If These Walls Could Talk Read Free Page B

building’s owner started making big bucks with his sheet metal business he moved his family to a condo on City Island, which, along with Riverdale, ranked among the nicest neighborhoods in the Bronx.
    She and Reuben first heard about the apartment from Reuben’s brother Saul, who was working downstairs in the shop. Not long after Saul decided to quit and work at a larger shop near Willis Avenue. At the time Mitchell was just eighteen months old and Camille had just gotten a positive result on a home pregnancy test. They desperately needed something bigger than their one-bedroom in Gun Hill.
    Camille, now dressed in a brown wool suit and crisp yellow blouse, her long hair pinned into a French roll to help disguise the fact that she was overdue for a visit to the hairdresser, prepared breakfast for the family in the kitchen. The kids had cereal with sliced banana, and she had a Waldorf salad with sweet apple slices, golden raisins, and chopped walnuts. Reuben didn’t eat breakfast on weekdays, at least not at home. He usually grabbed a croissant or one of those fried-egg sandwiches with bacon. Camille kept telling him that all that butter and cholesterol were bad for his heart, as well as making him gain weight, but he didn’t particularly enjoy fruit or cereal. “I ate oatmeal for breakfast every day when I was growing up, but my stomach cried out for eggs and bacon,” he always said.
    At ten minutes to eight Camille kissed her family good-bye and left for work. She sighed when she stepped out into the street. The sunlight that came through her apartment windows was practically obscured by the shadow of the elevated train tracks a block away. She heard the wheezing of the train’s brakes as it pulled into the 161st Street station. Employees from the sheet metal shop congregated outdoors, sipping coffee in Styrofoam cups bought at the convenience store down the street, savoring the last minutes before they were due to start work. They would hastily toss their cups at about a minute or two before eight, and nearly half of them would miss the trash can, leaving the ground littered with white cups that would soon be flattened and dirtied by the shoes of passing pedestrians.
    She walked briskly in the direction of the train station, suddenly anxious to get downtown. She always felt like this the moment she stepped out of her apartment, always had the same thought. If only she could lift their building and drop it in a nicer area, like Dorothy Gale’s house in The Wizard of Oz . Only instead of landing on the Wicked Witch of the North, she’d want to land on a nice block on City Island or in Pelham Bay, where the commercial space would be filled with upscale shops, including a bakery, which would not only be quiet but sweet-smelling.
    Ah, if only. This was no way to live, surrounded by all this noise and ugliness. She could stand the noise from the sheet metal shop if she absolutely had to, but the neighborhood had not one single redeeming feature. The kids didn’t even have a park to play in. Mitchell wanted a bike, but Reuben said no because there was no place to ride it safely.
    And Mitchell was now ten years old, just a leap away from puberty. He really shouldn’t still be sharing a bedroom with his younger sister at this stage of his life.
    As she huffed her way up the steep stairs to the elevated train—she’d put on twenty pounds after giving birth to Mitchell and another twenty after she had Shayla, losing none of it—Camille suddenly had an idea. She’d call Reuben when she got to work.
    No, she thought, better to wait. This needed to be discussed in person.

    â€œCan I be excused?” Shayla asked.
    Camille glanced at her daughter’s dinner plate. “You didn’t finish your lima beans.”
    The seven-year-old’s face promptly wrinkled, like she wanted to cry.
    â€œDon’t even try it,” Reuben warned. “You can do better than