HOLD ME CLOSER

Chapter 3: Breaking Point

The furniture was Italian. Krit knew this only because Boss Anan had said so approximately eleven times in the twenty minutes before they arrived, as if repetition alone could make the crew handle it more carefully than they would have anyway, as though the word itself were a kind of spell that might keep the marble from chipping simply by being invoked often enough.

It was a console table, marble topped, the kind of piece that probably cost more than Krit made in a year, and it needed to go up a narrow spiral staircase because the client’s elevator was, of course, being serviced. The staircase itself looked ornamental, more suited to being photographed than climbed by three grown men carrying two hundred kilos of stone and wood between them, each step a shallow curved wedge that gave no honest place to plant a foot.

“Slow,” Anan barked from the bottom of the stairs, not helping, never helping, phone in one hand as though documenting the process for some purpose he never explained, perhaps for his own records, perhaps simply because a phone in hand gave him something to do with his authority besides carrying weight himself. “Slow, slow, watch the corner, watch it...”

Krit had the weight braced against his shoulder, sweat running into his eyes, stinging enough that he had to blink hard to keep his vision clear, when his foot found the edge of a step wrong, just wrong enough, and the table’s corner clipped the stair rail with a c***k that seemed to echo through the whole stairwell, sharp and final, the kind of sound that made everyone go still before anyone had even assessed the damage, the kind of sound a body remembers longer than the mind does.

A chip, no bigger than a coin, flaked off the marble edge and skittered somewhere below, bouncing twice before it went silent, the small sound of it landing somehow louder in the aftermath than the c***k that had produced it.

For a full second nobody said anything.

Then Anan was up the stairs faster than Krit had ever seen him move, inspecting the corner with his phone flashlight like a man defusing a bomb, tilting it at three different angles as if the damage might look better from a fourth, and when he straightened up his face had gone a shade of red that Krit had learned, over the past year, to be afraid of, a color that meant the yelling would go on longer than usual and would not stop simply because Krit apologized.

“Do you know what this costs? Do you have any idea?” Anan’s voice climbed with every word, loud enough that the client, somewhere upstairs, would surely hear, would surely come to the top of the stairs to see what the commotion was, which was, Krit suspected, at least partly the intention. “This comes out of your pay. All of it, until it is covered, and if the client wants more than that, it comes out of you some other way, understand?”

“Boss, it was an accident, the stairs are...”

“I do not care whose fault the stairs are! You had the table, it was your job to not break it!” One of the younger movers, a boy barely out of his teens named Off, shifted uncomfortably at the bottom of the staircase, clearly wanting to say something in Krit’s defense and clearly too afraid of Anan to risk it, his eyes flicking between Krit and the floor as though the floor might offer him some way out of the moment.

“You will work it off,” Anan said, signing off on the paperwork without meeting Krit’s eyes, as though the matter were already closed and beneath further discussion, his pen scratching across the page with the brisk efficiency of a man closing out a transaction rather than a man who had just decided another person’s next several weeks for him. “Do not look at me like that. Should have been more careful.”

Off, the younger mover, caught up to Krit at the truck afterward, glancing back toward the building to make sure Anan was not in earshot, his voice dropped low the way a person’s voice drops when they are about to say something they would not say if the wrong person heard it. “That is not fair, what he did back there. Everyone knows those stairs are a hazard, half the crew has nearly gone down them at some point.”

“Does not matter what is fair,” Krit said, tightening the last strap on the truck bed harder than necessary, the muscles in his forearm still trembling faintly from the day’s work. “Only matters what he decides to write down.”

“You could report it. The stairs, I mean. Building safety or something.”

Krit almost laughed at that, though there was no humor in it, just a short exhale through his nose. “Report it to who? Anan is the one who would have to sign off on the complaint. You think he is going to write himself up?”

Off had no answer for that, and Krit did not blame him. There was not one.

He did not go straight home. He went to the hospital instead, because it was Tuesday, and Tuesday was his mother’s follow up appointment, and some things did not bend around a bad day at work, no matter how badly Krit might have wanted, just for one evening, to fall apart somewhere private instead of sitting upright in a hard plastic chair pretending everything was fine, arranging his face into something steady before he even reached her floor.

“How was work?” she asked, the same question she always asked, settled into the vinyl chair with an IV line taped into the back of her hand, her voice carrying the same warmth it always had, undimmed by whatever the machines beside her were quietly measuring, their soft periodic beeping the only evidence that anything at all was wrong with her.

“Fine,” he said. “Boring. You know how it is.”

She looked at him for a moment too long, the way mothers do when they know they are being lied to and have decided, out of love rather than ignorance, to let it go unchallenged, at least for tonight, her eyes moving over his face the way they used to when he was small and had come home from school claiming nothing had happened.

“The doctor says the treatment is working,” she said instead. “Slowly. But working.”

“That is good, Mae. That is really good.” He squeezed her hand, careful of the IV, the tape rough beneath his fingers, and meant it more than almost anything else he had said all day.

“You look tired,” she added, studying him now with the same careful attention he had been giving her. “More tired than usual.”

“Long day. Nothing to worry about.” He forced a smile that felt, even to him, a little too bright for the words underneath it, the corners of his mouth aching faintly with the effort of holding the expression steady.

“Krit.” Her voice had a warning in it, gentle but unmistakable. “If something is wrong, you can tell me. I am sick, not blind.”

He almost told her, then. Almost let the whole day spill out, the marble table, the debt, Anan’s cold satisfaction, the particular humiliation of being yelled at in front of a boy young enough to still believe the world might be fair if he waited long enough. But he looked at the IV line in her hand and the tired hollows under her eyes and decided, the way he decided most things these days, that his burden was his to carry, not hers to add to hers.

“Everything is fine, Mae. Really.”

She studied him a moment longer, then let it go, the way she always did, though something in her expression suggested she believed him a good deal less than she let on.

Later, in the hallway, the billing office handed him an updated total, the paper still warm from the printer, and he folded it without reading it fully because he already knew the number would be worse than last month’s, and there was no version of tonight where reading it slower would make it smaller.

His apartment felt very quiet when he got home. The cat was not on the balcony yet, the plastic chair sitting empty in the last grey light of evening. He sat on the floor with the folder of bills in front of him, unopened, and his phone buzzed.

Add: how did the Sathorn job go

Add: you good?

Krit looked at the message for a long moment before answering, his thumb hovering over the screen.

Krit: not really

Krit: Anan is charging me for a chip in some marble table. going to eat my whole paycheck

Add: that is it. I am calling that guy tomorrow about the interview. You are coming with me Thursday; no arguments

Krit: Add it's fine I can handle it

Add: Krit. You have said “it is fine” about six different disasters this year. It is not fine. Thursday. no arguments.

Krit almost laughed, a tired, humorless sound in the empty room, though something in Add’s stubbornness loosened a small knot in his chest that he had not fully realized was there, a tightness he only noticed now in the moment it began to ease.

Krit: ok, Thursday

Add: Good, and eat something. I know you have not

Krit: How do you always know that?

Add: twenty years, Krit. Twenty years.

He set the phone down, opened the folder at last, and let himself feel, for exactly as long as it took to read every line, exactly how bad things had gotten, the numbers stacking up in a way that made his chest go tight and his eyes sting in a manner he refused to acknowledge as anything close to tears. The hospital total alone had climbed again since last month. The figure Anan had scrawled at the bottom of his own paperwork sat beside it like a second weight dropped onto an already sinking scale, the two numbers together forming a sum he did not want to say out loud even to an empty room.

He did the math anyway, because some stubborn part of him always did, even when it never came out any better than the last time. Wages minus rent minus the debt minus whatever the hospital would ask for next. It came out negative, the way it usually did, and he closed the folder before the number could get any smaller than it already felt, as if closing it fast enough might keep the number from settling any further into something permanent.

He lay down on the thin mattress, one arm over his eyes, and made himself a small, private promise, the same one he made most nights lately, that the new job, whatever it turned out to be, had to be better than this. It had to be, because he was not sure how many more months he could keep doing this particular math and coming out the other side of it standing.

The cat eventually slipped in through the balcony door sometime past midnight to curl near his feet, her small weight a quiet comfort against his ankle, and somewhere in the dark, exhausted past the point of despair, he finally slept, one hand still resting near the folder as though he might need to reach for it again before morning.