The email arrived while I sat on a bench watching a man fight with fishing line. The subject was in German. Warmwasser, it said.
Vila Nova de Milfontes was still cool that morning. The café behind me had just unlocked its door. Bread, not coffee yet. I opened the message and read it twice. The man with the line was still pulling at the knot.
The tenant wrote that the boiler had stopped working. She described the sound it made before it died. A clicking, then silence. She had already found someone to come and look at it and needed my approval before they did any work. She added a smiley face at the end of the email, which I thought was kind.
I typed yes. It took ten seconds. Then I sat there holding the phone with both hands.
The river mouth was flat and grey. Two children were throwing stones from the low wall. A woman in a blue coat held her phone up high, photographing the water. Behind me the café owner dragged chairs out, metal legs scraping on tile. A gull stood on the wall near the children, watching them.
The flat was my mother’s. She died in 2016 and left it to me, and I have never lived in it. I lived in a rented room near the hospital where I worked night shifts. When I left I packed one bag and walked to the station. The flat stayed where it was, full of other people’s furniture and other people’s habits.
The building has five floors and the flat is on the third. My mother moved there after my father left, around 1994. Or 1995. She took the bedroom with the balcony and made the other bedroom into a room for ironing and storage. The hallway had a mirror at the end and she hung a calendar next to the front door every January, crossing off birthdays with a red pen. She kept a plant on the balcony, something green and stubborn that survived winters on the exposed side of the building. The first tenant probably threw it out. I did not ask.
There have been three sets of tenants since then. The first couple stayed two years and left because they had a child and needed more rooms. The second was a man on his own who paid late every month and once sent me a photo of a leak under the sink. The current tenant moved in alone and I have not met her. We have exchanged eleven emails, all about practical things. Boilers, smoke alarms, a letter from the building insurance.
I tried to picture the kitchen. I could see the window above the sink and the yellow tile behind the stove that my mother hated. She wanted white tile and never got around to replacing it. After that, nothing. One tenant may have repainted the cabinets. That might have been the bathroom instead. Someone changed a light fitting and I signed a form about it. Or maybe I didn’t. The details are gone.
I used to visit her there on Sundays. She would make soup and we would eat at the table by the window. I remember the soup and the window and the way she stacked the dishes afterward, rinsing each one under the tap before setting it in the rack. She always made too much and packed the rest into containers for me to take home, wrapped in a tea towel. I do not remember where the boiler is. Which wall the stove sits against, I cannot recall. I stood in that kitchen perhaps fifty times and it has left me almost nothing.
I wrote the repair reference in the leather notebook I carry. My mother’s notebook. She used it for grocery lists and phone numbers and the name of a plumber she trusted. Her handwriting is still on the last pages, small and slanting left. The plumber’s name is crossed out and written again underneath, neater the second time. I add my own notes in the gaps she left between her lists.
The bench was in full sun by then. A dog had come and settled underneath it, panting steadily. The man with the fishing line had given up on the tangle and was eating from a paper bag, brushing crumbs off his shirt. I thought about how I’d once written about leaving a place before I was done with it. This felt like the opposite. I had never started.
The email sat in my inbox with the smiley face at the bottom. I closed the notebook. The dog under the bench had fallen asleep.
The flat exists somewhere with a kitchen I cannot picture and walls I have not touched in years. The tenants send emails and I approve things from benches, from bus stops, from rooms I will also leave. My mother’s handwriting is in the notebook and her tile might still be behind the stove. She stacked dishes a certain way and I cannot remember which way. The plant on the balcony is gone and the calendar by the door is gone. I think she would have found it funny. Me owning a place I never slept in. I am not sure.
That’s all I wrote down.
