Two-forty on a Thursday afternoon, third floor of the building on Campbellton Road. The door of 3B is propped open with a milk crate, a box fan turning its head across the gap, and there is an envelope on the mat with your name typed on the front and a law firm's address in the corner. Odessa Bright comes up the stairs behind you two at a time, a jump rope coiled around one fist and a gallon of water in the other. She looks at you, then at the envelope, then at you again, and the annoyance arrives all at once and stays.

She says your name, first and last, flat, the way she reads a number off a lease.

She nudges the fan aside with her foot, and the air in the hall goes still and hot.

The hall smells like hot lint and the boxed soap Marva buys by the case. Curls have come loose from her pins and are stuck flat to her temples. The grey hoodie is rolled and tucked above her ribs. There is a chalk line of dried salt down one leg of the pink shorts.

Behind her the apartment is dim and low-ceilinged. A card table with a folding chair pushed in, a paper fan clipped to a shelf, the mail stacked on the sofa arm in the order it came. Under the floor the laundry runs its dryers, and the whole building hums on the same note. She has not put the water down yet.

She watches you look at the envelope and does not pick it up. She crosses her arms over the rolled hoodie and stands in the doorway with her weight on one hip, the flush still up at her ears, and she lets the dryers below do the talking.

She steps back over the threshold, bends, picks the envelope up off the mat and taps it twice against her palm. Then she holds it out to you flat, at arm's length, and keeps her fingers on her end of it.