“Yeah, I guess I would. How did you describe yourself? You’re desperate,” he recalled. “I guess that means your presence here is something else that doesn’t speak well for me.”
“It’s totally reasonable that you would feel bad when everyone else in your family leads normal, productive lives,” I encouraged.
“Damn.” He looked up at the sky. “Yeah, thanks.”
“We could help each other.”
Now he looked at me. “What? How?”
“I need to have more contact. More friends,” I explained again. “Bonds. I can go for days without speaking to anyone except for my cat and she doesn’t really like me. When my neighbor visited his daughter for a month, I went to the grocery store just so I could see people.”
He squinted, almost like my words had hurt him. “That’s pathetic.”
“I know,” I agreed. “So you could be a point of contact for me.”
“And what would I get out of it, except for the pleasure of your company?” Levi wondered.
“I could help you.”
“How?” he asked again, extremely skeptical. But I really could.
“I got my last boyfriend his job,” I explained. “I put his finances in order, too, and now he’s debt-free with a retirement account. His parents were very happy about it.”
“This is the guy who dumped you while you were recovering from your car accident? Wait a minute, who was driving?”
“He was. It was his car,” I said. “You can come to my apartment every day, like you’re going to a job, and I’ll make you work for real.”
“You’re thinking that I’ll scam my sister into believing that I’m productive.”
“You actually would be productive,” I corrected. “It’s dumb that you’re not doing anything and you don’t have a place of your own to live.”
“Thanks,” he said again.
“But I could help you with that. Why wouldn’t you want to be someone better? You could be a person that your sister Ava talks about at the orthopedic surgeon’s office in a proud way, rather than telling a total stranger how she’s worried and then fixing you up with that same unknown woman. Obviously, she’s desperate too.”
He swallowed, a reflex which I was now noticing a lot after that whole chicken deal. “Yeah, she’s clearly grasping at straws,” he said. “She’s cornering patients in pain to trick them into dating me.”
“Well—”
“I really had no idea how far I’d slid,” he said. “What the hell happened? Life came at me so fast. I was having fun in high school, I was going along ok in college. And then, all of a sudden, it was time to get a job and everyone I knew was like, ‘Yeah, I’ve applied to forty-two different companies and had three interviews, looks like I’ll get hired soon.’ I’d done nothing except go to class and go to bars. What was I waiting for?”
I shrugged because I didn’t know, but I’d seen exactly this scenario before. “The same thing happened to my boyfriend Grant and it was worse because all his friends were rich and connected, so their parents got jobs for them. He hung out with them but he wasn’t a part of their world, not really, and he had a lot of challenges that they didn’t. It wasn’t just a lack of initiative and intelligence. He also lacked the resources, but we were able to overcome all that.”
“How?”
I explained how I’d fixed Grant’s CV, how first we’d found him an internship which he’d done while I’d worked to support us, and then how the internship had led to permanent employment. “It wasn’t a cakewalk, but we got there in the end,” I said. “He wasn’t used to being on a schedule or putting in effort, because his family wasn’t wealthy but they’d spoiled him. His mom worked nights so she could take care of everything in his life during the day, I think including his homework. I don’t know when that woman ever slept. His dad had two jobs.”
“And what about now?”
“I haven’t talked to his parents since before the accident,” I said.
“I mean that boyfriend,” Levi clarified. “Is he still working, still doing well?”
“I think so. He seemed to be the last time I checked, but one of the other things that the therapist told me before she quit was that I had to stop looking him up all the time.” She’d explained that I was hurting myself when I did it, and she was right about that. I’d been enlarging the pictures of Grant, zooming in on him enjoying life with his friends, and I’d found myself crying a lot. “I’m over him,” I noted.
“If you say so.”
There had been a whole lot of doubt in those words. “No, I really am. Right before we hit the wall, I had a moment where I understood everything.”
