“I’m twenty-six. That’s not exactly decrepitude, either,” I told him, but then had to use his arm to get back up to the apartmentbuilding and that felt exactly like decrepitude. And then, just a moment later, I saw the car pull up.
“No. ¡Quédate aquí!” Hernán ordered but since I didn’t understand, I wasn’t able to obey. I walked outside just as Levi started to walk up from the sidewalk, and I stepped down carefully to meet him.
“Good morning,” he greeted me, and it was still slightly before noon. I had been working for hours and he had been awake early, too. What had he been doing?
“Hi,” I answered, and determined that I was only going to say it once.
Levi looked over my head at the person scowling on the steps. “Is this your neighbor who’s teaching you Spanish?” he asked, and I nodded. “Hello,” he called to Hernán. “O a lo major le debo decir‘buenos días.’”
“You speak Spanish?” Hernán asked, in English.
“A little.”
“Me parece que es más de un poco.”
Levi nodded. “Me pasé un año estudiando español enSalamanca.”
“Excuse me? What are you two talking about?” I asked.
“I studied Spanish in college,” Levi explained, and Hernán looked thrilled.
“Everyone should speak another language. It’s broadening! It helps us to understand others! You didn’t tell me this,” he accused, but I shook my head.
“I didn’t know. We only saw each other twice and he didn’t mention it,” I further accused.
“Maybe there are a few things that we didn’t cover yet,” Levi suggested. “We can do that in the car on the way to my friend’s club.Mucho gusto,” he said to Hernán, who nodded back and said something about aplacer.
“So you speak Spanish, and what else?” I asked once I was seated. This car was a little beat-up, but when I looked over at the instrument panel, I did see that it was full of gas. That was something I’d always kept track of in Grant’s car, for his sake and for my own since I didn’t want to be stranded somewhere on the highway.
“What else…” Levi looked over his shoulder and then pulled out as he thought. “Well, I won an award for courage at camp when I was eight. I picked up a snake that had crawled into our cabin and carried it out into the woods. It wasn’t very courageous,” he confided. “The snake wasn’t that big and I knew it wasn’t poisonous because at that point in my life, I was an amateur herpetologist. That’s—”
“I know what it is,” I interrupted. “I was a biology major.”
“Yeah? Were you thinking about medical school?”
“No, I imagined that I’d be in a lab, like I already told you. I shared that before.”
“That’s right, when I was withholding the crucial information about my second-language abilities,” he reminisced. “Let me fill in some gaps.” He told me a few more facts, like how he got into an accident while out with his driving instructor at age fifteen (“not my fault”) and how he had nearly burned down his house while trying to make a Mothers Day breakfast without his two sisters butting in (“definitely my fault, but I was eventually forgiven”).
“It sounds like your whole family is pretty close,” I noted, and he nodded slightly.
“I’d say that we are. We don’t talk every day—I don’t talk to them every day,” he corrected himself, “but I think that Ava and Liv are in fairly constant communication with each other and with our mom.”
“And they’re not mad at you,” I confirmed.
“For being a fuck-up? No, they’re not mad. They’re worried,” he said, and frowned. “They want me to be happy.”
“Which you’re not, due to your lack of achievement. We were supposed to work on that today,” I reminded him.
“Right, but my friend August and I were talking about meeting up and I also remembered him saying that he needs someone new to work on his books, that the last guy disappeared or something. I thought this would be perfect. You said you’re taking on new clients.”
“I am, because I lost several while I couldn’t work. I really could use the income.”
“Perfect,” he said again.
“Then afterwards, we can work on your stuff.” He had, as I’d requested, sent over his CV and I’d carefully read it. One thing I already knew we had to add was his fluency in another language—actually, I would ask Hernán to quiz him more to make sure of that skill. I didn’t like what some people called “fibs,” not even on a résumé where employers might assume they’d find them. No, lying was not ok.
I kept asking questions, mostly now about important things like his GPA, if Ava had been correct about why he’d lost his last few jobs, and the state of his finances. “You have to be honest with the person managing your money,” I admonished when he seemed evasive in some of his answers.
