The Man Upstairs Alanna Schubach (bio) We were under the impression that our mother was working the late shift until a girl in Walt’s kindergarten class told him otherwise. “Your mom’s the tooth fairy,” she said. The girl’s name was Genevieve and the day previous she’d sneezed an incisor across the classroom. It had soared through the air as though looking for someone to bite. Upon its descent, another child extracted it from between the thick fibers of the alphabet rug and handed it back to its owner. She had forced herself to stay awake, Genevieve told Walt, because this was her very first lost tooth and she had figured maybe she could negotiate up from the single dollar one was rumored to receive in exchange. Eyes lowered in feigned sleep, she couldn’t see through the slit in her lids the method by which our mother entered but recognized her at once when she drew near enough to slip a hand beneath her pillow. Genevieve had been too startled to bargain but nevertheless ended up with two silver dollars. [End Page 429] ________ Our family was famous for two things. The first was that our mom was a waitress at the Laurel Luncheonette, where everyone went. She had a crystalline recall and knew whose daughter had been in first grade with me, whose father was laid out with lung cancer. From his station behind the counter, the owner was forever flapping a menu at her, trying to dislodge her from conversation with one boothful of customers and get her moving to the next. She claimed all the chatting brought in bigger tips, but I don’t think she was so mercenary. She was like that everywhere. My father had an outburst about it once, she said, when she took too long at the drugstore because she ended up deep in conversation with the woman on line behind her. “Do you have to talk to everyone?” he demanded, when she got back into the car. “Can’t you just buy your Camels without making a new best friend?” In the passenger seat she had laughed and laughed. The second thing we were famous for was how we looked together. An old lady stopped us once in the IHOP parking lot. “One of each,” she marveled. “Excuse me?” our mom said. “Light, dark, and medium.” The old lady pointed to me, then Walt, then our mom. Walt giggled, delighted for the attention from someone who wasn’t Mom or Grandma, but I, sensing our mom stiffen, kept my face still. “Do they have different fathers?” the old lady asked. “You know,” my mother said, “I’ve never been sure,” and yanked us across the blacktop, away from the lady now glaring, mouth a little slack and inside it her bottom teeth like small gray stones leaning against each other. Our mom knew very well we had different fathers. Mine was originally from a place called Wales, to which he’d returned after getting caught bartending on a tourist visa. Walt’s was from [End Page 430] Jamaica — not the neighborhood in Queens but an island, far away — and had been killed in a motorcycle crash some months before Walt was born. “I like accents,” our mom would tell the people she considered worthy of knowing her business. When these people asked what she was, she flapped her hand, like the diner owner flapping the menu. “God knows,” she said. We all thought we looked more alike than not. That Walt’s dad was dead and mine was just a voice lilting over the telephone a few times a year mattered so little there was no need to say so. But then there were the games we played. My favorite, “Belly,” amounted to Walt and I sitting on my bed with the comforter over us, pretending we’d been swallowed by a huge creature and had to fight our way out. Usually it was the belly of a whale — whales, Wales? Sometimes we kicked and punched until the ribs fractured and the skin tore, but more often it was about tickling the innards just so until we...