“Levi, shut up!”
“I’d like to see that,” I said. Ava had bought my coffee, but this had been a long day and now I was dealing with this guy. I deserved more.
“What?” they both asked, and then she added, “He was lying about how I was a can-can dancer. I was a cheerleader, but I could never kick that high.”
“No, I mean the chicken thing. Drinking via gravity,” I explained, looking at her brother. “I’d like to see it.”
Levi steadily met my gaze, and then he picked up his coffee. He tilted his head back, filling his mouth from the cup. Then he tilted it back further, and opened and closed his jaws, shakingthe liquid down his throat. He wiped off his lips with the back of his hand and looked at me again.
We locked eyes and I nodded slowly. “Thank you,” I told him. “Ava, thank you for the drink. It was nice to meet you.”
“It was nice to meet you too.” She was back to sighing. “I hope you feel better soon.”
I nodded and said the same, and then I collected my cane and slowly made my way out to the sidewalk. When I got there, I stood in the greyed-out sunshine but I wasn’t really noticing it. I was thinking about chickens swallowing coffee, and I started to laugh. I laughed hard enough that I had to lean on my cane, and the world around me suddenly seemed a little brighter.
Chapter 2
Ok. Ok, I had to do it. There might have been something important—like, work-related important. Optimistically, there also could have been something like a cordial “hello” or “just checking in,” because I’d known people in college and in high school, and even in elementary school. And after I’d graduated, I’d hung out with other people. They hadn’t been my own friends, but I’d spent plenty of time with them and they were acquaintances. They might have been sending a message, too. I tried to pet Coral the cat for reassurance but she stared at me out of empty eyes and then turned to show me her butt, so I left her alone.
So, the new emails in my inbox could have been something positive…I held my breath and clicked.
No, there was nothing good. I had been right to be fearful because it was all bills and threats, plus a woman bothering me with intrusive questions about my mother. I blocked her and looked through as many others as I could, until I felt the familiarsqueeze of anxiety in my chest and I had to quit. It had been like this since the accident and I did the same thing that I always did, every time I got so overwhelmed that I couldn’t breathe: I went outside. It was the cheapest therapy I’d been able to come up with.
I slowly sank down to sit on the front steps of our little apartment building. There were four units, two on the ground floor and two stacked above those. The upper two were empty after some storm damage to the roof but fortunately, one of the lower ones had been available when I’d come out of the hospital and had been reeling and frantic about where I would live. I had felt lucky to get it, even though these two steps had been very hard for me to navigate at first and they still weren’t the easiest now. But they were an ok place to sit, especially since the weather had warmed up. It had been uncomfortable in the winter but when I got this feeling, I hadn’t cared if it had been freezing, snowing, or sleeting.
The door to the building opened and closed again behind me. “SeñoritaMack,” Hernán said.
“Mr. Bermejo,” I answered, but he shook his head. “SeñorBermejo,” I corrected myself.
“Hace buen tiempo,” he said slowly.
“Um…something about time?”
“It’s nice weather,” he corrected. “¿Qué tal estáshoy?”
“Um…” What was the right answer? “Estoy bien.”
He clapped like those two words were an extraordinary achievement, and for me, they were. He had decided that I needed to learn Spanish so he’d spent the last few months teaching me, but it was an extremely slow process. I had previously taken two years in high school too, but none had stuck very well. I wasn’t much of a language person at all, in fact, because I’d also struggled in English class. He was excited to teach me; due to my decision to try optimism and the need to have bonds, I hadn’t said no.
Hernán started to speak to me again because he had the idea that if I heard enough, eventually I would start to absorb it. After that happened, Spanish would emerge from my own mouth. He would stop every now and then to give me a loose translation, like that he was talking about his daughter or telling me something about Spain, where he’d grown up. And I usually did recognize at least one or two words, but this teaching method wasn’t doing much for my language acquisition. I didn’t mind hearing it, though. I was glad to interact with anther human, even if I had no real idea of what he was saying.
He switched to our common tongue when he wanted me to answer. “Why are you out here? Did you have to check your email?”
“Yes,” I admitted.
“What about the junk file?” He sounded stern. “You missed the message from the lawyer because you didn’t look in there before.”
“I didn’t look in there now, either,” I further admitted. I gotten too overwhelmed by the regular stuff. “I will.” I took out my phone and did it, because he was right and ignoring email folders only made them grow aggressively, like poison ivy.
I felt a wave of relief. Fortunately, luckily, wonderfully, most of the contents of the junk folder was actually junk, people trying to help with my erectile disfunction and telling me that my passwords had been compromised. Except for one. I stopped scrolling and looked at it.
“¿Quién es ese?” Hernán pointed at it, too. “Who is that guy?” he translated, because I hadn’t quite nailed down all the question words.
I also looked at the name. “It’s someone I met briefly,” I answered. “How do you say ‘chicken’ in Spanish?”
“Pollo. What does that have to do with…” He squinted and frowned at my screen because he didn’t like the small text size that I used. “Levi Lassiter. ¿Quién es esteLevi Lassiter? ¿Quién?” he repeated slowly, and then raised an eyebrow. “¿Me entiendes o no, Emerson?”
I’d gotten enough of an idea of what he was saying to allow me to answer. “Levi is someone I met through his sister.” I opened the email, and there was nothing except for a picture. It was a chicken:pollo.
