Three years earlier, Maya had arrived in our building carrying a lemon tree she seemed to consider an immediate family member. The elevator was broken, the lobby smelled like somebody’s burned dinner, and I had been coming home with groceries when she pointed at me. “You,” she said, scanning my shoulders with professional interest. “Those look useful.”
Ten minutes later, I was carrying one end of an enormous terracotta pot up four flights of stairs while she walked backward ahead of me. She introduced the tree as Walter and warned me against causing “citrus trauma” whenever a branch brushed the railing. By the third floor, I was sweating through my shirt and regretting buying milk before meeting her. By the fourth, she had made me laugh so hard I had to put Walter down before one of us became a building incident.
Two days later, she knocked on my door with cinnamon rolls in a pan covered by a clean dish towel. “Payment for your recently promoted shoulders,” she explained, handing them over before I could say she didn’t owe me anything. They were still warm, and she had gotten icing on her wrist without noticing. I invited her in for coffee, which was how ten minutes on a broken-elevator afternoon became three years of knowing where another person kept her spare batteries.
