Angels of Detroit Read Online Free Page B

scraping of McGee’s boot heels on the cement.
    “It went well,” Myles said. “Didn’t it?”
    McGee didn’t speak or slow down or turn her head.
    “It’s going to be great,” Myles said. “People are going to be excited.”
    “Please stop talking,” she said. “It was better before, when you weren’t paying attention.”
    She was surprisingly fast for someone with such short legs.
    When they reached the building, she waited for him to open the door, the one bit of chivalry he was allowed. The overhead door was heavy, but she was like an ant, a thousand times stronger than anyone would think. Sometimes he wondered if she stepped aside out of pity, just to make him feel useful.
    The building had once been a factory of some kind. Ball bearings, according to one story, but it was hard to imagine something so small leaving such a mess. The lower half of the building was still full of metal drums spray-painted with skulls and crossbones. Myles had pointed them out to McGee on the day she’d brought him here for the first time, eager to show the place off.
    “Well, they’re sealed, aren’t they?” she’d said.
    Even though this was exactly the sort of stuff she was constantly getting agitated about. Brownfields and poisoned groundwater andtoxic sludge. But for some reason she found it more compelling when these things happened to people other than them.
    He and McGee were the only ones living in the building. The rest of the second floor had been converted to artists’ studios. Maybe the light blasting through all those vast, uninsulated windows was flattering to canvases. On sunny days, Myles found the dirty glass had a way of making his life feel sepia-toned.
    Before the sun went down, though, the artists fled. Myles didn’t know where they went, but he liked to imagine little cottages in the suburbs with herb gardens and roaring fireplaces. He almost never talked to his neighbors. One was a mailman, or maybe he worked at the DMV. Something awful. His paintings were dark and blobby, like album covers for heavy metal tribute bands. And there was the middle-aged woman who rolled clay into thin gray turds that she assembled into something she called jewelry boxes but in fact looked like colanders made of Lincoln Logs. The third was a batty old hippie who taught art at the community college. Myles had never seen her stuff. She was always finding reasons for shutting her door whenever he came near.
    McGee didn’t mind the exposed ceilings or the wall of windows looking out over an old railway bed. Or the floorboards slathered in gray industrial paint. She didn’t notice that their futon, lying in the corner beneath a mound of blankets, looked like a jumble of newspapers swirled together in a dirty alley. She didn’t care that the bathroom had been an afterthought. There hadn’t been one at all when McGee found the place. But there were some things, thank God, even she was unwilling to live without.
    McGee had put Holmes in charge of building the bathroom. But Holmes didn’t know anything more about plumbing than the rest of them. His main qualification was that he owned tools and had at least a vague idea what to do with them. Holmes had stuck the bathroom where he could, in the middle of the sidewall, where it was easy to access the pipes crisscrossing nakedly overhead. A shower stall andtoilet, side by side. Around them Holmes built a Sheetrock cubicle with a curtain for a door.
    On the other side of the bathroom was the kitchen. A single sheet of drywall was all that separated the toilet from the two-burner stove. The plastic, paint-splattered utility sink was the only fixture the place had come with.
    The day she’d given him that first tour, Myles had willed a convincing grin, saying, “It’s perfect.” And she’d taken him by the arm then, smiling her pixie smile, making his lie worthwhile.
    But that had been more than five years ago. Tonight, as soon as they came inside, McGee began to pace,