Page 34 of Except Emerson


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“I’ll take the important pieces. My daughter’s baby book, our old wedding album.” He looked sad when he said that. “Most of the rest is just extra.”

“My mother couldn’t give stuff away, not anything,” I said, and then was very surprised at myself. Why was I talking about her? It must have been because Levi had been badgering me to share…he hadn’t been badgering, exactly.

“Why did she hold onto it?” Hernán asked. “Was it a psychological problem?”

“No, nothing that you could diagnose. I don’t think so,” I added, “but I’m no app therapist. Her office had so many books that it was hard to open the door and they collected a lot of dust.”

He asked me additional questions in both languages, but there wasn’t really anything more to say about my mother or her accumulations. Instead, I asked him about driving alone all the way across the country, when he was nervous about driving across town to the library by himself, and where exactly he planned to live in Nevada without any furniture. He’d gotten very serious as he’d talked about my problems and his concern for me, but he perked up when he discussed seeing different sights along the way and how his daughter had space for him in the house she’d just purchased.

But he did circle back to the previous topic, just as I was leaving. “I’ll expect you to text me, Emerson,” he said sternly. “I’ll be asking Levi how you’re doing.”

“Please don’t. He doesn’t need to hear that you didn’t think I was eating enough or that I wasn’t leaving that apartment. You’re not my keeper and neither is he. I don’t need one.”

I thought about it later, though, as I sat in my singular chair. I hadn’t really considered it, because I’d been thinking that we were neighbors and tutor/tutee, but I also did have a bond with Hernán. He wasn’t just someone who talked to me on the steps sometimes.

He was a friend, and I was going to miss him.

Chapter 7

Imade myself ignore it. I would not check my phone to see the time, not again, because lateness was normal for most people. I’d certainly gotten used to it while I was with Grant—not exactly “used to it,” because it had never ceased to upset me, but I’d come to terms with the fact that he was just not as punctual as I was.

“Not everyone has a clock shoved up their ass,” he’d let me know on many occasions.

“That’s disgusting and all it takes is glancing at your phone to know that you have to hurry,” I’d let him know right back. He done a lot of glancing at it, pretty much constantly, but that hadn’t helped with his timeliness. He looked at it even while driving, even after he’d gotten into a fender-bender because he’d been texting and had been distracted. He just had so many friends to keep up with, that was the reason.

Despite my attempt to change my attitude, I still felt that people who were late were showing that they didn’t care aboutyou. They were saying, “I have more important things than my commitment to you. I’m doing them while you sit there and waste your time, which isn’t as important as mine.” And sometimes, that was true! For example, Ava was probably late today because there was a problem with one of her children, or because something had happened with her job. Levi had told me that she had a lot of responsibility at her firm and that the place might have gone up in smoke without her. It was likely that there was a figurative fire that she’d needed to put out, and it was why she wasn’t yet here at this restaurant.

I didn’t have to check the time again anyway, because suddenly, she came through the door and rushed over to the table where I waited. “I’m so sorry,” she apologized. “I was running right on schedule.” But then she described an issue at work which had kept her from arriving promptly. “I texted as soon as I could,” she also said, but I had been preventing myself from looking at my phone so I hadn’t seen it.

Her lateness wasn’t the only reason that I’d been avoiding it. I could see that there were a number of emails waiting, unread, in my inbox, and they were probably all bills or notices that I was overdue again. I was aware that they would germinate and flourish just like mold, but I wasn’t ready. I needed Hernán’s support, maybe. It was going to be hard when he wasn’t around to give it.

“It doesn’t matter that you’re late,” I told her.

“Yes, it does.” She seemed upset, which signaled that she hadn’t actually been thinking that she had more important things to do than to meet me. “I hate being off schedule like this. I’m just…”She stopped and I watched her take a breath, and she seemed to reset. “This is fine. It’s a busy period of my life, but I can handle it with grace.”

“You didn’t have to squeeze me in,” I told her. “I could have met you another day.”

“You know what? I’m a little tired of pushing everything I want into second place, or third, or fourth. I came today because I wanted to talk to you! What I didn’t want to do was volunteer this morning at the summer camp at the preschool, where they stuck me in the group with the kid whose parents never say the word ‘no,’ and then I didn’t want to deal with the intern at my office who…” She stopped again, took a second deep breath, and shook her head. “This is a busy, overwhelming time but I can be calm and flexible.”

“I guess, but it must be really hard to have a full-time job, a dog, three kids, and a house to take care of,” I pointed out. “Especially when you still think that you have to watch over Levi and your sister, too.”

“Well, Liv’s doing great, and I don’t worry so much about her anymore,” she answered.

That left her brother, though. “I think Levi is also ok. You know he got a new job, right?”

To my surprise, Ava didn’t seem very happy about that. “Yeah,” she sighed. “Yeah, he told me and I said congratulations.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“I just can’t imagine him sitting at a desk all day,” she confessed. “I picture him more as an outdoor guide. Has he told you how much he likes to hike?”

I thought about the walks we’d been taking, a few blocks every other day. “Um, no. How far does he go?”

Well, he had done the Appalachian Trail, for one thing, and he’d talked about trying the Pacific Coast Trail as well. “Besides that, he’s always out for some kind of exercise. And he’s always doing something creative, too,” she said. “When he was little, he used to tell us stories that went on for hours. They didn’t always make sense but they kept us entertained.”

“I thought that you wanted him to get a serious job.”

“That was what I kept drilling into him.” She picked up the glass of water near her bread plate and took a long sip. “Anyway, that’s enough about me and my brother. I didn’t really get to talk to you when you were over at my house.”