Oregon Hill Read Online Free

breakfast or lunch or brunch or something, but she says she has a class. Far be it from me to discourage that.
    “Well,” I say, “call me. Let’s have dinner sometime.”
    But we never seem to.
    I resist the urge to tell her to be careful. She’s twenty, for God’s sake. She only looks like a little girl as she walks away from me, tugging on a bra strap that shouldn’t be showing.

    I walk back to the Prestwould with the morning slipping away. In Monroe Park, the students are enjoying a fine fall day. The squirrels who haven’t yet been eaten by the hawks are frolicking around the inert bodies of guys from the shelter enjoying a last bit of freedom before cold weather drives them indoors. “The squirrels and the nuts,” according to McGrumpy, which is what we call my upstairs neighbor, Feldman.
    The building itself isn’t that old. It was built in 1929. But to say they don’t make them like that anymore is an understatement. It stands there, glowering down at the park like Norma Desmond waiting for her closeup, a great lady who’s seen better times and doesn’t know it.
    The interior walls are terra cotta. You could slaughter a sheep in the next room and no one would hear. It has maid’s rooms that most have turned into space for washer-dryers. High ceilings and lots of single-pane windows. My unit (the one I rent from Kate since she left) overlooks the park and downtown. I can’t quite see the newspaper building, ten blocks away, but I can see the corporate headquarters, Suitville, across the street from it. One time when Sally Velez was up here, she asked me if I thought a sniper could pick somebody off that far away.
    When Kate and I moved in here nine years ago, it took us a while to figure out where the distant buzzing came from that we heard sometimes when we ate in the dining room. One of the older residents had to tell us about the button for summoning the maid, hidden underneath the rug.
    It’s a nineteenth-century kind of building constructed in the twentieth and trying to get by in the twenty-first. The roof leaks, the windows leak. Hell, the walls leak if you get a big enough storm. If the plumbing goes south, you get a guy with a sledgehammer to knock a hole in one of those brick walls, then the plumber comes in and tries to fix it, and then a crew comes in to fix the hole the sledgehammer made. The radiators play the Anvil Chorus, and the place smells like hot metal when they’re on full blast.
    How could I not love it? When Kate left, I asked her to let me stay and pay rent and half the condo fee. She said fine, that the place had nothing but bad memories for her, but if I wanted to live there, to knock myself out. I can just about make the rent, usually, as long as Mel Wheelwright and his corporate masters let me hang on by my scratching, clawing fingernails to what I’m sure is the best-paying job I’ll have for the rest of my sorry-ass life.
    The residents here skew toward old. There are still a couple from before the building converted to condos. They hate change, mainly because change, in the last tenth of your life, is seldom for the better. They balk at fixing things, for the same reason that they opt for only the one-year subscription to The New Yorker . If the roof doesn’t leak, but I’m dead, so what?
    However, they are the smartest, most interesting people I’ve ever lived among. And they need me to change their light bulbs and fix their cable TVs and computers when one of them hits a wrong button and is sure they’ve broken the contraption forever. In exchange, they bake me brownies and cookies and brighten my life.
    Kate was the one who wanted to move here. We were renting a place on Laurel Street, on the Hill, because R. P. McGonnigal’s Uncle Ookie owned it and gave us a bargain. It was kind of nice, to me, living on the Hill again, but Kate had just gotten her law degree and thought we could “do better.” She said she’d always wanted to live in the Prestwould, ever