You want to know if a guy's a slumlord you don't look at the apartment, everybody cleans the apartment, the apartment's a performance, somebody knew you were coming and there's a smell of that orange stuff from the dollar store and the blinds are new, so no, you go stand in the stairwell, because nobody owns the stairwell, it's the part between, and the between is where I've spent twenty years and where I'll probably die, honestly, some landing somewhere with a bad bulb.

Treads first, always treads, they tell you everything and they don't know they're telling you, which is the thing about a building, a building can't lie, a guy can lie all day and his stairs can't. You get a nosing worn round and that's just time, that's fine, that's a hundred years of people going down for the mail and coming back up with the mail, that's not a finding, I'm not writing a guy up for a hundred years. But you get a tread that's been sistered, and I mean somebody took a piece of doug fir and screwed it right on top of the tread instead of pulling the tread and putting in a tread, and that's not time, that's a Tuesday, that's a decision, somebody stood right there where you're standing and made it and then went and had lunch.

And here's the part nobody says out loud, and I'm going to say it because I'm not running for anything: it worked. It held. It'll hold another year, maybe two, maybe five if nobody heavy moves in on four. The guy who did it isn't a monster, I've met him, I've been him, he's a guy with eleven units and a boiler making a noise he's been not-hearing since February, and he made the call, and it was the cheap call and it was the fast call and it was also, on that Tuesday, the call that kept somebody's kid from putting a leg through a step.

• • •

Then you look up. And the handrail's right. Not adequate, right, proper bracket spacing, returns at both ends so nobody's sleeve catches, and I know what that costs because I've bought it, that's real money and a whole Saturday, and it's the same building and the same guy and the same screws in the same apron.

So he's not lazy, that's the thing, that's the whole thing, he's triaging, and I know triage, I've been the guy in the basement at seven in the morning with a flashlight in my teeth doing the math on what gets money this month and what gets a screw and a prayer, everybody in this trade has been that guy, and the list is real and the money is real and the choosing is the actual job, the choosing is the job.

Except the code doesn't care about his list, and neither does the woman on three, who's seventy-one, who I've held the door for maybe forty times, who comes down those stairs twice a day, once for the mail and once for the pharmacy, and she isn't on the list, she's not a line item, she's not on it anywhere, she's the thing the list was supposed to be for.

• • •

People want me to tell them where the line is. Where cheap stops and dangerous starts. I get asked at cookouts, I get asked by lawyers, I got asked once by a guy's kid, which was worse.

I've looked at a hundred of these and I couldn't draw it. I'm not being cute. I don't know.

What I know is that it moves, and it moves toward the stairwell, always toward the between, the hallway, the back steps, the landing light nobody's replaced because nobody's exactly sure whose light it is, the parts of a building nobody's name is on, that's where the line goes when it goes anywhere, it doesn't go into the apartments, it never goes into the apartments, it goes where nobody's watching and nobody's paying and nobody's name is on that particular four feet.

Which means the guys who wind up on the wrong side of it are almost never the ones who meant to be there, they didn't wake up and decide to be slumlords, nobody decides that, they decided about a tread.

They're the ones who got the handrail right.