Chapter 4
“Turn a little. Leg up higher…there it is.” One of his hands kept busy but the other reached for his phone.
“No cameras,” I reminded him, and dropped my leg down.
“I’d pay you extra. Put it back,” he ordered, but I didn’t move until his phone was gone. “No pictures” was another rule I’d established at the beginning of this weird relationship.
“You’re a bitch. Fuck.” But the last word wasn’t angry, it was a moan. This was almost over. I only had to wait a little longer, and then it was done.
“Great. Great,” he panted, his wheeze in full force. It was hot in here because he’d turned up the thermostat so that the old steam heaters were clanking and hissing away, but it was cold outside. I looked through the window at the grey landscape and wished I were there.
“You know,” he said appraisingly, but I shook my head because I did know exactly what he was going to say next, and my answer was already negative. No, there was no touching.
“Don’t get—” he started to snap, but as he tried to finish his thought, the words turned into a wet cough that rattled out of him. He raised a finger, like he was asking for another moment, and I waited to hear if he was going to start arguing over how much he owed me.
Then he did manage to speak, and it wasn’t a complaint but a query. “It’s November. Why are you wearing shorts?”
It was because I liked them, but that wasn’t any of his business. I could wear these shorts all winter and I probably would, unless I gave them back like I was supposed to.
That was what my oldest sister had recommended last weekend, anyway, when I’d been over at her house to do laundry. “They’re not yours so you should return them. You can’t keep things that don’t belong to you.”
I had remembered Nicola guiding me along as we had walked over to our neighbors’ house many years before.
“Go ahead,” she had ordered when Mrs. Lassiter had opened the door, and I’d removed their cat from beneath my sweatshirt and said I was returning him.
I had told her that I was sorry for taking him home with me, hiding him in my bed, and renaming him Chester Curran.
“It’s just a pair of shorts. It’s not like I took his pet,” I’d answered my big sister, and she’d agreed that it wasn’t the same as cat-napping Chester but repeated that I should still give them back.
Maybe I would. But it had been a while since my last day at the medical office and I hadn’t talked to anyone from there since. Regina had texted and invited me to go to lunch and so had Pinar, but I hadn’t responded. Nicola had also told me that I wasn’t acting nice to my former colleagues.
I thought about them as I collected my money from the table and got into my car. I drove around the corner so that I wouldn’t have to see the steamy, fetid house anymore, and then I answered both of them and also another text that had sat unopened on my phone.
“How are you?” Theo had asked, and I hadn’t known what to say.
But now I had something specific to tell him.
“I have your shorts. I’ll leave them on your car,” I wrote.
Then I drove over to Sophie’s house, which was the closest and I was running out of gas.
After a while, she must have seen me parked there because she stepped out on her porch, holding a baby wrapped in a blanket and waving at me to come inside.
“Where are your pants, Grace?” she asked when we were all in her kitchen.
“I took them off because I’m returning them,” I said, and looked in her fridge for something to eat before moving to her stove to check under the lids of the pots on the burners there.
Sophie smacked my hand with a wooden spatula when I reached into one, and I realized that her standards had really changed.
Not too long ago, she also would have been eating that raw-ish meat herself.
“Go put on a pair of my leggings, and then you can stay for dinner if you hold your nephew or your niece.” She surveyed both of her children. “Pick whichever is the most fractious.”
That was the boy, and I sat him on my lap.
Pretty soon, I was singing a song that I made up, one about fish swimming in a tank where the sharks couldn’t get them.
In another moment, I was holding both twins and we were all enjoying the music.
But then their dad arrived home, and even though they hadn’t seemed to be very observant, they did notice him and got extremely excited.
They wanted him to hold them and so did Sophie, who hopped around smiling until they all ended up hugging as a foursome.
Which, by the way, was another term that you weren’t supposed to bring up in a job interview.
“Hi, Grace,” he greeted me. I remembered Danny from when I was a kid and he and my sister had been friends. He had been nice to me at a time when Nicola’s boyfriends had called me annoying and Juliet’s boyfriends had said things like, “If you take my car without my knowledge, I’ll call the police.”
“Hi, Danny,” I answered. “I have questions for you about a cabin.” He did construction and was getting his contractor’s license.
“A particular one, or just cabins in general?” he asked, and started feeding both babies.
His attention was divided between that, talking to them, talking to my sister, and trying to eat himself, but he did provide some insight into two hundred or so year-old buildings and their upkeep.
Mostly I learned that you did have to keep them up and not let them turn into dark dust holes, because while the part you could see was rotting, the part you couldn’t see was probably getting bad as well.
“Like, if the walls are crumbling inside then the second floor could fall down,” I suggested. “It could fall onto the first floor and if someone was there sleeping on sheets that were pretty clean, that would be bad.”
“Yes, it would definitely be bad to have the second story of a house fall on you. Open your mouth, sweetie!” he encouraged his daughter, and demonstrated how that worked. It was pretty obvious but babies were oblivious.
“Grace, what are these questions about?” my sister asked suspiciously. “Are you living somewhere that was condemned?”
No, I wasn’t. “I moved back home yesterday.”
“Back with Mom?” Her one eyebrow raised. “I’m surprised I hadn’t heard.”
It would have been because our mother didn’t exactly know herself, since she was out of town at a yoga symposium in Pittsburgh.
Her lodger/adopted son Dion hadn’t been there either because he had been spending a lot of time at his girlfriend’s house.
He was with her enough that my mom was afraid that they were going to move in together (that was according to Brenna in our group chat, and she had also said that Mom was only worried that she would be left alone again).
Maybe she would be glad to have me around.
Sophie had really gotten better at cooking and dinner was tasty, but afterwards she said that I should go because they had to do a lot of baby stuff like baths and books.
That was bananas because there was no way those two kids could read, but I did make my exit after Danny put some gas in my tank out of a red can he had in his garage.
I thought about walking across the street to visit my brother Patrick, but he was probably busy with his daughter and his girlfriend’s car was also parked in the driveway.
Then I remembered that I had sent a message about the shorts that I was now carrying in my hand instead of wearing.
There was an answer to that: “I don’t need them back. Don’t drive over here to put them on my car.”
Fine. I wouldn’t.
But Theo had written more: “I’m concerned about the fish.”
On my last day at their office, I had left instructions for everyone about tank maintenance and aquatic animal care. “It’s important to follow these carefully,” I’d told Regina and Pinar.
Pinar had stared at the paper I’d given her, then had turned it sideways and then upside down. “What language is this?”
“Dr. McGonagle also had terrible handwriting,” Regina had mentioned.
She’d smiled at the fond memory of the former partner in the practice.
“I bet that I can interpret…nope.” She handed my instructions back to me, and I’d had to squint and read them aloud so she could type everything.
She was amazing on her keyboard and she had gotten everything I’d said and several other points I’d also thought of…
but maybe they were ignoring that bullet-pointed list. Maybe the fish needed me.
“On it,” I wrote back now, and I drove north from Detroit into the suburbs.
I went into the empty garage and parked next to a car that was very familiar, because I’d ridden in it a few times.
The pile of trash that we’d previously put into the back seat to make space for a passenger was still there.
The corridors in the medical building were in their half-light mode and the cleaning lady with the cart wasn’t around.
I hadn’t expected anyone to be in the office either but I’d hoped it would be unlocked.
Unfortunately, I found that it wasn’t, and at the moment, I wasn’t prepared with the tools that I usually would have used to enter.
But what if there was a fire and rescuers had to get in to save the fish?
I started to think about installing an emergency ax in this hallway and writing up more instructions for its use.
But as I turned to leave, I heard that door open and then a voice.
“Grace,” Theo called, and I stopped. “Most people would have waited until the morning to come here to look at the fish tank, but I had a feeling that you meant you were ‘on it’ tonight,” he continued as I walked back toward him.
Even in the semi-darkness, I could see that he had circles under his eyes.
I would have checked the time, except I might have left my phone at Sophie’s house—in any case, I could tell that it was late and it looked like this wasn’t the only late night he’d spent here.