Sleepwalker by Wendy Corsi Staub

picks up a paint stirrer. He’d better get busy.
    â€œW hat the hell is going on down there?” Roger Krock calls from the top of the steps, not really expecting the first floor tenant to answer him.
    Sure enough, all is silent below . . . now .
    But a minute ago, there was such a loud banging noise that Roger nearly fell off the kitchen chair he was standing on. At his age, a fall from that height could easily snap a bone.
    Who would look after him then?
    He’s eighty years old, living alone, long retired from his janitorial job at the state capitol building a few miles away, with pensions from that and from the navy. Not much to spend his money on, though, so he adds it to the cash he’s been stashing away for years, though he’s not sure who will even inherit it when his time comes.
    His brother has been gone for nearly five years, his sister for seven, and he lost his wife way back in ’96.
    It’s not like he has kids and grandkids to lean on in his so-called golden years. No, he and Alice were childless. They didn’t want or expect it to be that way—they were hoping to raise a big family—but things were different back then.
    If God didn’t want you to have children, you didn’t get to have them. Period. There was none of this nonsense with test tubes and women carrying other women’s babies and being injected with octuplets and whatever the hell else goes on in this day and age. People adopting from foreign countries, and all those Hollywood movie stars not even bothering to get married . . .
    The world is going to hell in a handcart as far as Roger is concerned.
    Anyway, being all alone in the world the way he is, he can’t afford to have any broken bones.
    Yeah, and it’s not like that inconsiderate tenant downstairs ever thinks to look in on him, even when the weather is bad—which it was more often than not this past winter. His neighbor is a good thirty, forty years younger than Roger, but he doesn’t even bother to shovel the front steps and walk when it snows. He just waits for the landlord to come around and do it, and half the time that’s not until a day later.
    Meals on Wheels can’t deliver when they can’t get up to the door. That means Roger resorted to canned beans on quite a few stormy days, all because of his lazy neighbor.
    And now I almost fell off my damned chair because of him slamming something around down there. Well, I’m going to go down and give that jerk a piece of my mind.
    Roger leaves the chair right where it is, beneath the trap door he’d just opened. He’ll get back to that later.
    The trap door leads to the low attic tucked beneath the roof. This apartment comes with access to the storage area there; the one downstairs gets the basement crawl space.
    The attic is better, as far as Roger is concerned. It’s a lot drier up there. God only knows what the underground dampness would do to the cash he has stashed away, much less to his magazine collection.
    He’s been collecting since he was in Guantanamo sixty years ago; some of those vintage issues of Hustler and Penthouse are worth a fortune. Not that he’d sell them off, unless he absolutely had to part with them. But it’s nice to know that he has his own little nest egg up there. Of course, Alice never knew the trove existed.
    If she had ever found out . . .
    Roger shudders to think of her reaction.
    But she never did, and now that he’s all alone, he sometimes feels like those old magazines are his only pleasure in life. Yes, and if he breaks a leg, God only knows when he’d be able to get to them again.
    Grumbling to himself, he goes out into the hall, leaving the door propped open, and hits the light switch.
    Nothing happens.
    The damned overhead bulb is burned out again. It’s bright as a Havana beach outside, but you’d never know it if you were stuck in the hallway of this dark old