Oregon Hill Read Online Free Page A

since she was a little girl. When a unit halfway up came open in 2000, at a price that sounds like a steal now, even with real estate tanking, we took it. We were married there four years later. We had some good times, often with each other.
    She insists that I don’t smoke inside for fear of bringing down the future resale value, but she wished that when we lived together, too. I try to be good, but you can’t have everything.
    As I walk in the front door and then fob myself into the lobby, I see Clara Westbrook, one of our older and more astute residents, sitting there in one of the chairs where she waits when someone’s coming to take her someplace. She has her oxygen tank with her. She rolls it behind her like a kid pulling a toy duck.
    “Oh, that poor girl,” Clara says. She looks like she’s been crying. “She couldn’t have been much younger than your Andi.”
    How does she do that? I can’t remember the names of everyone in the building, and there aren’t that many of us, but she knows my daughter’s last name and age. I don’t believe she’s ever seen Andi, except in pictures.
    “There are such bad people out there,” she says. “Sometimes, I don’t think I’ll mind leaving this place very much.”
    I know she means Earth and not the Prestwould.
    Then she looks up at me and smiles.
    “But I get over it.”
    She asks me if I know anything else about it.
    I tell her that I emptied my brain into the computer at work last night, that everything I know she’ll know if she reads the paper.
    “Well, I hope they catch the bastard.”
    I tell her I do, too, and that I’m sure they will.
    I ask her if she’s seen Custalow.
    “Oh, I think Abe and Susan are down in the basement, trying to fix the heat. It’s freezing in here.”
    Actually, it feels as if it’s about seventy-five in the lobby, and this likely is Antarctica compared to Clara’s unit. It’s a bone of contention here among the newer, younger, more affluent members of our little insane asylum. We pay a common heating bill as part of the condo fee, and there are those among us who would like to take very old people far below their comfort zone in order to save a few dollars. What passes for sweater weather for Clara Westbrook and her friends is a pleasant temperature for the newbies. Such people deserve to spend all eternity in hell, with Clara controlling the thermostat.
    I take the stairs down to our basement and finally find Abe Custalow and the lovely Susan looking mildly confused as they stare at the Rube Goldberg expanse that is our boiler.
    “Don’t know,” Custalow says. “We might ought to get somebody in here that knows what they’re doing.”
    “Shit,” says Susan. “These old farts will never pay for that. They want us to fix it.”
    Susan Sheets is about half Abe’s (and my) age, but she already looks ridden hard and hung up wet. She’s got two kids out in Powhatan somewhere and a boyfriend who “visits” her occasionally here. I know because I caught them one night visiting on a table in one of the utility rooms when I came down to look for something in my storage cage. Because I didn’t tell, Susan gives me wry, conspiratorial smiles now and then, and I think she would show her appreciation in a more corporeal way if I only asked. I do not believe this will happen in my lifetime, but Mr. Johnson, my auxiliary brain, has disappointed me and others before.
    She’s been the super here five years, and Custalow only started four months ago, so she has assumed the role of his boss. Abe goes along with it, doesn’t complain to the manager. The last guy got arrested for setting his girlfriend’s car on fire, and since Abe was crashing with me already and had a background in building maintenance, among other things, he seemed like a natural to replace him.
    McGrumpy opined that we were trading one criminal for another, but enough people knew Abe by then that they were willing to give him a second chance.
    “After