I have left instructions for you regarding various features of the apartment in places where I trust said instructions will be of most use. I believe I have thought of everything, but if I have missed something crucial, please let me know and I will do my best to address your concerns.
As we have discussed, I suspect we will interact infrequently. When I wish to convey information to you and you are not here, I will leave a note for you on the kitchen table. I ask you to kindly communicate with me in this same way. I strongly prefer more “old-fashioned” methods of communication to email and text messaging. I use the latter as infrequently as possible.
I look forward to greeting you properly in a few hours if you are still in the apartment when I rise at sundown.
Yours in good health,
Frederick J. Fitzwilliam
Frederick’s handwriting was easily the prettiest I had ever seen, his cursive gracefully slanting across the page like the lettering in a formal wedding invitation. The last time I’d gotten a handwritten letter was in the sixth grade, when my class did a pen pal exchange with a sixth grade classroom in France. Somehow, it didn’t surprise me that my new roommate wrote letters often enough to justify having monogrammed stationery.
Smiling a little, I stepped into my new bedroom.
There was a second envelope lying on the mattress, beside an intricately carved wooden bowl full of olive-shaped bright orange objects. Were they fruit? They smelled strongly of citrus, but they were unlike any fruit I’d ever seen before.
Bewildered, I slowly opened the second envelope—which had also been closed with an old-fashioned seal—and pulled out the crisply folded, fancy sheet of paper inside.
Dear Miss Greenberg,
I am told it is customary to give housewarming gifts when a person moves into a new home. I don’t know if you even like fruit, but I had these kumquats on hand and thought I would gift them to you.
I hope you enjoy them.
With kind regards,
Frederick
I set down the letter, amazed.
He’d gotten me a move-in gift.
I’d had over a dozen living arrangements since high school. Before now, the closest thing I’d ever gotten to a move-in gift was the communal password to a roommate’s ex-boyfriend’s Hulu account.
I glanced at the bowl again, picking up one of the tiny orange fruits and sniffing it. Up close the citrus smell was strong and unmistakable.
I had never seen fruit like this before and had no idea what a kumquat even was. I loved citrus fruit, though. Somehow, I had a feeling these were organic, too.
I reached for my phone to tell Sam about this. He wasn’t going to believe that my weird new roommate got me a bowl of exotic fruit as a move-in gift. But then, I thought better of it. If Sam was already concerned about me moving in with a hot roommate, he’d be even more concerned if he knew that said hot roommate bought me a gift—as random and fruity as it might be.
No. Even though I always told Sam everything, I needed to keep this detail to myself.
Curious, I bit into the small fruit in my hand. Sunlight burst on my tongue.
Delicious, I thought, popping the rest of it into my mouth.
* * *
It was after five by the time I got all my stuff moved over from my old apartment. Everything I owned—my art supplies, my clothes, the half-broken rainbow-colored guitar I’d dragged with me on every move since college even though I barely knew how to play—fit easily inside my new bedroom closet.
When I shut the closet door, you couldn’t even tell anyone had just moved in.
I leaned back against the wall and surveyed the room. I still couldn’t believe this space was mine. It all felt surreal—the four-poster bed that took up a third of the room; the antique dresser and desk set; the mostly bare walls.
I thought back to Frederick saying I could redecorate. Normally I liked to cover my walls with things I’d made. But it was hard to picture most of my pieces in this room. Especially my most recent project, which I called The Eternal Sunshine of Late-Stage Capitalism, made mostly out of a rusted-out carburetor and rainbow-colored confetti.
But the decor in the room sucked. Yes, the furniture was fancy and old, but it was as much a mishmash of style and era as the living room was. A single framed oil painting of a fox-hunting party was all that hung on the walls. It was huge, hung on the wall directly opposite of my bed, and was maybe the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. It featured a dozen long-dead men riding horses in a field, dressed in wigs and red coats. Beagles ran alongside them.
I’d studied in London during my junior year of college, and I remembered learning that this style of painting had been very popular in English inns in the eighteenth century. It arguably matched the decor in the room a lot better than my own projects would. But it was also hideous. I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep there knowing what fate awaited those poor historical foxes.
After a few moments’ consideration I decided the seaside landscape project I did the previous summer after my trip up to Saugatuck, on the eastern coast of Lake Michigan, would look great in that spot.
While landscapes weren’t my usual thing, I thought I did a decent job with that series. I’d been in a rare mood for watercolors on that trip, and I thought the warm, sandy tones I’d used would go well with the color scheme of the room. As would the seashells and pieces of beach trash I’d glued to the canvas once the paint had dried.
I decided to write Frederick a note before getting any of my pieces from Sam’s storage unit, just to be on the safe side.
Hi Frederick,
I’m all moved in! Tomorrow I’m going to hang up some of my art in my bedroom if that’s okay with you?? The walls in my bedroom are kind of bare, and you said I could redecorate if I wanted to. I have a lot of pieces I’m proud of that I’d like to display in there, but this IS your apartment, so I wanted to be sure it was okay before I brought stuff over from Sam’s. Especially because my art is a lot different in style from the way the rest of the place is decorated.
Also, thank you for the fruit! I’d never had a kumquat before. They were delicious.
Cassie
My handwriting was nowhere near as nice as Frederick’s, and I didn’t have an envelope to put my note in. But there was nothing to be done for it. I set it down in the center of the kitchen table, figuring that if he still wasn’t awake by the time I had to leave for my shift at Gossamer’s, he’d see it there.
I was exhausted from moving and regretted agreeing to take a shift at the coffee shop that night. All I wanted was to relax in my new bedroom and listen to music. But I needed the money and wasn’t really in a position to say no to shifts, no matter how tired I was.