The Cryptocurrency King

THREE CRUELTIES

"Wes Calloway. Four months of excuses and now you want me to believe this time's different."

Sal Renner filled the doorway of apartment 4C, arms crossed over a chest gone soft with age, a ring of keys jingling against his hip like a warning bell. Wes stood in the hallway with a grocery bag cutting into his fingers. Rice. Milk. The store-brand supplements that cost more than food had any right to.

"I have half of it," Wes said. "Friday I'll have the rest."

"Friday." Sal laughed, short and ugly. "You said that in March too."

Behind him, in 4B, old Mrs. Alvarez cracked her door open to watch. Wes felt his face go hot. This was the second time this month Sal had done this in front of half the floor, talking to him like a kid who'd wet the bed.

"Look, man. My mom's stage four. I'm working three jobs. I'm not hiding from you."

"Everybody's got a story." Sal stepped close enough that Wes could smell coffee on his breath. "You know what I think? I think you're a deadbeat with a sob story stapled to him, and the sob story's the only reason I haven't put your stuff on the curb already."

Something in Wes's chest went tight and cold. That was two. Not the last.

"I'll have the rest by Friday," he said again, because there was nothing else to say that wouldn't get him thrown out faster.

"Funny thing about Fridays." Sal's eyes dropped to the backpack on Wes's shoulder, the only thing he owned worth stealing. "You know what's in there?"

"Sal. Don't."

Too late. Sal yanked the strap before Wes could react and pulled out the laptop, five years old, screen cracked in one corner from a fall it never fully recovered from. The only thing standing between Wes and total silence from the outside world. Job applications. Freelance gigs. The one login that still worked on his mother's patient portal.

"Sal, I swear to God. Put it down."

"Or what?" Sal held it out over the stairwell railing, pinched between two fingers. Three floors down, the lobby tile was the kind that didn't forgive anything. "You'll pay me? Prove it. Empty your pockets right now."

Wes had nine dollars and change. They both knew it.

Sal's mouth curled into something that wasn't quite a smile. "That's what I thought."

He let go.

The laptop hit the stairwell wall on the way down, bounced off the third-floor railing, and cracked open on the lobby tile in three pieces. The sound of it, plastic and glass scattering across ceramic, was the loudest thing Wes had heard all week.

Nobody moved. Mrs. Alvarez's door clicked shut. Sal straightened his jacket like he'd just finished a perfectly reasonable transaction.

"Friday," he said. "Or it's not just the laptop going out a window next time."

He walked off whistling, the same tune he always whistled, some half-remembered jingle from a radio commercial that made Wes's skin crawl every time he heard it drift down the stairwell after that.

Wes stood there a long moment, the grocery bag still cutting red lines into his fingers, and made himself breathe before his legs would work again. This was the third thing Sal had taken from him this year. Not counting rent. Not counting the two weeks in February when he'd shut off the hot water over forty dollars, or the time in April he'd let himself into the apartment while Wes was at work just to prove he could.

Three cruelties. Wes had stopped being surprised a long time ago. He'd started keeping count instead.

Wes made himself walk down three flights to collect what was left of the only tool he had. The screen was shattered past saving. The hinge had snapped clean off. He crouched over the wreckage and gathered the pieces anyway, because leaving them there felt like leaving part of himself for strangers to step over.

His phone buzzed.

SAWYER: mom is asking for you. she says her medicine ran out again. can you come home

Wes closed his eyes. Three jobs. Two hundred and forty dollars behind on rent. A dead laptop in a plastic bag. A mother who needed medicine he couldn't afford and a brother who tracked every promise Wes made down to the exact minute he broke it.

WES: on my way. tell her I'm bringing good news.

He had no idea, standing in that lobby with glass in his palm, what kind of lie that was about to become.

The apartment smelled like eucalyptus and old carpet when he got home, the humidifier doing its useless best against his mother's cough. Sawyer sat cross-legged at the kitchen table, still in his school clothes, lining up four different colored pens by length.

"You're forty-one minutes late," Sawyer said, not looking up. "You said six."

"I know, buddy. I'm sorry."

"Mom's oxygen tank beeped an error twice. I wrote down the time both times." Sawyer slid a torn piece of notebook paper across the table. 5:12 PM. 5:38 PM. "I didn't know what to do so I just wrote it down."

Wes read the numbers and felt something twist behind his ribs. His brother, fourteen years old, sitting alone with a dying woman and a machine that kept malfunctioning, and the only thing he'd known to do was document it, precisely, because precision was the one language that never let him down.

"You did exactly right," Wes said. "I'll call the supplier tomorrow."

From the bedroom, Diane's voice carried thin through the wall. "Wes? Is that you?"

"It's me, Mom. Give me a second."

He set the grocery bag down and pressed both palms flat against the kitchen counter, breathing through the part of him that wanted to put a fist through the drywall. Then he wiped his face with his sleeve and walked into the bedroom wearing a smile he didn't feel, because that was the one thing he could still give her for free.

"You look tired," she said, the oxygen line hissing under her words.

"Long shift."

"You're a terrible liar. You always have been." She patted the edge of the mattress, and he sat, careful not to jostle the tubing. "Sawyer told me the tank alarmed twice."

"I'll handle it," he said. "Get some rest. I mean it."

She closed her eyes, and he sat there another minute listening to her breathing even out, before he eased off the mattress and went back to the kitchen, where Sawyer hadn't moved an inch.

"With what phone," Sawyer said, like the conversation had never paused. "You said the laptop broke. I heard it in your voice on the text."

Wes stared at his brother, who never once looked up from his pens, and who somehow always knew more than he was supposed to.

"It's fine," Wes said. "I'll figure it out."

Sawyer finally looked up. His eyes, gray-green like their mother's, held something that wasn't quite a question and wasn't quite an accusation.

"You always say that," he said. "And then you don't sleep for a week."