“We will tomorrow,” he answered, because that was when we were going to his cousin’s wedding. “Why would you bother me, Emerson?”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to. I’m trying to establish limits, since I know that people like their privacy.”
“Sure, and if I’m busy over here with some secret agent kind of stuff and can’t be disturbed, I’ll let you know,” he said, and threw himself down on the couch that we’d picked up from his parents’ house. They had been so nice and so happy to see us together, and his mom had wanted to ask me—me!—about the outfit she’d chosen for the wedding. I had thought it was great, and told her so.
“Here’s another question,” Levi told me. The cat climbed over and settled on his lap, and he petted her. “Why did you feel like it was a new experience to have Hernán watching you? I get that you probably didn’t have neighbors spying too much in the past,but you had a boyfriend. You had a mom, too, and they must have kept an eye on you.”
I sat, too, close enough that I could continue my desensitization training with Coral. I scratched her head. “No one had to do that.”
“I know that things change when we grew up, but I still watched out for Mary Evelyn.”
“Really?” Because I remembered what I had written in my transcript of the first conversation I’d had with Ava, in the doctor’s office lobby. She’d told me that her brother’s ex thought that he was “clueless.” “What do you mean?”
“I knew how much she hated cleaning her hair out of the drain in the shower, so I did that when the water started running slower. I worried about her when she came home late a few times and she had turned off her location…” He stopped. “That was also when I started to get the idea that she was interested in someone else.”
“Wait a minute. Wait a minute! That woman cheated on you?”
The volume of my voice had startled Coral, and she got stiff.
“It’s ok,” Levi soothed her, and then he answered me. “She swore that she didn’t, but the fact that it even sounded plausible made me realize that we had serious issues, worse than how much she hated the idea of my book, worse than how my sisters didn’t like her. There was this time she got into it with Liv at a grocery store…” He stopped again. “Didn’t your boyfriend do that for you, too?”
“Grant? Are you asking me if he cheated? No!” I said, still too loud for Coral. She batted my hand and I moved it.
Levi shook his head. “Didn’t he look out for you?”
“No,” I repeated, but at a more appropriate level for the cat’s ears. “Grant was independent and…why are you laughing?”
“Because you’ve told me about all the shit you did for him. Not only did you get him a job and organize his money, but you organized everything else, too. You did the laundry. You did the grocery shopping, you paid the bills, you cleaned. You were the captain of the ship.”
“When did I tell you all that?” I asked, amazed.
“You told me gradually, in little bits and pieces,” he said. “You never want to say a lot, but I got dribbles of information and I remembered.”
I wondered if he wrote it down, like I did. “Ava said exactly the same thing about how I don’t talk, but I do. I talk all the time,” I defended myself.
“Hm.” He looked at me steadily. “Why would both of us say the same thing?”
“Because you planned it?” I suggested. “More likely, because you share much of the same gene pool and were raised by your parents in the same household. You probably share a lot of characteristics.”
“How dare you say that to me,” he stated. Coral climbed up his chest and cuddled into his neck on the other side of his body, so I had to sit closer to reach her again.
Was I really like that, secretive and tightlipped with information? No, I said plenty. But I already knew how people formed solid bonds of friendship. Levi had said it before: they shared parts of themselves.
“My mother didn’t watch me at all,” I volunteered. “She was busy because she had to support us, but she also didn’t like children very much. I was mostly on my own.”
“She didn’t like children?” he echoed, and I shook my head.
“No, she really didn’t. When I hear Ava talk about volunteering at her kids’ schools, I try to imagine my own mother doing that. The bus picked me up for kindergarten and I don’t know if she was aware of where it took me. I hardly remember spending any time with her, definitely not in the same way that Ava does. She knows all about them, what they like to eat or their clothing sizes, for example.”
“She and Jeff would notice, for example, if their offspring were having trouble decoding words,” Levi said, and that was also true. My mother had not, but I hadn’t ever blamed her for it, or thought that it was strange…it was a little strange that she had never read with me, since she was such a great reader herself and also an author.
“I just took her as she was,” I explained. “She didn’t like babies or children and we didn’t do much together. That’s all.”
“How did she meet your dad?”
“On an airplane when they were both flying from Detroit to Portland. She was going to a conference and he lived there. It was just a one-night thing,” I answered. “Not even the wholenight, because he zipped up his pants and left her hotel room to go home to his wife. I had always thought that she got pregnant as an experiment, like how she took LSD or how she lived on the streets of San Francisco for a while. But it turned out that I was a total mistake, and she regretted the decision to have me.”
“She said that to you?” He seemed confounded. “And how the hell do you know about your father running out of her hotel room after they had sex and about her using drugs? I can’t believe she told you that stuff.”
