel District before the heat, which meant he had left home at six. He read the notice to the end, the way he read the labels on things he had already decided not to buy.

“I paid for that wood,” Mr. Kugel said.

Nobody asked him anything else. Lilly had four questions and filed them all for a day with fewer people in it. Mr. Kugel set the pot on Nonna’s window ledge and walked home.

On the way back Lilly went by the walk-up to count its windows, cut across toward the step, and stepped over the grate, and the grate breathed on her.

It was hot. All summer the grate had been warm, with the platform under it and the sun on top. This was a cool morning, and the heat was coming up into it from below.

She took the order pad out of her apron and wrote grate: hot under the walk-up’s floors, between 4A: knock loud and Esther Kugel, as though the grate had signed a lease.

It was not a plan. Plans were what the men on this block made, out loud, near her.

She went in at ten past seven to open the register, which she had been opening for three years of a one-year promise. Then she checked the drawer under it. She had been checking it every morning lately, and not counting. The drawer held what it always held: the job listings she printed and filed instead of applying; the six notes from her handwriting comparison, the three cream cards on top in one neat hand; and, flat on the bottom, the listing for the cold-storage logistics job across the Machattan Bridge. She had applied four weeks ago, the night the board burned, with one paragraph she had kept ready for a month. It had not answered. Jobs across the Bridge did not answer. They waited to see if you would ask twice.

She took a pencil, as an alibi, put it through her strands, and shut the drawer.

By ten the heat had arrived as advertised. Steam came off the cobbles in the sun and stood there. The customers moved slower than they had at nine and softer at the corners, and the ones who usually argued about the price of a bowl paid it and sat down. By then the order pad had columns, a key and a margin she had ruled with the side of the pencil. It was still not a plan.

Tony Tortellini, twenty-one, was standing on the north sidewalk in front of the walk-up, in the only patch of direct sun on the block, with his eyes shut and his arms held a little out from his sides, like a man waiting to be measured for a suit.

“Tony,” Lilly said from the step. “What are you doing.”

“Accepting.” Tony did not open his eyes. His tank top said SEWER GYM — NO PAIN, NO GRAIN, and the print was beginning to stretch. “I feel… EXPANSIVE.”

Ricky came out of Nonna’s at a run, courier bag already on for a shift that had not started, and Lilly noted how well he ran, and that his tee had shrunk in the right places, and overruled both in the same breath on the grounds that it was a heat wave and she was not an idiot.

“Tony, get inside,” Ricky said. “You’re melting.”

“I’m not MELTING. I’m… ADAPTING.”

Tony’s left arm went down a little at the elbow, by itself, like a shelf losing a bracket. He opened his eyes and looked at it. “…That’s supposed to do that, right?”

Ricky took him by the other arm, the one that was still working. “No. That’s not supposed to do that. Come on.”