“How did you know what would be in his message?” Hernán asked me. “Wait a minute. Is this some kind of threat? If it is, it’s a poor choice of animal. Why not a wolf? A jackal?”
“No one’s threatening me with pictures of chickens,” I assured him. “He’s making a joke, an inside joke. It’s not going to sound funny if I explain it, but it was at the time.” I smiled again now when I thought of it. “He looked up my email address. That’s funny, too.”
“Why is it funny? Why wouldn’t he pursue a beautiful girl?” He typed on his own phone and then held it up. “Levi Lassiter. Is this him?”
“Oh, wow.” Yes, it was a picture of the guy I’d met for a few moments in the coffee shop, the one who’d seemed as uninterested in me as I had been…well, I hadn’t been uninterested in him. Of course, I hadn’t been interested, either. I’d thought he was rude to his sister who was trying to help him, but I hadn’t been not-uninterested. That wasn’t the same as interested or uninterested, though—I had been neutral. That was the word.
This picture was also neutral, and by that I meant it was ugly and devoid of charm. Yes, it showed the same man from the coffee shop, with the same curl in ends of his hair, the same straight nose, the same arched eyebrows. He stared blankly at the camera out of the same dark eyes, too. I frowned. “He looks…”
“Boring,” Hernán stated.
“It also looks like a mugshot,” I said. “Is it?”
“Let’s see, shall we?” He typed some more. “No, no arrests that I can find. He rarely posts and it’s all private anyway. I don’t see anything for work, either. Who is this?”
He definitely sounded unimpressed, but I had returned to looking at the picture of the chicken. “Why did he reach out to me?”
“I just told you,” Hernán answered impatiently. “Why wouldn’t he reach out? Or, are you wondering why he sent a chicken? I also have questions because as a threat, it’s terrible, and for romance? Also no good. Maybe a dolphin, maybe a dove…”
“I also just told you that it’s a joke, not a threat and not an overture,” I said, and I used the handrail to pull myself back to my feet. “I need to get back to work.”
“What are you going to answer him? Want me to ask my daughter for advice?”
“No, that’s ok.” He and his daughter were very close, but she lived all the way in Nevada. I figured that was why he liked to spend time with me, because I reminded him a little of someone he loved, since I was a woman and also below the age of fifty. She was successful and financially stable, though, so we also had our differences. “Adiós.”
“Let me know what happens,” he requested. Because the other reason that he liked to spend time with me was that he was a busybody.
I in my chair and looked at the chicken more, and then I also looked up Levi Lassiter. Hernán had been right; there was nothing much about this guy that I could find. I thought about him as I glanced around my apartment, at the bland expanse of rental décor with ecru walls and grey, plastic-wood floors. It was all as boring as the mugshot picture we’d looked at.
If I wrote back, what would I have said? “Cute bird,” I typed, and then quickly deleted it. He had been funny and I had to respond in kind. I tried again: “Are you asking me over for dinner?” No, that just sounded unkind to chickens.
Ok, there was another way to go with this. “Are you the guy from the coffee shop?” I wrote, and before I could second-guess myself again, I sent it. Then I turned up the volume on my phone.
I got up again, even though I felt the familiar pain. I went into the little kitchen, just an alcove off the main living area, and I opened my refrigerator and the two cupboards next to it. The mug, plate, and bowl sat where I’d placed them. The small carton of milk was still in the refrigerator, next to the same bunch of arugula that I’d bought because I knew that I needed more vegetables in my diet. It was now looking wilted—
My phone made a soft chirp and I walked faster than I had in a while over to look at it.
“Are we emailing?” Levi had written. “I think this is how my parents met. It should be a great story for our kids.”
Well! I blinked, and then closed my phone with a click. I sat down carefully in my chair and opened the files I had been working on, the finances of a local party store whose owners had been nice enough to keep me as their bookkeeper even though I’d been out of commission for a while. I was slowly trying to build my little business back up because not everyone had been willing or able to wait out my recovery and forgo my services for all that time. I understood. I did, but it was—
I jerked in surprise when my phone made another sound. I always had it silenced and I never turned on any of the notifications…except I had just now, and I had forgotten to turn them off. I wasn’t very interested in what that guy had to say, of course, but I did go ahead and read the new email.
“Sorry,” he’d written. “Looking at what I sent to you, I realize that it came off as strange and not hilarious. I’m not actually hilarious despite the opinion that you might have formed after I did that trick with the coffee. My sister told me that I acted like a jerk when I met you and my other sister read the email I just sent and says you’re probably afraid. She repeated that I’m a jerk. Now I’m trying too hard and I think that’s enough. I’ll leave you alone. Levi.”
I leaned my chin on my hand and re-read all that. “I’m not scared,” I wrote back. “Things come off wrong when you write them. Maybe it would have been funny for real, in person, but probably you would have seen my face and taken it back. Writing is a poor way to communicate. Things are better face to face.”
Send.
This time, I didn’t even pretend to return to work. I stared at the inbox on my phone and waited. Maybe I needed to sit outside, because my heart was beating pretty hard.
His name appeared again and my thumb moved to tap it before my mind recognized that it was a new email.
“How about more coffee?” he’d asked. “I’ll swallow normally.” He suggested a time and place, an hour from now in a café in thetown that lay between where he lived in the basement and where I lived in the apartment that had no apertures for fresh air.
I also swallowed hard as I read that, also in the usual way of using pharyngeal muscles instead of relying on gravity. Then I wrote, “Ok.”
An hour later, I had the car drop me off in Royal Oak. I caught a glimpse of myself in the plate glass window below the swirling gold letters that spelled out the name of the café, and I saw that wearing a bright blue shirt hadn’t really brightened me as a person. I’d looked in my closet and tried to find something that didn’t feel quite so bland and blah, and I’d remembered how Ava had put on lip gloss at the doctor’s office.
