Speak to Me of Home

Chapter Fourteen

New Jersey

1991

Ruth, who was unaware that her capacity to be deeply in love with two men at the same time was an inherited trait, met both of her college boyfriends at her off-campus job a few months after Titi Lola died. Her freshman and sophomore years of college had been an extended romantic drought, and her loneliness was only magnified by the weight of her sudden grief. So, during the early fall of her junior year, when she found herself faced with not one but two romantic prospects, Ruth was both pleasantly surprised and utterly unprepared. She handled it poorly.

She met Thomas first, on a Saturday afternoon in late September. No sign of autumn yet in New Jersey, and it was hot in the photo lab that day, so Ruth had propped the street door open with a brick because the owner of the building refused on principle to turn on the air-conditioning in September, regardless of actual weather conditions. Ruth had her hair pulled up in a scrunchy and her school bag was on the floor behind the counter. She worked here sixteen hours a week—four hours each on Mondays and Wednesdays, and a long eight-hour shift every weekend. Saturdays were always quiet, which had surprised her when she first started, but she soon understood that Saturday was the day people were out in the world taking pictures, not so much the day they earmarked to drop off their film or pick up their prints. So Ruth learned to bring her schoolwork with her on Saturdays, to run the day’s prints early, and then pass the long hours reading or studying. She’d once asked her boss, Gus, if there was any hope of getting a more comfortable chair behind the counter, but he’d looked at her like she was crazy.

“I’m not paying you to lounge around in a comfortable chair,” he said.

You kind of are on Saturdays , she did not say, because she liked the job and she liked the money, and she didn’t want to give him the idea that maybe he should just close the shop on Saturdays and save himself her paycheck. So instead she said, “No, you’re right, sorry. Just an idea.” She perched herself uncomfortably on the hard, wooden stool behind the register, and longed for the beanbag in her dorm room.

It was just after two o’clock when Thomas came in, and of course she didn’t yet know he was Thomas. The bell didn’t jingle because she’d propped the door open, but Ruth sensed the way the light changed when someone walked in, and she looked up from her book. He seemed a couple years older than her, and was wearing his Wodsley T-shirt tucked into his jeans. The way he wore his shirt struck her as bizarre, because it indicated both a meticulousness about his appearance and a vigorous disregard for actual style, which gave him a self-possessed dork vibe she found strangely compelling.

“Hiya,” he said without really looking at her.

She nodded at him, and quickly cleared her lunch away from the counter where its remnants had been sitting since she’d finished eating a half hour ago. There’d been too many red onions in her salad, so she was glad of the bright, sour odor of the photographic chemicals to cover her breath. He bent to examine the various envelopes below the counter.

“How come you’re not at the game?” she asked.

He looked up, confused. “Game?”

She pointed at his T-shirt. “You go to Wodsley?”

“Yes.”

This didn’t seem to clear it up for him.

“Me too,” she said. “I thought I was the only student in the whole school who couldn’t go to the game today.”

They were about three blocks from the stadium, and every few minutes she could hear a roar go up. In a few hours, when the game was over, there’d be a drunken parade back to the dorms, right past the open door of her photo lab. She would bring the brick in before then. Close the door. When she walked home later, she’d keep her eyes on the sidewalk in front of her, careful not to step in anything gross.

“Oh,” he said. “I’m not really…” He shook his head. “Not really into basketball.”

She looked at him blankly. “It’s football,” she said.

He grinned. And until that moment, Ruth had never understood what people meant when they said someone had a twinkle in their eye.

“Oh,” she said.

“Yeah, I’m just messin’,” he said.

“Very funny.”

“But seriously.” He shrugged. “Not that into football.”

She nodded. “You have an accent.”

“I do,” he said.

“Where from?”

“From Ireland.”

“Oh!” she said. “My dad’s Irish.”

He smiled, but didn’t answer. Years later, he’d explain to her that usually, when people claimed their family was Irish , what they meant was Irish American, and so there wasn’t a lot more to discuss there, because Thomas wasn’t Irish-American. He was Irish Irish, from the village of Cong in County Mayo in the province of Connacht in the west of Ireland. And he didn’t like to point this out to people because it was kind of a dickish thing to say, so he usually let them take the conversation wherever it might go. For his part, he was happy enough to return to the task at hand.

“Cool,” he said, waiting just a beat to see if she had more to add on the Irish topic before asking, “Which one of these do I use? I don’t need them back in a hurry.”

“Lemme see your film?”

He dug into his pocket and pulled out two small yellow cannisters.

“Right,” she said, leaning over the counter even though she already knew which envelope he should take. She pretended to look. “The red one, there,” she said. “All the way on the left.”

He pulled two red envelopes out of the stack and fished a pen out of the cup on the counter.

“You can put them both in the same envelope,” she said.

And then she tried not to watch him as he leaned over to fill in his details in block capitals. She didn’t want him to feel like she was looming in judgment over his handwriting. She had a bad habit of always trying to fill an uncomfortable silence.

“Actually my dad isn’t really Irish,” she said, just for something to say. “He’s Irish-American.”

Thomas stopped writing and stood up.

Years later, he’d also explain how unusual it was that she’d been the one to make that distinction. He’d say it was a distinction only an Irish person would make.

“Or a Puerto Rican,” she’d counter. “From there and from there are not the same.”

But that conversation wouldn’t happen for another two years. That first day, in the photo lab, when Ruth clarified that her father was Irish-American, the declaration only gave Thomas pause to set the pen down. To straighten up. To notice that she wasn’t just a pretty girl with dimples and curls. There was something different here.

“His parents are from Ireland, my grandparents, but even they came over when they were pretty young. My grandpa doesn’t even have an Irish accent,” Ruth continued, unaware of the shift she’d just provoked, and still just yammering on to fill the silence. She did notice his heightened attention, though, and leaned down to rummage in the front pocket of her backpack for a stick of gum, in case the chemicals weren’t strong enough. She thought she could still smell a trace of onion, even though she’d sealed the plastic container and tied a double-knot in the bag before tossing it. “Both born in Galway.”

“Oh, that’s not too far from my neck of the woods,” he said. “I’m from Mayo. Have you been?”

She shook her head.

“Someday,” he said.

“Yeah, I hope so.” She smiled. “I like your accent.”

“Thanks. I like yours.”

She felt herself take in a sip of breath, an ancient worry, well-buried and almost forgotten, and here he was like an archaeologist with a straw brush, gently excavating.

“I have an accent?” she said.

“Well, you don’t sound like you’re from New Joysey,” he said.

“Oh,” she laughed. “Got it. Yeah, I’m not.”

“So where are you from?”

Where was she from, anyway?

“Well. My accent is probably from St. Louis, I guess.”

“Ah, midwestern.”

“Yeah, but I’m not really from there. I’m originally from Puerto Rico,” she said. And that sentence brought Titi Lola to stand in the room beside her, absent and present both. For a moment, the swell of Ruth’s grief was just as acute as it had been two months ago, beside her titi’s open coffin in Parroquia Sagrado Corazón de Jesús. Ruth heaved it aside. “Born in San Juan,” she said. “That’s where my mom’s from, too, her whole family. We moved to Missouri when I was like ten.”

She’d found herself doing this lately, exaggerating the age she’d been when they left there, as if those three imagined years might redeem an authenticity she could no longer feel. Thomas nodded, but didn’t answer. He tapped the end of the pen on the counter between them. And then finally he said, “I have so many questions.”

She surprised herself with a laugh. “I know, it’s confusing.”

“No, it’s great!”

“Well,” she said. And then she made some kind of awkward, vague gesture. She wasn’t even sure what she was trying to convey. Suddenly, his tucked-in T-shirt seemed so charming, so European, so out of her league. Ugh, why was she such a dork? No wonder she hadn’t made out with anybody in months.

“So I’m going to need more time,” he said.

“Time?”

“To formulate and ask my many, many questions, and for you to answer them.”

“Oh.”

“There are so many I don’t even know where to begin. For example, did your Irish-American father live in Puerto Rico that whole time, or did they split up? And if he did live there, was he always, always sunburned, and if not, how? And then, for another example, is there, like, a big Puerto Rican community in St. Louis? Why St. Louis? Or is there an Irish community in Puerto Rico? How did all of this happen, how did it happen, how did you happen?”

She laughed again, and felt the ghost of Lola flit from the room. “Oh, we are going to need more time,” she said.

“So, then, dinner.”

“What?”

“Have dinner with me.”

Ruth shrugged, delighted, but eager not to show it. There had been one casual boyfriend in high school, and a couple of regrettable vodka-fueled hookups the summer before college, but nothing serious and nothing since. She would of course never reveal this truth to Thomas, not even after they were engaged, but the fact was that she was twenty years old and had never been on an actual date before. She worried she might blush if she didn’t say something soon. “Okay,” she decided. “Why not?”

“Tonight?”

“No, not tonight!” she laughed. She was working until six, and then had plans to go to a party with her three roommates. There was the distinct possibility the three of them would already be drunk when she got home, but it was too late to change her answer, and anyway it would have felt pathetic to go to dinner with him only hours after the suggestion had been made, even she knew that. Outside, she could hear another roar from the stadium.

He leaned on his elbows now, so his face was closer to hers. She chewed rapidly on her gum. She was sitting on the wooden stool, and she could see how the scruff of his beard would crowd his jawline if he didn’t shave every morning. It was early afternoon and already there was a shadow there, a diagonal trail along his cheekbone, freckles across the bridge of his nose. His dark hair was cut short and his lips were very red. “Tomorrow night?” he asked.

She waited a moment before answering, “Maybe tomorrow night.”

The phone beneath the counter rang, and she had to answer it. It was a quick one—no, they weren’t open on Sundays. They closed at 6 P.M. today. When she hung up, he was again engrossed in filling out the form on the front of his envelope. He dropped his two canisters of film inside, and then slid it across the counter to her.

“You know, if we go out to dinner, and it doesn’t go well, and then it’s awkward, you’ll have to go somewhere else to get your film developed,” she said. “Are you sure it’s worth the risk?”

He crossed his arms in front of him and mulled it over. “Are you planning for it to be a disaster?”

“Not necessarily.” She shrugged. “But disasters are seldom planned.”

He nodded in a serious way. “Well. There’s that other photo place on Maple Avenue.”

“They’re expensive, though,” she said. “And they do a good job with color prints, but if you ever have black-and-white images, you can forget it.”

“I guess dinner better go well, then,” he said.

“I guess so.”

She wrote her phone number on the pad of paper she kept behind the counter, tore off the sheet, and slid it across to him. They still didn’t know each other’s names.

“By the way, I’m Thomas,” he said.

“Oh!” She shook his hand. “Nice to meet you, Thomas. I’m Ruth.”

He looked at her quizzically. “Ruth?” he said. “Is that a Puerto Rican name?”

“It is… not.”

“It’s not Irish either,” he said.

“Nope. It’s biblical.”

“Are you somehow also Jewish?”

“Not that I know of.”

“It’s fine. We’ll throw a few extra vowels and an accent mark in there. You’ll be Irish in no time.”

Dinner went better than well. Thomas didn’t wear jeans or a T-shirt, so Ruth couldn’t gauge whether the peculiar tuck-in had been an anomaly or was a regular habit, but she hardly cared. They went to her favorite Indian place where she only ever ate when one of her parents took her to dinner. She laughed so hard at the table she had to cover her mouth, afraid a piece of paneer would fly out and ruin everything by landing on his face. He walked her back to her dorm afterward and then before he leaned in, he asked, “Can I kiss you?” which Ruth thought all but killed the moment. But years later she would recognize that in fact, he was just decades ahead of his time. They made plans to see each other again the following weekend.

And then on late Wednesday afternoon of the following week, Ruth was at work again when Arthur came in. This time, she had the door closed, because even though it had only been four days, the arrival of autumn had happened in the interim, so the bell above the door did jingle when he pushed it open. Outside, the maple trees that lined both sides of Main Street had suddenly bedecked themselves in a blazing crimson. The sun was sinking low behind the shops across the street, giving the impression that the whole block was on fire. And against this splendid backdrop, he appeared.

Ruth stood up at once and her throat went dry. She had been watching this boy for two years, but they had never spoken. She knew they were in the same year because he’d been in the same freshman dorm building as her. He’d lived on the seventh floor, she knew, because she saw him press seven when he got on the elevator. Sometimes she imagined that his room was the one directly above hers. She saw him coming and going from the building at least a couple times every week. Once, she’d seen him turning his key in the front door lock just as she was getting on the elevator, and she’d pressed the door-open button for as long as she dared, hoping he’d get on, and it would just be the two of them. Her heart pounded imagining it, imagining that he’d turn to look at her, that he’d level his chocolate-drop eyes at her, and then pin her against the elevator wall and hit the emergency stop button and hike her skirt up around her hips and… she wasn’t even wearing a skirt. And after perhaps thirty seconds of pressing the door-open button, she still didn’t even hear his footsteps approaching, and she felt like a loser, so she let the doors slide shut without him. And still, she felt breathless all the way up to the sixth floor, all the way to her freshman dorm room, alone.

She knew his last name was Rodríguez, or at least she thought his last name was Rodríguez, because he played soccer, or at least she thought he played soccer because he was often seen around campus wearing various soccer jerseys with the last name Rodríguez emblazoned across the back. They’d never had any classes together even though at the beginning of every semester, when she walked into each classroom or lecture hall for the first time, she found herself surveying each table and desk to see if he was there. Once, when she’d stood behind him in line at the dining hall, sliding her cafeteria tray along the metal rails just behind his, choosing the same items that he chose from the servers, even though she didn’t really care for green beans, just to give him something to remark upon, should he happen to turn and notice that they had selected exactly the same dinner—would you look at that!—she perceived that, unlike so many of their peers, he wasn’t one for drenching himself in a cologne-bath of Drakkar Noir, but instead he smelled exceedingly clean, like fresh sheets and laundry detergent and sandalwood soap. She’d stopped herself just short of touching her nose to the back of his broad, lean shoulder to commit his scent to memory.

“Hi,” Ruth said when he walked into the photo lab that Wednesday just at sunset. Just like that. Hi. Like it was no big deal, and like it hadn’t taken her two years and the perfect confluence of circumstances for her to find the courage to finally unleash that single syllable.

“Hey,” he said, and he looked right at her and smiled.

She sat down on the stool with a thump, grateful that it was there to catch her weight, grateful that she didn’t fall off backward and into a legitimate swoon. His voice , my God. It was like soup and warm bread on a cold day. Say more words , she thought. To him, to herself. She needed to make more words exist between them. She found absolutely nothing in her mind, nothing from which to create more words.

“I didn’t know you worked here,” he said.

As if he knew plenty of other things about her, so it was strange that this one plain fact had slipped his notice.

“Oh,” she said. “Yeah, I started last semester.”

“Yeah, you go to Wodsley, right?”

“Yup,” she said, and she could feel a tightness around her mouth, a giddiness that she prayed he couldn’t sense.

“Yeah, I’ve seen you around, I think.”

His dimples were like craters, you could fall into them. You could stick your whole tongue in there.

“Yeah?”

He nodded. “Yeah, definitely.”

“Cool,” she said.

“I think we lived in the same building freshman year,” he said. “You were in The Dozens, right?”

“Yeah!”

“Yeah, me too.”

She could not say cool again, she knew. But she could not think of any other words.

“Cool,” she said. “Yeah. Yeah, you definitely look familiar.”

“I’m Arthur,” he said.

Arthur Rodríguez . It was not the name she’d expected. She thought he’d be Eric, maybe. Or Raúl or Javi. Something with four letters. Something suave, less geriatric. It didn’t matter. He was Arthur, how wonderful.

“I’m Ruth,” she said, and realized for the first time that her name was also extremely geriatric. Arthur and Ruth. They should be sipping lemonades through their dentures on a porch swing somewhere.

“So where are you from, Ruth?” he asked.

The dreaded question. She never knew how to answer.

“Oh, it’s a long story,” she said, pretending to busy herself with something very urgent beneath the counter because making eye contact with him was too intense, and she felt like her whole body was a neon sign advertising her sentiments. She was grateful for the moderate padding in her bra to disguise the morse code her nipples were determined to transmit. She crossed her arms in front of her chest anyway, just to be sure.

“I don’t mean… I just mean, Puerto Rican or Dominican?” he asked.

She looked him right in the face. The question almost startled her. “What?” she said.

“Sorry—Cuban?” he guessed again.

“No, no,” she said. “I mean, yes, I’m Puerto Rican.”

“Yeah, me too. I mean, my Dad’s Puerto Rican. And Dominican actually, half and half. My mom’s white.”

Do not say cool again , she thought.

“Yeah, I’m the same, half Puerto Rican, half white. But I was born there. In San Juan.”

“Oh, word?” he said. “That’s cool. I’ve never even been to Puerto Rico. Even my dad’s never been. He was born in Paterson, where everybody just thinks he’s black. I mean, African American. He explains to everybody that he’s Domini-rican.”

“Ha!” Ruth said by accident.

“He thinks it’s more fun to say than Afro-Latino.”

“I don’t disagree.”

“So, born in San Juan?” Arthur said, and Ruth had the feeling he was assessing all kinds of things about her in the context of this new piece of information. “Yeah, it’s funny, I always figured you were Puerto Rican or Dominican when I saw you around. Or like, I knew you were something . But then I never saw you at the Boricua House or any of the events, so I wasn’t sure.”

Ruth felt herself hopping from thrill to thrill to thrill, like lily pads across a deep, still pond. He’d seen her. He’d noticed her. He’d had thoughts about her, about who she was or who she might be. And even more breathtaking, he had recognized her. Ruth had gotten so accustomed to confounding people that she never even realized she craved this kind of recognition. His heart sees my heart .

In St. Louis, when people bothered to take up the question of her ethnicity at all, they called her Mexican, in the same way they called the Vietnamese boy, two Korean girls, and one Chinese-American teacher in their school district all Chinese. Even the ones who cared, who knew they weren’t supposed to say oriental anymore, hadn’t quite made it to Asian yet. They were doing their best, Ruth thought, because that was what she wanted to believe. She seldom bothered to correct them.

All throughout her childhood in the Midwest, she had ingested the reality that the only thing that mattered about her appearance was the fact that she was almost, but not quite white. Even the forms she filled out when she was applying to Wodsley and other colleges gave her extremely limited options as far as those checkboxes were concerned. She’d had to choose one: White. Black or Negro. Indian. Asian. Other. Ruth had checked other , and her mother, leaning over her shoulder at the kitchen table, had literally smacked the pencil out of her hand.

“What are you doing?” Mama had asked.

Ruth bent down to retrieve the pencil from the floor.

“Just… filling out the forms?”

“I mean what are you doing checking other ?”

Ruth had been unable to formulate a sensible response.

“You are white!” Mama said. “You check white !”

Mama tapped her finger impatiently on the appropriate box in case Ruth could not find it without her help. Ruth flipped her pencil around and started erasing her other checkmark, but then ventured a small opinion in her mother’s direction. “You know, there may be scholarships available for—”

“White!” Mama had interrupted.

And so Ruth had checked white , but she’d felt a kind of slithering across her skin when she did it.

She’d hoped things would be different when she moved to the East Coast. It was one of the reasons she’d applied to so many colleges in New York, New Jersey, Maryland. She knew there were places in the world outside Puerto Rico where lots of Puerto Ricans lived. She knew there were communities, other kids like her whose experiences might have matched some of her own. Ruth hadn’t been an unhappy child, not like Benny. She hadn’t felt like a miserable outsider, hadn’t felt homesick or super alienated, or like she was the target of persistent racism every day of her life. But there were little things, tiny things really, that Kathy and Jenny and Jennifer would never understand. The way the store clerks ignored her and fawned over her friends when they went shopping for prom dresses. Ruth had suspected that her appearance had something to do with that, but she couldn’t prove it, not even to herself. There had been other moments, of course, when the ignorance was indisputable. Once, they’d all gone to dinner for Jenny’s birthday, and the waitress had looked right at Ruth and said, “I hope french fries are okay with your burger, hon. Sorry, we’re fresh out of rice and beans.” And Kathy and Jennifer had both laughed, and Ruth’s neck had gone hot. Jenny had squeezed Ruth’s hand beneath the table, without saying anything. But those things didn’t happen every day or even every week. For the most part, Ruth had been happy enough. She’d felt happy to be included in a friend group, to reliably have someone to sit with in the cafeteria. But she’d always hoped that in college, she might meet people who were different from the friends she had in St. Louis. She hoped to meet some kids who liked her without the attachment of the unspoken phrase even though…

So when she’d arrived here in Wodsley, she’d been aggrieved to immediately discover how self-segregating the campus was. Students joined fraternities and sororities that separated them not only by gender and race, but also by socioeconomic background, religion, grade point average, height, weight, level of attractiveness. Ruth found the sequestering creepy, but also personally troublesome, because what was she supposed to do? Where was the sorority for moderately attractive, island-born Puerto Rican–Irish girls of midwestern childhood and indeterminate race whose mothers insist they are white despite conflicting evidence? In the dining hall, all the white kids ate in the main room, while the students of color gathered into the smaller peripheral rooms that were partitioned from the main space by glass walls. Asian kids in this room, African American kids in this room, Latino kids over here. Ruth felt like a fraud no matter where she sat, so she ordered her food to go and ate at the desk in her dorm room.

Still, on her fourth morning on campus, Ruth burst into the Boricua House in a fever of naive optimism, determined to make some headway. She marched right in as if they’d all be waiting for her, her new group of would-be friends, waiting to embrace her. She was wearing the sticker name tag they were all supposed to wear the first week around campus. Hello my name is RUTH brENNAN .

The girl behind the welcome desk was perhaps a year older than Ruth, and in no way welcoming. She was on the phone when Ruth walked in, and she looked right at Ruth, but did not smile or gesture or indicate that Ruth should take a seat and wait. She just stared at Ruth while continuing her conversation. So Ruth busied herself by wandering over to the bulletin board to review the flyers and upcoming events calendar while she waited. One flyer stapled to the board informed her in purple bubble letters that eight percent of the student population at Wodsley was Hispanic. Eight percent! That was almost one in ten! (Ruth was not a math major.) The Boricua House was a welcoming place for all Hispanic students, another flyer said, not only Puerto Ricans. Around the edges of the bulletin board, there were flags tacked up from Ecuador, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, Peru. Tuesday nights there was a potluck dinner. Saturday mornings there was a coffee club where people could practice conversational Spanish— All levels welcome! No shaming! the flyer said.

Behind her, Ruth heard the girl at the misnamed welcome desk hang up the phone. She turned away from the bulletin board, but before she could approach the desk again, Ruth realized another student had appeared, and they were both looking at her. The newcomer stood behind the other girl’s chair. There was a tinfoil sign hanging from the front edge of the desk that said BIENVENIDOS .

“Ay, mira la blanquita,” the newcomer said. “?Qué quiere ella?”

Ruth was aware that she had lost some significant portion of her Spanish in the years since she’d left Puerto Rico. But she retained enough to understand that unmistakable hostility was being directed at her, and the accent was not island Puerto Rican. Hey, check out the white girl. What does she want ?

Once upon a time, Ruth might have stretched her spine to its fullest height and replied in her pistol-whip Spanish, shaming them with her flawless Caribbean accent, a playground retort. No quiero nada de ustedes comemierdas. Estoy en el lugar equivocado. But her mouth was dry, the linguistic stockpile of her mind long depleted. So the pit that opened in Ruth’s stomach at that moment was exactly the same as the one that had opened at the St. Louis restaurant when that red-faced waitress had said rice and beans . It was the you-are-not-one-of-us pit. The chasm yawned open within her. And Ruth fell in. She never returned to the Boricua House again.

But then, two years later on a Wednesday evening at sunset in the photo lab, here was Arthur Rodríguez, single-handedly dismantling all of Ruth’s disappointment, her heartache, her devastated optimism. Here he stood, resurrecting her hope of belonging. And my God, he was so good-looking. It was crazy that one human could be so many perfect things, and smell like that, and look like that. Crazy.

“Encantado de conocerte,” he said with a formal little bow.

“Oh wow, you speak Spanish?”

He shrugged. “Of course. Don’t you?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I mean I used to. I lost a lot of it in Missouri.”

He laughed. “Like you misplaced your luggage in Missouri?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“You left your heart in San Francisco?”

“Exactly.” She was leaving her heart right here, in Gus’s Pro Photo on Main Street, in Wodsley, New Jersey. “I mean, it was my first language, you know? But when we moved to St. Louis, my brother had trouble in school, so—”

“So your parents forbade Spanish at home?”

How did he know? She nodded.

“Ugh. That sucks,” he said.

And she was mortified to find that she had tears in her eyes. What the fuck, stop it .

“So practice,” he said. “It’s still in there. You’ll get it back if you try.”

She shrugged again. “Who’m I going to practice with?”

He smiled at her, and his teeth were beautiful. She wanted to lick them.

“Conmigo,” he said. With me.