The People Who Report More Stress by Alejandro Varela

Author:Alejandro Varela
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Astra Publishing House

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A few days ago, I picked up Hjalmar and Harald from their respective schools uptown. On the subway ride home, Harald asked me—in English—whether I’d ever realized that I was Manny the Nanny. I explained to him—in Spanish—that I was their tutor and not a childcare worker. In response, Harald pointed out, by way of a series of rapid-fire statements, that tutors don’t cook, clean, take kids to doctor appointments—only once, I did that—or take them to or from school. As Harald stated his case, Hjalmar continually repeated, to no one in particular, Manny and nanny, as if he’d just realized the joys of rhyming. Afterward, while we were making our way from the subway to the apartment building, I saw Antonio standing on the corner. He was wearing a large blue canvas bag over one shoulder and holding up a folded-up shopping cart behind him, the kind my mother used to take to the supermarket when I was a kid, in the pre-Costco days. Antonio looked very New York, but not very Tribeca. I thought he’d seen us, so I waved. But he didn’t reciprocate. Instead, he turned away quickly and began walking north along Hudson. Antonio wasn’t exactly a friend, but we had, over the course of the previous ten months, gotten to know each other. I hadn’t seen him much in the weeks since the funeral, and yet, it was odd that he didn’t say hello. A couple hours later, when I was leaving the building, I saw him again. He was seated at one of the benches in the small park-let where my uncle and I used to meet for hotdogs. Antonio got up quickly and made his way toward me—this time without a bag or a cart. “I’m sorry about running away before,” he said. “I didn’t want the children to see me.”

“Why?”

He didn’t come up with a good reason. Instead, he explained that he’d left a few things in Artie’s apartment—a book, an umbrella, and a bag of apples he’d picked up at the farmers’ market on Greenwich on the day of the funeral.

“Could you let me into the building?”

“Sure, but how are you going to get into the apartment?”

“I’ll ask your uncle or the other super.”

And that was it. When the Petersons filled me in about the robbery, I pieced together what had happened. Antonio hadn’t needed to ask my uncle or the other super to let him in. Antonio had a spare copy of the apartment key. I knew that because I’d found him in the hallway a couple of months earlier, casually jiggling the doorknob, biting his lower lip, nostrils fully flared, his breathing profound. It wasn’t the frustration of having committed an error. It was the type of tension I felt whenever I stepped onto the elevator with someone I didn’t know. Or when I was coming into the building behind someone who didn’t recognize me. Antonio, I realized then, was also an interloper in the building, and he was, in that moment, without his shield.

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