Page 102 of Dying to Meet You

He’s quiet, and she wonders if he isn’t going to answer. “It’s mostly just very humiliating. You’re like a head of livestock, going where they want you to, when they want you to. Lots of picky rules. And no privacy.”

Kind of like living with Mom.

“And then you adjust to it, and that’s almost more unsettling. Like you forget how to think for yourself, and you have to fight off the impulse to just wait to be told what to do.”

Her heart sags. “Sounds grim.”

“It is pretty grim. It doesn’t help that I was always surrounded by people who are even more hopeless than me. Like they never had a chance to be anything but a problem.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah. To cope, I had to work on having a really rich interior life. I listened to a lot of talk radio. Then I tried my hand at drawing a graphic novel.”

“Really? What about?”

“It’s not finished,” he cautions. “It’s science fiction. About a cyborgwho doesn’t know he’s a cyborg, until a glitch clues him in. It’s a book about being in prison, honestly. But you’re supposed to write about what you know.”

He peels the cucumber in several quick strokes and then reaches for a knife in the block and begins to chop. “Before I go to work, I’ll order some groceries. Do you know what store delivers?”

“Hannaford,” she says. “Maybe Whole Foods, too?”

“All right.”

Natalie sets up the griddle and starts in on two grilled-cheeses. She’s careful not to burn them, because that would be so embarrassing.

A few minutes later they’re sitting down to a better lunch than Natalie would ever have made on her own. “This is nice,” she says uselessly.

He cocks his head to the side and smiles at her. “Happy to have lunch with you while I can. I’ll only be here a few days. And I’m going to be working a lot and staying out of your mother’s way. She seems really stressed.”

“Oh, she is. That guy was bad news even before he died on her.”

He frowns. “Bad news how?”

“Do you want to hear my theory of how he got killed?”

The corners of his mouth twitch. “It sounds like you want to tell it to me.”

“Well, it’s weird, right? He dies in front of that house, and they took all his stuff from his car. Like a robbery. But they also took his notebooks. He was a journalist. I think he was working on a story about the mansion. He was adopted from there, I think. It used to be a home for unwed women.”

“I knew that,” he says. “My mother worked there when I was little.”

“She... What? Seriously?” Natalie puts down her sandwich.

“Yeah, that’s what she told me once.”

“Doing what job?”

“Could have been anything. She worked a lot of jobs when I was young. Hotel maid. Waitress.” He shrugs. “This will sound weird to you, because you and your mom are close. But my mother was kind of a mystery to me. Things were okay when I was little—back when my dad wasstill paying child support. But then our lives got hard, and she just kind of gave up. Did drugs. Stayed out all night.”

“Oh.”He had an unhappy childhood, her mother had said.

He shrugs again. “Not everyone is built to be a survivor. And she didn’t have help. Her parents kicked her out when she got pregnant with me. I used to be mad at her. But then I had some bad luck myself, and now I understand her a little better.”

Natalie nods. But her mind is churning on something else. “Can I show you something?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. She bolts from the table and runs upstairs, where her backpack was abandoned the minute school got out last week and not touched since. She digs out the saint medallion. Runs back downstairs.

“Here,” she says a minute later, dropping it into his hand. “Remember this?”

“Wow. Yeah.” He turns it over in his palm. “This was hers. You’ve had it all this time?”