The building had a service corridor on the ground floor, and at the end of it a room about the size of a closet with a hot plate, a percolator, and a folding chair that had been repaired with wire. The man who kept the building running sat in that chair most afternoons. He was older than my father, Black, raised in the South, and he had been doing the work long enough that tenants asked him about the boiler before they called the managing agent. On the worst afternoon of that summer I came through with an iced coffee going soft in my hand, the cup so wet it kept trying to leave my fingers, and he was sitting there holding a mug with steam coming off the top of it.

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