Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley

Author:Sloane Crosley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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My liquor store does not have a ton of kosher wine options so I use the traditional method and pick the second-cheapest bottle. As I walk down Forty-seventh Street, paper bag tied with a flammable ribbon, I nod at the security guard in the beanie. I have more cash on my person than I did yesterday. Some of it is in my bra, which feels like a mistake. Regardless, I don’t know how these negotiations will shake out. If I bring too little, my search will have been for naught. If I bring too much, I might give away too much. I don’t want to spend years calculating all the things I’m not paying for to justify buying back my own necklace.

Yesterday, I spotted cameras in the stairwell. So I have returned alone. I don’t want anyone thinking I brought backup. Hard-boiled or not, it delights me to think this way, to feel at home in this space of transaction and darkness, in this land where the only law is the law of what you can get away with. Did Russell know a version of this world? Multiple versions? Multiple secrets? Suicide, unlike most deaths, is math you work backward instead of forward. It’s enough to make you crazy.

In the halogen light of a new day, suite 303 seems somewhat defanged. Today’s cast of characters is limited to Dimitri, a woman in a sheer frilly blouse, and a man in a leather bomber jacket who, like myself, has business here. I hang back as Dimitri and this man have an exchange involving an envelope and a hug. They pat each other’s backs. After the man leaves, Dimitri starts speaking to the woman in Hebrew but she interrupts him, nodding at me.

“Oh,” he says, upon seeing my face, “is this for me?”

“It is,” I say, instantly embarrassed by the wine.

I place the bag on the partition, which is narrower than the base of the bottle. The woman watches me perform this balancing act without interfering. She remains unimpressed. Meanwhile, Dimitri is patting at his pockets and lifting papers, as if having misplaced his glasses. At long last, he removes an object from the top of the safe.

It’s a plastic sandwich bag.

My eyes widen at the sound of the necklace being extracted from the bag. When Dimitri turns around, he is holding the amulet by its chain. The silver has begun to oxidize around the amber. If you wear silver every day, you will never have to polish it. The grease of life keeps it gleaming.

“Give me your hand,” he instructs, which I do, obediently.

He drops the necklace in my palm, dripping the chain on top of itself.

Then he closes my fingers for me and says: “Take it. That shouldn’t have happened.”

What the fuck, I wonder, should have happened? But I am distracted by how lightweight it is. Every time I looked at a photograph of the necklace, it gained an ounce.

“What happened to you was not right,” he emphasizes. “Just take it.

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