A Small Favor

Hana had lived in the apartment building on Commercial Drive for almost four years, and in all that time she had never asked anyone for anything. She said hello in the elevator, held the door open for people carrying shopping and occasionally complained about the heating, but she did not really know her neighbors. In a city like Vancouver, she told herself, people liked their privacy.

Then her company sent her to Calgary for a meeting, with one day's notice. The trip was only overnight, but someone had to feed Miso, her elderly and very demanding cat. Hana stood outside the door of apartment 4B for a full minute before she knocked. The woman who opened it, Mrs. Alvarez, was in her seventies and had flour on her hands. "I'm so sorry to bother you," Hana began. "Could you do me a small favor?"

Mrs. Alvarez agreed immediately, and seemed almost pleased to be asked. "Of course I'll take care of her," she said. "But you could do something for me in return. My grandson's birthday is on Saturday, and I can't carry the cake I'm making down the hill to the bus. Your friend upstairs has a car, doesn't he?" Hana did not have a friend upstairs. She had a man in 6A who drove a blue van and whose name she did not know.

His name, it turned out, was Daniel, and he was a carpenter. He was happy to drive the cake on Saturday, he said, as long as somebody could help him with something first. His daughter, Ruby, had a math exam on Monday and was really struggling with fractions. "I can make the furniture," he said, "but I can't do the homework."

Hana was good at fractions. She was not good at teaching thirteen-year-olds, but she paid attention to how Ruby got confused, made an effort to explain it in three different ways and, after an hour at Daniel's kitchen table, Ruby suddenly said, "Oh! That's it?" She looked both delighted and slightly offended that it had been so simple.

Ruby, it seemed, had been listening to the adults. On Sunday she knocked on Hana's door with a plate of cookies and a request of her own. Mr. Takahashi, on the ground floor, had broken his wrist the week before, and he couldn't walk his dog. Ruby wanted to do it, but her father said she was too young to go to the park on her own. Would Hana come with her?

So on Sunday afternoon, Hana and Ruby took a large, joyful dog called Bear to the park, and when they brought him back, Mr. Takahashi made them green tea and told them about the building as it had been forty years earlier, when he had first moved in. Back then, he said, everyone knew everyone. People left their doors open. On Friday nights there were dinners in the courtyard, and children ran from one apartment to another as if the whole building belonged to them.

"What happened?" Hana asked. Mr. Takahashi shrugged. "Nothing happened. People got busy. They stopped asking each other for things, and when you stop asking, you stop knowing each other." Hana thought about the minute she had spent outside Mrs. Alvarez's door and felt her face go a little warm.

By the end of the month, the chain of favors had spread through the building. Daniel fixed Mrs. Alvarez's kitchen cupboards. Mrs. Alvarez taught Ruby to make empanadas. A young couple on the third floor, who had heard about it in the elevator, offered to do the shopping for Mr. Takahashi until his wrist got better. Somebody put a notice on the board by the mailboxes: "Need help? Can help? Write it here." Within a week, it was covered in handwriting.

In early summer, someone suggested a dinner in the courtyard. Nobody was quite sure who had organized it, but everyone came. Mr. Takahashi brought a photo of a dinner in the same courtyard in 1985, and they tried to sit exactly the same way. Mrs. Alvarez brought the biggest cake anyone had ever seen.

Hana sat between Ruby and Daniel, with Bear asleep on her feet, and realized that she had not paid anyone back at all. The favors had not gone backwards; they had gone forwards, from one door to the next. Upstairs, Miso was asleep on the windowsill, completely unaware that she had started all of it.