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A Novel
by Mikki Brammer
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Savoring the bergamot vapor from my tea, I closed my eyes and let my body relax for the first time in weeks. Holding in your emotions all the time is kind of exhausting, but it's what makes me good at what I do. It's my responsibility to always remain placid and even-keeled for my clients, even when they're frightened and panicking and don't know how to let go.
As my feelings began to thaw, I leaned back into the sofa cushions, allowing the weight of sadness to settle across my chest and a yearning to squeeze my heart.
There's a reason I know this city's full of lonely people.
I'm one of them.
3
Usually after a job ended, I spent the next day catching up on the mundane domestic duties I'd neglected while working. Household chores and bill paying felt inconsequential when someone was dying. Three weeks' worth of dirty laundry bulged in the basket I was lugging to the basement. Grandpa hadn't just bequeathed me the rare treasure of a rent-controlled apartment, but also one with a laundry room in the building. Saving me from the New York City burden of trekking to the laundromat was one of the small but infinite ways he'd made my life easier, even in his absence.
On my way back upstairs, I stopped by the mailbox to unleash the flow of envelopes and catalogs that always awaited my sporadic visits. I rarely got anything worth reading.
A gravelly voice called from midway up the staircase. "On vacation again, kid?"
The shuffling gait that accompanied it was as familiar as the voice itself. Leo Drake was a sprightly fifty-seven when I moved in with Grandpa at age six, and the intervening decades had barely made their mark, except that his hair was now a little more salt than pepper, and his swagger a little slower.
He was also still my only friend.
"I guess you could call it that," I said, waiting as he made his way down the last few steps. "Though I'd prefer the beach to the laundry room."
As a tall, slender man with high cheekbones, Leo's age only advanced his elegance. It fascinated me how elderly people's fashion preferences tended to stay frozen in a certain era, usually the years they'd been in their thirties or forties. Often it was due to thrift—why buy new clothes when you already had plenty—but for most it seemed to be a nostalgia for what they considered to be their glory days. The time when more of their life was ahead than behind them.
Leo's style was still firmly planted in the sharp tailoring of the 1960s: crisp spread collars, notched lapels, linen pocket squares, and, when the occasion called for it, a well-loved trilby. I'd never once seen him look disheveled, even if he was just on his way to the corner bodega for milk. It'd probably been that way ever since his days working on Madison Avenue. Though he was relegated to the mailroom at first, that didn't stop his astute eye from documenting every sartorial flourish of the advertising executives to whom, as a Black man, he was mostly invisible. And when he eventually did have the financial means, he emulated—and elevated—that style to make it his signature.
All Leo was doing today was checking the mail and he still wore a pressed button-up shirt and pleated slacks. It was a conspicuous contrast to my sweatpants and baggy fisherman sweater. If my theory was correct, my style legacy didn't seem promising.
Leo smiled slyly as he slid his key into the mailbox. "And when is our rematch?"
Grandpa had taught me to play mahjong as soon as I'd come to live with him. It took me four years to finally beat him—he refused to let me win intentionally, insisting that it wouldn't do me any favors. Over time, I memorized all the different mahjong hands and observed each of Grandpa's moves closely, tracking the tiles he discarded. He had only one tell: lightly scratching his neck with his right pointer finger whenever he suspected he might be losing. Leo became his regular opponent after I went away to college, and then continued the tradition with me when I moved back after Grandpa died. We'd enjoyed a heated rivalry for the past decade or so.
Excerpted from The Collected Regrets of Clover by Mikki Brammer. Copyright © 2023 by Mikki Brammer. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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