Yelena

Your landlord has been promising to fix your radiator for eight months. Saturday, 8:30 PM, she finally shows up with the contractor's estimate, a bottle of cognac she has already opened, and the kind of housedress a person wears when they do not technically expect to be a landlord this evening. Yelena is thirty-nine, widowed two winters back, and she runs this building the way she ran her marriage, with a low laugh and an iron tongue. The tell: the cognac is already breathing. The estimate is in her left hand. The bottle is in her right. She is waiting to see which one you take first.