“She told me that she wanted to talk to you about the orthopedist,” he explained. “Instead, she was planning a cocktail ambush.”
“Do you mean that she was attacking you with me?” We had stopped at his car. “Can you give me a ride home?”
“Sure, I can do that.” He opened the passenger door. “Did my sister tell you what’s been happening?”
I waited for him to get in and then I answered, “I haven’t talked to her before today, when she asked me to a party and said that she had her basement back.” And when the kids had suggested playing there, I had gone down to look around. It wasn’t anyone’s apartment anymore, and Ava’s daughter had answered definitively that Uncle Levi had moved away and they missed him. Her brother Elliott had chimed in to let me know that he was carrying three cars and a tooth (not his own) in his pockets, and then we’d snacked on plastic vegetables.
“Well, yeah, I moved out,” Levi told me. “Ava is thrilled.”
“Where do you live now?”
It was in a building in downtown Detroit, a place that seemed very nice when he described it. It immediately made mesuspicious. Every time my ex-boyfriend had talked like this, big and impressive, there had been more to the story.
But Levi wasn’t Grant and he wasn’t trying to show off. He was stating the facts, and he had more to share, too.
“I also got a job,” he mentioned.
“Wow.” Well, he definitely didn’t need any help from me, and I felt a rush of disappointment as I realized it. If he didn’t need me, we wouldn’t have any kind of reciprocal relationship where I got friendship in return. I had already seen that Ava didn’t really want me to be her friend, either; she had only sought my company to try to get me hooked up with her brother.
Which didn’t make sense.
“If you have a job and an apartment, why did your sister want me to come over tonight?” I asked him. “You’re well on your way to normalcy even without my presence.”
“Ava had picked you out for me, remember? She wants it to work because she doesn’t like to be wrong. Things have to go according to her plan.” He didn’t sound resentful, just kind of amused.
“Ok,” I sighed. I wasn’t sorry that he’d started to pull things together on his own, but it did make me sorry for myself. This really had seemed like a great opportunity for a bond. “What’s your new job?”
“You’re not going to like it.” He told me the name of his new boss.
“You’re seriously working for your friend August, even after I told you that he’s involved in something criminal?” I asked. “That’s a really poor decision.”
“I’m not doing anything for the club. He has a few businesses, and—”
“If they’re all part of the enterprise and he goes down, then you’ll be sent to the stir right along with him.”
“Do you mean jail? You picked up some words from your old movies,” he remarked. “I’m not part of a criminal enterprise. I’m working on ad campaigns for his totally legitimate businesses, like a jewelry store.”
“Ad campaigns?” I repeated, and he told me that he’d done some writing in the past and that, among his friends in high school, he’d had a reputation for being funny.
“That’s not saying a lot,” he admitted. “We called our other friend ‘Godzilla’ because we thought he was so strong, and he couldn’t bench more than one plate.”
“I have no idea what that means,” I said, and Levi laughed. He reached over and gently squeezed my upper arm.
“Been a while since you hit the gym?”
“I went walking today,” I informed him, but then I heard myself admit something that I hadn’t planned to let him know, not ever. “I thought you and I would be walking together.”
“What are you doing tomorrow morning?”
“Nothing special,” I answered. Saturdays were just the same as the rest of the week, so I would get up, feed the cat, feed myself,and then try to fill the long hours with work, old shows, and learning Spanish until it was time to go back to sleep. “I might watch a movie.”
“Want to go for a walk?”
“Together?”
“Yes, me and you.”
I glanced at my arm, where I had a thin white scar that stood out very conspicuously against the self-tanner. It was a reminder of the last time I’d tried to go out for a walk with a partner: Coral the cat had slipped her collar and run, and I’d had to tackle her.
