Marta watched the truck back up to the curb from the second-floor window. The Romanian movers were the same ones from last spring — the older one with the back brace, the younger one who whistled. Sometimes the same crews moved different people in and out of the same apartments, year after year. They didn't remember her, but she remembered them.
In the apartment across the hall, Rosa was wrapping the last of the kitchen things in newspaper. She had been wrapping for two days. A box for the donations, a box for the daughter, a box for the apartment in Florida.
"You'll come visit," Rosa had said yesterday, in the way that means we both know you won't.
"Yes," Marta had said, in the way that means we both know I won't.
She would miss her. Twelve years of borrowed sugar and shared deliveries, of holidays remembered, of a doorbell that meant a person and not a problem. She would miss the smell of Rosa's coffee in the hall every morning. She would miss the small specific scrape of Rosa's slippers on the wood.
She was already thinking about the next person who would move into 4B.
She would give them three days.
Three days was what it took. Three days of footfalls — heavy or light, even or uneven. Three days of doors — slammed, eased, forgotten open. Three days of voices through the wall — phone calls or arguments or nothing. Three days of garbage on Tuesday morning — punctual, or one bag late, or the kind of person who pretended they didn't have any. Three days of cooking smells, of music or no music, of how late they came home. By the third day she could tell. She had not yet been wrong.
She was not proud of being good at it. It was just a thing she could do, like some people can taste salt in water. The new person was always knowable; she only had to wait three days.
Today she was on day minus one. Rosa was still here. The boxes were still moving the wrong direction. But the truck was at the curb and the older mover was already calculating angles for the couch, and Marta knew, watching from the window with her cooling tea, that by Friday someone new would be opening the door across the hall, and by Monday she would have decided.
She did not always like what she decided. Twice in twelve years she had been cordial-not-friendly across the hall for the duration of someone's stay, because by the third day she had known and the knowing had been correct. Three years for one of them. Five for the other. She had not waited to see if she might be wrong; she had simply been right and continued.
She was going to miss Rosa terribly.
Rosa came to the door with a dish towel and a tired smile. "Marta, can you take Mira's water bowl? She doesn't drink from the new ones."
"Of course," Marta said.
She crossed the hall and picked up the bowl. The cat had been Rosa's for fourteen years and was riding shotgun in the daughter's car at four o'clock. Mira would die in Florida and Rosa would not get another, and Marta knew this too the way she knew the new tenant.
She looked at the empty kitchen of 4B over Rosa's shoulder. The cabinets bare. The hooks where the apron had hung. A pale rectangle on the wall where a calendar had been.
In four days someone else's calendar would hang there. In four days the new tenant would come down the hall with a pizza box, or a violin, or a vape pen, or a child, or alone. Marta would say hello in the noncommittal way she said hello to all of them. She would not introduce herself. She would say her name when asked, and only then.
She would give them three days.
The mover whistled in the stairwell. Rosa was crying in the bedroom — Marta could tell from the silence. Marta carried the water bowl back across the hall and set it down on her own kitchen floor, where it would wait until Rosa could come collect it, or not.
She would put fresh water in it on Tuesday, just in case.