Page 15 of Except Emerson (Detroit ABCs #7)

She did, finally, and I stood in the hallway to watch her get into her Porsche, check her hair, and then pull away fast. Hernán came out to watch too, since nothing happened without his notice. “? Qué cono ?” he asked me.

“What…” I translated, but then stopped when I got to the second word, which I seemed to recognize. “No, that question doesn’t make sense.”

“It’s slang. What the hell?”

“You mean Vivienne? She was someone I knew, before.”

“Before your accident,” he expanded, and I nodded. “She was your friend? Besides Levi, you’ve never had anyone over here.”

He knew, since he kept track. He and Levi had gotten better acquainted in the last few weeks, because Hernán popped out of his apartment every time Levi’s old car stopped at the curb outside our building. He often beat me to it so he could speak Spanish with a person who actually understood.

Yes, Levi had been coming over, but not just to talk to Hernán.

We’d been taking the walks that helped my hip to loosen up, for one thing.

We’d gone for ice cream and more coffee and we’d headed back to the park to sit, but not near the ant hill.

We just hung out, mostly talking about old movies and his family, because I loved to hear stories about them.

He had been such a troublemaker growing up and it sounded like he had tortured his sisters, like when he’d “played football” with the younger one.

That had consisted of her running as fast as she could to get away before he tackled her.

But both those girls had given it back to him—and more than anything, it was always clear how much they loved each other.

“That’s so nice,” I’d said the day before, when he’d told me about Ava following him in her car when he went out with some people she didn’t approve of.

She’d ended up calling him and feigning an emergency (their house had been hit by a hot air balloon) so that he was able to extricate himself when the new crowd had started shoplifting.

“Very nice,” he had agreed. “She wasn’t great at camouflage, though. If they hadn’t been so drunk, they definitely would have spotted her riding our bumper.”

That memory now gave me an idea. I said adiós to Hernán and went out onto the front steps.

One thing about my job was that I was able to set my own hours, so if I wanted to stop working in the middle of the day, I could.

I would make up that time at night when I was alone but most other people were forming additional relationship bonds.

Levi’s new job also allowed him to come and go as he chose, since he was working from his new apartment and not an office where coworkers would frown on him taking off in the middle of the day to go spy with me.

Because that was my plan. I texted and he said sure, he’d be over in a little while.

I was already standing on the sidewalk when he pulled up so that Hernán wouldn’t be able to get involved.

My neighbor must have heard something anyway because as I got into the car, I saw his face appear at his window.

“Go!” I said, and we did.

“Hi. What are we doing?” Levi asked me.

“Remember how Ava followed you because she was worried?” I reminded him, and he nodded.

“We’re going to follow someone?”

“Close. We need to drive by a few places.” The directions were already cued up on my phone and I started the route.

“Hernán texted me about your visitor,” he mentioned. “He called her a beautiful young woman who drives a Porsche.”

“Why are you texting with him?”

“He’s lonely.” We drove north on Woodward Avenue. “He misses his daughter a lot and he doesn’t have many other people to talk to. Who are we spying on?”

“We’re not exactly spying,” I corrected. “We’re assessing the situation.”

“Whose situation are we assessing?”

“First, a woman named Vivienne, then an older couple named Tony and Harriet, and the third person is Grant.”

“Grant is your former boyfriend who drove you into a wall,” Levi stated, and I nodded.

“Exactly, and his best friend from childhood is a guy named Lance. They used to play lacrosse together and they ended up going to the same college. Vivienne is Lance’s wife and she was the woman who came over to see me today. Tony and Harriet are Grant’s parents.”

“Why do you want to see all of them?”

“Something is going on. Why would she have visited me? When I asked, she only said that I should go back where I came from.”

“She used those words?”

If I’d had the transcript already prepared, then I could have given him a better idea of the exact phrasing, but I thought that I was pretty close so I nodded. “After the first few weeks, I didn’t try to contact any of them again. I have no idea what’s actually going on, but there’s something.”

“Why didn’t you hear from them before now? You said that your boyfriend didn’t want to deal with your injuries, but what about his parents? What about this Vivian woman?”

“Vivienne,” I corrected. “They didn’t like me.”

“But you also told me that his parents were happy that you’d straightened him out. Now he has a job and retirement account and it was all your doing.”

Levi seemed to remember conversations well, too. Maybe he was writing up his own transcripts. “That’s true, they were glad. But they still didn’t like me very much. They wanted him to meet someone better.”

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“They wanted a lot for him, maybe because they’d sacrificed a lot to get him where he was,” I explained.

“For example, that lacrosse team I mentioned, the one he was on with Lance, was very expensive. They traveled all over the place to play and he always needed new sticks and cleats, and all that added up. He also needed a car, a nice one, and they sent him to private school.”

“What the hell does any of that have to do with you? It was before you met him, if my math works out.”

“Everyone around Grant came from backgrounds of family money and influence, but then he ended up with me,” I continued. “I had basically nothing. I didn’t even give my mother a tombstone for a few years because I couldn’t afford it.”

“So they were hoping that he’d latch onto a woman and mooch? Is that what you mean?”

“Well…yes, I guess,” I said. “At the least, they wanted him to find someone with prospects.”

“What’s wrong with your prospects?”

“Levi, let’s be realistic,” I said sternly. “I don’t have a good job in my field of study and I certainly don’t have an apartment with a terrace. I live with a cat in a place where the window doesn’t even open. They were right about me.”

“You’re not done yet,” he said. “You have plenty of time to make changes.”

Maybe, but I felt so stuck.

“What else did you want to do?” he asked.

“I had some plans,” I said. I’d thought about graduate school, but I had needed to work for a while to make money for that and it was impossible to save as much as I wanted with all our expenses. “I couldn’t afford everything that I wanted and neither could Grant.”

“How much was he helping out?” he asked, and that was a good question. I thought of the ghastly car insurance premiums and shrugged. “I don’t see how any of that is enough reason to drop someone when she’s in the hospital and needs help,” he continued.

“They didn’t like me,” I repeated. “Vivienne said it today but in my heart, I knew it all along. They tolerated me because I was with Grant, but that was all. I bet my app therapist would have had something to say about it if we’d had time to get into the situation.”

“That woman was a weird therapist. My parents made me to talk to someone in high school when I was skipping class and screwing up, and my guy never told me shit like yours did for you.”

“I was wondering if she knew that she was going to leave, so she just threw caution to the wind and started letting her clients in what she really thought, rather than trying to lead us to the right spot. Maybe she just thought, ‘Screw it. I’m going to tell them the truth.’”

Levi still wanted to talk about Grant but we were quickly approaching Vivienne and Lance’s house.

It wasn’t a building I’d ever admired aesthetically due to its abundant fanciness, but of course I’d understood that they were lucky to live there.

How many other couples came out of college and moved into a six-thousand-square-foot home with a swimming pool?

“I don’t see the white Porsche that Hernán told me about,” he said as we stopped across the street.

“Maybe they bought more cars,” I said, because there were several in the driveway that I didn’t recognize. “Maybe they’re having a party.”

“Midday on a Wednesday? Don’t most people work?”

Lance did, in a job provided by his parents, and Vivienne had done something, too.

“Who’s here, then?” I asked, staring. “They like to travel and wear new stuff, but they were never interested in collecting a bunch of vehicles.” The house looked a little overgrown, too, which was different.

They also weren’t into doing yardwork themselves but they’d always had crews of people to keep things up for them.

“Who’s that?” he asked, as we watched the garage door open and an older woman came out.

“I don’t know. It’s not Vivienne.”

We could see that the interior of that garage was stacked with large boxes, moving boxes.

The woman got into one of the cars in the driveway and reached to push something near the visor, and the garage door closed again.

“I think she lives here,” he told me. “If we stay parked like this, they’re going to think we’re up to something. ”

“Casing the joint,” I said, nodding.

“Sure,” he said, and grinned. “Let’s take a powder.”

As we drove away, I looked for information on my phone. “Vivienne and Lance sold that place two months ago,” I announced. Since I’d been preventing myself from hunting down information about all of them, it had gone on without my notice.

“So they moved.”