Fin & Lady: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

realized he loved Lady, whether Lady loved him or not he loved her, that he would always love her.
    Lady turned the car onto a quieter street and then an even quieter one. Fin remembered the elevator in his old building. The wood panels. The brass, shining. Lady pulled her car to the curb and stopped. The buildings were low, skinny—brick houses really, three stories, sometimes only two, steep steps leading up to the front door. No elevators here.
    “Greenwich Village,” Lady said.
    Fin looked up and down the street. Greenwich Village was where Bob Dylan lived.
    “That’s the house.” Lady pointed to one of the high, slender houses. “Our house.” The yard in front of their house was the size of a bathmat. A thick, beautiful wisteria grew up from the patch of dirt and clung to the building, purple flowers hanging dramatically over the stairs. Gus went right for the base of the vine and peed luxuriantly.
    Inside, Lady switched on a light. The room was long and narrow, two large windows facing the street. A wide doorway led to another room with two large windows at the back, facing what would turn out to be a garden.
    “Isn’t it terrific?” Lady said. “Isn’t it perfect?”
    With the exception of a chandelier in each, the rooms were completely empty.
    “Home sweet home,” Lady said.
    Fin looked around him uncertainly. Lady beamed. The place was stuffy and smelled of new paint.
    “Home sweet home,” he said. Furniture or no furniture, this was apparently where he was going to live. Our house. He liked the sound of that, at least. He walked back to the front door and opened it.
    “Wait!” Lady cried. “What are you doing?”
    “I’m going to get my suitcase.”
    “Oh.” She looked relieved. “Christ, I thought you were running away. Already.” She hustled Fin and the dog back into the car. “Come on, come on, let’s split.”
    “But what about our house?”
    Lady seemed not to have heard him. She had turned the radio back on and Louis Armstrong was singing “Hello, Dolly!”
    Fin realized how hungry he was. He’d eaten nothing today, nothing at all. He put his head back and stared up at the night sky. No stars in New York City. Just him and Lady. Who cared about being hungry, anyway?
    “That house will be our new life,” she said after a while. Her eyes were bright beneath the streetlights. She pushed her hair back from her face. She drove quickly through every green light and every red one. “You and me,” she said. “Our house.”
    The lights of the city flashed and blinked. She patted his head with her unfamiliar, lovely hand. You and me, she had said. He gazed at the city. It was all around them. It blocked the sky. It was the sky.
    “Our house,” he repeated. “You and me.”
    They parked in front of a tall apartment building, twelve stories—Fin counted. He and Lady lugged his suitcase and cardboard box into an elevator run by a sleepy man dressed like Captain Kangaroo. Gus stuck close to Fin’s side, looking up at his face every few seconds.
    “It’s all right, boy,” Fin said.
    “It is, you know,” Lady said.
    When they entered an apartment, huge and well appointed, it reminded Fin of his parents’ old apartment, what he could remember of it. The furniture was ornate. The paintings were large, dim landscapes in curling gold frames. The thick carpet practically bounced beneath his feet. He leaned against the wall, and the cool of the thick plaster, even the faint plaster smell, reminded him of when he was little.
    “We’ll crash here until our house is ready, okay?”
    “Okay.”
    Fin remembered toddling purposefully from room to room of his old apartment, dragging his small, dirty blanket behind him. He remembered pointing at things and naming them. (“Like God,” he would say later. “There is power in names. Things without names don’t really exist, do they?”) He remembered sitting on the floor while his mother had coffee with her friends, writing his name, FIN,