Chapter 10 #2
Pinar told us all the latest about the relationship between the two doctors who used the empty office for fun, at least, as much as she could understand of their relationship by spying on them from the window in the exam room.
When she started to talk about a new position they were trying, though, Regina wanted to discuss something else.
“Wasn’t your contractor going to get started around now?” she asked Theo.
“Tomorrow,” he answered, and he rubbed his cheeks before quickly putting his hands in his lap. It was too late: Regina had spotted it.
“And when is your next appointment about your jaw?” she asked him, and we started discussing teeth and grinding, and also people who were doctors but didn’t listen to sound medical advice even though they should have.
That part of the conversation was directed at one particular person, and we all knew who he was because Regina pointed at him.
At the end of our meal, I said goodbye and they walked together towards Theo’s car to go back to the medical building.
He kept it very clean now so there was plenty of room for everyone to sit.
I watched as he opened the doors for them but then, as they got in, he jogged back to me.
“I wanted to say goodbye again,” he explained. “What are you doing now?”
“I have plans with Sophie,” I said, which was highly unusual.
First of all, my second-oldest sister had never cared for me because she found me annoying, even how I said her name.
Second, she was very busy now due to her twins.
One of them seemed to take after her husband Danny, and she was sweet and easygoing.
The other one was a lot like his mom. That made parenting much harder and made me feel sorry for my grandma, who had been the primary caregiver when Sophie was a little girl herself.
“I’ll see you tonight.” Theo smiled at me and I smiled back, and we stood there grinning until Regina called that they were going to be late, and I left for Sophie’s.
My sister worked mostly from home, and I went over there to meet her. It was strangely quiet in her house with no crying or screaming, and I wondered what was wrong.
“Mom and Nic have all the kids today,” she explained. “They’re planning to go to a puppet show at the library, and more power to them. Sometimes I don’t even change out of my pajamas, let alone get into a vehicle with a purpose.” She eyed me. “What are you wearing?”
“Do you like it?”
“That looks—Grace! Is that my sweater?”
It had been, at one point. “Do you want it back?”
“No, it looks better on you.” She studied me even more carefully. “What’s with your hair?”
I held up one of my curls. “My friend Pinar told me that I’m a Three-A.”
“What the heck does that mean?”
I took some of her hair with my other hand, holding the two dissimilar hunks together to compare them. “She would call you a Two-A. It’s the level of curl,” I explained. “She showed me how to make my hair less.”
“Less of a mop. Your hair looks like it does when Nicola or Addie fixes it for you.”
“Exactly, and now I can do it myself. Pinar could tell you things, too,” I added, but really, nobody except her husband could tell Sophie a whole lot.
But today she was dressed in a sweater instead of the pajamas she’d mentioned and she looked nice as well, even without good hair products. “Why are you so fancy?”
“I’m not,” she said. “Come on, I’m driving.”
She offered snacks and, although I’d just come from lunch, I also wasn’t a person to say no to free food. We got in her car and almost as soon as my door closed and she ordered me to put on my seatbelt, she also started asking questions.
“Where are you living, Grace?”
I’d had an idea of what was coming, since my sisters always liked to interrogate. “I’m in a very nice house. It’s unfurnished so I’ve been thinking about that.”
“Furniture? Like, if you need it? You do.”
It was funny coming from Sophie, whose former home had been a lot like my friend Hepzibah’s right before it had spontaneously combusted. I had privately thought that it put itself out of its misery.
“What do I need?” I asked, and she had a lot of ideas, as Sophie always did. She went on for a while before she realized what was happening, and she broke off suddenly from her sermon on mattress firmness.
“You know exactly what furniture you need!” she said. “Don’t get me off track. Where exactly is this unfurnished house, and who is living in it with you?”
It wasn’t very far away, in an area called Woodbridge that she was familiar with and was also on the West Side of Detroit where we’d grown up. I had pictures that I showed her when we came to a red light, and she admitted that it was a pretty house. “How the heck do you afford that?”
“I’m getting a good deal because I know the leasing agent’s wife, my friend Regina. Also, I’m going to get a new job. Also, I have a roommate.”
“What job? What roommate?”
I explained how I had an interview with Pinar’s cousin, the veterinarian, to work in his office. “I have to make sure that my interview outfit is available,” I said. It had to be somewhere. “But if I got to work there, I would wear scrubs. I love those.”
“Do we need to practice again?” she asked. “Let’s go over what you’ll say about why there’s a gap in your résumé when you were twenty, when you had actually gotten out of the cult and—”
“No, I’m not going to give them one of your reasonable excuses.
I’ll just tell the truth. It’s too late to lie, since Pinar already saw my real résumé before you sanitized it and also, she knows me,” I said.
“She explained to her cousin that I have a weird history but that I’ll do a good job.
If I get hired, I will do the absolute best that I can.
” I would have to because I wasn’t going to let all those people down.
“Ok,” Sophie said, but she sounded skeptical. I pictured what she would write in the group chat, the one I wasn’t a part of but Dion was. He told me what was happening in there, sometimes. “Ok, I hope it goes well. You’ve always been good with animals.”
“Thank you,” I said, pretty surprised. My sister didn’t dole out compliments unless she meant them, so that was very nice to hear.
“And now the roommate,” she told me. “It’s Theo?”
It was. He was the main reason that I was able to afford such a nice house in a nice neighborhood, because he was taking the lion’s share of the rent.
It had nothing to do with actual big cats and only meant that he was paying for most of it.
“We live together very well,” he’d told me, and I’d agreed.
We got along extremely well and we liked doing things as a pair, such as when we’d baked the Yule log cake.
Granger, my brother-in-law, had watched us using his restaurant’s kitchen, and then he’d told my sister Addie that he’d enjoyed being there with us because we’d had so much fun.
Since he never said very much to anyone, I was pretty happy to read that in the group chat that I was not allowed in. Dion had sent me a screenshot.
“But Theo’s not your boyfriend,” Sophie stated. That was true. “And you’re not sleeping with him.” She’d sounded a lot less confident when she said that.
“No. He’s not interested.”
“Oh, good.”
“What?” I turned so fast to stare at her that my seat belt locked and I was momentarily trapped. “Why is that good, Sophie? What’s wrong with this car?”
“Stop fighting it!” She unclicked the belt and then ordered me to put it back on, but slowly this time. “Every one of your boyfriends has been a jackass.”
“If Nicola heard you say that…”
“She can’t hear me right now.” But she did glance over her shoulder. “I’m a grown-up and I can swear if I want, and ‘jackass’ isn’t so bad. Her husband says it and I can, too.”
But I bet that she wouldn’t do it in front of our big sister. “Not all my boyfriends are jackasses.” I smiled and she looked over and laughed.
“Cursing is liberating. And yes, they are,” she informed me.
“So are all your friends. There’s not one normal person out of all of them, and before you ask what that’s supposed to mean…
stop yanking on that seat belt, Grace! Let me do it.
” She re-buckled me at the next red light.
“By ‘normal,’ I mean people who can hold conversations about something other than drugs, the evils of modern refrigeration—”
“For a while, your refrigerator didn’t work,” I reminded her. “I remember that very well, because I was the only one who would eat at your house.”
She flushed. “Yeah, well, I grew up!” she retorted. “I was a mess for a lot of years but I’m eating properly stored food now, I have a job that doesn’t involve me staying up all night, and I have two car seats in the back.”
“And you have Danny.”
“And I have Danny,” she said, and her face softened into the smile that was reserved for the guy she’d loved since she was in high school.
“So I have to get pregnant and married, like you did.”
Sophie hit the brake pedal hard. The car jerked to a stop and the truck behind us laid on the horn.
“Sorry! Sorry!” she yelled to the other driver, and waved her hand in front of the mirror to apologize.
“What are you talking about, Grace? No, you don’t have to do either of those things!
But you should start hanging out with more normal people and dating them, too. ”
“I should date people with car seats.”
“You’re trying to annoy me,” she said, and that was true. “We’re going to play the quiet game.”
That had worked on me as a kid, but not anymore.
I actually didn’t feel like talking for a while as I thought about what she had said, but then I realized that we had been in this car for a long time.
“Where are we going?” I asked her and then she played the quiet game herself for a few more moments before she admitted the truth.
“We’re going to see Dad,” she said.