Page 13 of Except Emerson (Detroit ABCs #7)

Ava’s husband got me a drink, a mix that he called his specialty and that her friend Nicola mentioned was deadly.

I wasn’t driving but I was never much of a drinker, anyway.

I’d spent five years of my life as the person in charge of safety for all nights out: I’d prevented drunken fights, hidden the car keys so that only I would be able to use them, and paid many a tab.

Now that I had my chance to be on the other side, it didn’t appeal very much.

I took the glass but I mostly just held it and as the ice melted, the level of the liquid inside increased rather than ebbed.

Anyway, I didn’t have time to drink because I was so busy talking.

All of us adults were in the living room, where they had pulled the chairs around the sofa in a semicircle.

It would have seemed like a great way to direct conversation back and forth, but that wasn’t what happened.

Almost every bit of the conversation was directed at me, in the form of a very pleasant, very cordial interrogation.

“Emerson,” Mrs. Lassiter said. “That’s so pretty.” She smiled at me and looked exactly like her daughter.

“Thank you.”

“Is it a family name?”

“No.” I shook my head.

“Where did it come from?” she pressed.

“I was named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Transcendentalist,” I explained.

“Your parents must have been fans. His essays are wonderful,” Mrs. Lassiter agreed and I nodded slightly.

My mother had always said so but I had never read them.

I was just glad that I hadn’t been named Hipparchia, her first choice.

The midwife had talked her out of it by suggesting authors’ names from the piles of books strewn around the room where I’d been born.

“‘To be great is to be misunderstood,’” Levi suddenly said, then explained, “That’s a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote that I think holds true in my case.” He grinned at his parents who shook their heads back at him, but not like they were disgusted. They seemed to find him funny, yet annoying.

“Was your mom a teacher, by chance?” Mr. Lassiter looked over at his wife, who told me that she herself taught middle school English.

“No,” I answered, and forced myself to continue. “My mother was an author.”

“Really?” Ava asked. “What did she write?”

“Nonfiction,” I said. “You wouldn’t have read any of her stuff. She’s deceased,” I added, just to wrap it up. There wasn’t any more to tell.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Nicola said.

“I bet she was a very interesting person,” Mrs. Lassiter commented, and nodded at me encouragingly.

I said I guessed that she was, and the questions continued.

What about my father? I gave her the same story that I’d told Levi, but more abbreviated: I didn’t have much to do with him.

Brothers, sisters? No. My job? Bookkeeping.

“I just took on a new client,” I said in an attempt to share, and Levi looked up. “A dry-cleaning business,” I explained. His friend August hadn’t contacted me again and I, of course, hadn’t reached out to him.

They asked about my education and my hobbies, of which there weren’t any.

They asked if I liked living in Ferndale.

Pets? Friends? I didn’t have much to say for myself and I realized how empty and boring my life must have sounded to them.

Really, the stuff about my mother had been the most interesting.

Also, I could see them looking at my arms and this room had great lighting, so the streaks were very, very obvious.

There was an awkward silence and Ava stared hard at her brother, who hadn’t added much to the conversation after doing his quotation thing.

But he suddenly spoke again. “Describe your favorite pair of shoes,” he told me.

“What are you talking about, Levi?” Nicola asked, laughing.

“They’re slippers with fake-sheepskin lining,” I answered.

“That indicates a homebody,” he said, nodding. “Interesting. What’s your third favorite movie?”

I absently rubbed at a stripe while I thought. “I’ll go with Roman Holiday .”

“What kinds of questions are those?” Levi’s dad asked him, and his son answered that he’d been told they were a good way to get to know someone.

“You’re supposed to be quirky,” Levi explained. “I heard that’s what the dating apps advise.”

“You’re not on those apps and you already know Emerson,” his mom scolded, and resumed her cross-examination. After a while, Ava’s husband took the kids off to bed and Nicola and her husband said they needed to leave, too.

“So do we,” Levi announced. He was very adept at avoiding questions about what we were doing and where we were going, and since it seemed like he didn’t want to tell anyone, I kept my mouth shut and didn’t admit that we had no plans and weren’t actually leaving together.

We did exit through the front door at the same time, after I’d said goodbye, thank you, and nice to meet you to the appropriate people. He helped me down the steps, too.

“Quick question,” he said as we moved slowly away on the sidewalk.

“Yes?”

“Why do you have those brown lines on your arms and neck? Or am I seeing things?”

“I’ll get it off later.”

“You look nice,” he commented, but it was an afterthought and he’d probably only said it because he believed that he’d insulted me. “You dressed up for this. What did you know about tonight?”

“Ava texted and said that she was having a party. She must have gotten my number from you,” I pointed out, and he said yes, that she’d asked him for it.

“She told me that she wanted to talk to you about the orthopedist,” he explained. “Instead, she was planning a cocktail ambush.”

“Do you mean that she was attacking you with me?” We had stopped at his car. “Can you give me a ride home?”

“Sure, I can do that.” He opened the passenger door. “Did my sister tell you what’s been happening?”

I waited for him to get in and then I answered, “I haven’t talked to her before today, when she asked me to a party and said that she had her basement back.

” And when the kids had suggested playing there, I had gone down to look around.

It wasn’t anyone’s apartment anymore, and Ava’s daughter had answered definitively that Uncle Levi had moved away and they missed him.

Her brother Elliott had chimed in to let me know that he was carrying three cars and a tooth (not his own) in his pockets, and then we’d snacked on plastic vegetables.

“Well, yeah, I moved out,” Levi told me. “Ava is thrilled.”

“Where do you live now?”

It was in a building in downtown Detroit, a place that seemed very nice when he described it. It immediately made me suspicious. Every time my ex-boyfriend had talked like this, big and impressive, there had been more to the story.

But Levi wasn’t Grant and he wasn’t trying to show off. He was stating the facts, and he had more to share, too.

“I also got a job,” he mentioned.

“Wow.” Well, he definitely didn’t need any help from me, and I felt a rush of disappointment as I realized it.

If he didn’t need me, we wouldn’t have any kind of reciprocal relationship where I got friendship in return.

I had already seen that Ava didn’t really want me to be her friend, either; she had only sought my company to try to get me hooked up with her brother.

Which didn’t make sense.

“If you have a job and an apartment, why did your sister want me to come over tonight?” I asked him. “You’re well on your way to normalcy even without my presence.”

“Ava had picked you out for me, remember? She wants it to work because she doesn’t like to be wrong. Things have to go according to her plan.” He didn’t sound resentful, just kind of amused.

“Ok,” I sighed. I wasn’t sorry that he’d started to pull things together on his own, but it did make me sorry for myself. This really had seemed like a great opportunity for a bond. “What’s your new job?”

“You’re not going to like it.” He told me the name of his new boss.

“You’re seriously working for your friend August, even after I told you that he’s involved in something criminal?” I asked. “That’s a really poor decision.”

“I’m not doing anything for the club. He has a few businesses, and—”

“If they’re all part of the enterprise and he goes down, then you’ll be sent to the stir right along with him.”

“Do you mean jail? You picked up some words from your old movies,” he remarked. “I’m not part of a criminal enterprise. I’m working on ad campaigns for his totally legitimate businesses, like a jewelry store.”

“Ad campaigns?” I repeated, and he told me that he’d done some writing in the past and that, among his friends in high school, he’d had a reputation for being funny.

“That’s not saying a lot,” he admitted. “We called our other friend ‘Godzilla’ because we thought he was so strong, and he couldn’t bench more than one plate.”

“I have no idea what that means,” I said, and Levi laughed. He reached over and gently squeezed my upper arm.

“Been a while since you hit the gym?”

“I went walking today,” I informed him, but then I heard myself admit something that I hadn’t planned to let him know, not ever. “I thought you and I would be walking together.”

“What are you doing tomorrow morning?”

“Nothing special,” I answered. Saturdays were just the same as the rest of the week, so I would get up, feed the cat, feed myself, and then try to fill the long hours with work, old shows, and learning Spanish until it was time to go back to sleep. “I might watch a movie.”

“Want to go for a walk?”

“Together?”

“Yes, me and you.”

I glanced at my arm, where I had a thin white scar that stood out very conspicuously against the self-tanner. It was a reminder of the last time I’d tried to go out for a walk with a partner: Coral the cat had slipped her collar and run, and I’d had to tackle her.

But Levi didn’t have claws, not that I could see. Not yet. “I’ll go for walk, just the two of us,” I agreed.

“Good. Should I come to you or can you meet me? Do you have a car?”

“No, I sold it.” At first, I hadn’t been able to drive with my head injury, and then I’d wanted the money that I got for it more than I’d looked forward to going places. I hadn’t been looking forward to anything, not until lately.

“Then I’ll be at your house at eight.”

That seemed early, but I was so glad about having a plan that I didn’t argue. I’d be up anyway, since Coral liked to eat at six and got angry if I dallied too long in bed. “Sounds fine,” I said.

“How would a gangster in an old movie answer that?”

“Sure thing, doll,” I told him, and he laughed.

We kept talking all the way back to my apartment, not an interrogation but a conversation that made me laugh, too—maybe he was actually funny.

The first time we’d met and Ava had offered me a ride, she’d told me that we didn’t live too far apart.

She was right, and that meant the trip with Levi didn’t take nearly long enough.