Page 17 of Except Emerson (Detroit ABCs #7)

“S ixth floor.”

“Oh.” I tilted my head to stare at the building and thought about that.

“There’s an elevator,” Levi said next, so I nodded.

“I can go up, then,” I answered, and he got a funny expression.

“Did you think I would bring you to a place where you had to climb that many stairs?” he asked.

“You might not have remembered that I had a problem with my hip,” I pointed out.

“Except that I already went walking with you three times to help with it. Come on.” He led me through the lobby, which was very nice, very sleek and very different from where I lived.

My building featured threadbare carpet, stains on the walls, and ultra-dim lighting, but there was none of that here.

The elevator worked, too, and took us right up to the sixth floor.

“Wow,” I said when he opened the door to his apartment. This was a full-sized place, with a kitchen that would have made sense in a house, and big windows overlooking the city. They probably opened, too, but I didn’t want to test them. “Do you have a roommate?”

“No, and I know that you’re wondering how I afford this.”

“Yes, I am,” I agreed, and he laughed.

“It’s part of August’s real estate portfolio. Can you believe that he has a portfolio?”

“I believe it,” I agreed again. If I was right, then he was up to something no good, and those kinds of ventures were often profitable. “So he’s renting to you below market?”

“He’s doing me a favor,” Levi agreed. “I wanted to get out of Ava’s house. I had to.”

“He’s doing you a favor just because you’re friends, or because you’re doing other things for him?”

“Sit down and I’ll explain,” he said, and pointed to the couch.

I did and listened. “When we were in high school, August had a truly shitty life. His dad was gone and his mom was high all the time. He was taking care of himself, and my family helped him. My parents let him stay with us for a while and I studied with him until we got his grades up so that he could graduate. He wants to help me back, and he’s not asking me to do anything illegal. He knows that I wouldn’t.”

“Ok.”

That word meant I’d acquiesced but maybe he’d heard some doubt in my voice, because it remained in my mind. “Haven’t you ever had someone do something nice for you?” he asked me. “Don’t you have friends who stepped up?”

“Not really. That’s why I was trying to get you to be my friend, or your sister.” Maybe she still only saw me as a possible match for Levi, but at least it made her stay in touch. “She and I are going to lunch soon.”

“That’s nice.”

“It’s because I thought you’d dropped me, until I saw you at her cocktail party and we started making plans.”

“First of all, you can be friends with more than one person at a time. Second, I didn’t drop you.

I got busy and I wanted to move myself out of her basement before I saw you again.

Pretty soon, I’ll be moving out of here, too, because I got…

” He tapped his index fingers in a drumroll on the leather-covered cushion.

“Are you feeling the excitement? You don’t look like you are. ”

“I wouldn’t say that I’m excited, but I’m curious,” I said.

“I’ll satisfy your burning desire to know. Ready?” He waited until I nodded. “I got a job! A real one, not just working for a friend whom you suspect of something nefarious.”

“Really?Wow.”

“You still sound less than thrilled but, of course, there’s no reason for you to be invested in my employment status.”

I was, actually, and I was thinking that if he got a job so easily, he didn’t need my help at all. He was doing fine. “I’m very glad for you.”

Despite the drumroll and the dramatic pauses, he didn’t sound very thrilled for himself either as he explained more. He’d obtained a paycheck-supplying position at a local real estate company, a big one which employed a lot of people in the area. He sighed as he explained it.

It sounded as if he would be starting at a low level but I had faith that he could move up, and I told him so. “You said that you were lazy, but you don’t really seem like it,” I also mentioned.

“I’ll be the oldest entry-level person in the company,” Levi pointed out.

“That’s ok.”

He shrugged but unlike his sister, he used both shoulders. “We’ll see. But you’re right that I wasn’t totally loafing before.”

“You’ve been doing the advertising stuff for your friend,” I suggested.

“Right.” Now he looked a little nervous, which I didn’t fully understand. “I’ve been doing a side project for a few years now, too. I’ve been writing something.”

“You mean something like a book?”

“Yeah, a book, a novel. I know you’re not a fan,” he told me. “You said that you don’t like to read and I saw your face when you talked about your mom’s profession.” He imitated it, and instead of looking pleasant and handsome like he usually did, he turned into a sour lemon.

“It was a different situation with my mother,” I said.

“What does that mean?”

“Do you write because you enjoy it?” I asked, and he nodded.

“Well, she wasn’t writing books for fun.

They practically tortured her. She spent years on each project and then it wasn’t ever a sure thing that she’d be published.

If she was, she’d still fall to pieces because no one outside of a very small group of academics cared at all.

If she got a bad review, she would shut herself in her bedroom and refuse to come out for days.

Her last book was called Dimidiate and when that got panned—” I stopped. It had been the final straw for her.

He waited for a moment but spoke again when I didn’t continue. “If my book ever does get published, no one will care besides my immediate family. Maybe an aunt or something, but I’m not expecting to land on a best seller list, or even to make any money.”

“I’ll read it.”

“You told me you don’t like to read,” he reminded me again.

“I have problems with that,” I explained. “I have trouble decoding.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s basically the ability to break apart words into sounds and then figure out what they are. You have to be able to decode well in order to read well. I couldn’t do it like a normal kid.”

“Normal?” he echoed.

“Like other kids,” I corrected myself.

“How did you learn?”

“When I was a few grades into school, they figured out what was wrong and then I got accommodations to make it easier,” I said. “But I dreaded reading and all the related stuff, like spelling tests.”

“And second-language classes.”

I nodded. “School worked better once I figured out that you can pretty much listen to anything. I hardly had to read at all in college.”

“But your job is numbers,” he said. “It’s not the same?”

“I don’t have many problems with math, and that was one of the reasons I always liked it. Anyway, I’m careful and I check myself constantly. But I’ll happily read your book,” I assured him. “Tell me what it’s about.”

It was the story of a family, not an unhappy one, but not without problems, either. The central character was a guy who’d had trouble growing up and who seemed to make a lot of bad choices. “You’re going to ask me if it’s autobiographical,” Levi noted.

“Is it?”

“To some extent,” he answered. “Parts of me are in all the characters, and parts of my parents and my siblings. But there’s no direct portrait of anyone, even if they might think so. I hope they don’t see too much of themselves, though, because I don’t want to hurt any feelings.”

“You didn’t tell me how it ends,” I said. “What happens to the guy?”

“I’m not done with it yet.”

“So, you don’t know? Don’t you have some kind of outline you’re following? Or notes?”

“I know exactly how it ends,” he said. “I’m just not telling you.” I sat back, annoyed, and he laughed. “I thought you’d be happy to learn that I wasn’t a complete and utter slacker, even when I wasn’t exactly prospering. Mary Evelyn couldn’t stand the idea of me as a writer.”

“She read your book?” I felt a twist of unexpected jealousy at the thought.

“I only told her that I was thinking about doing it, and she hated the idea that I wouldn’t have a regular job with a consistent salary. I understood her concern.”

“So do I,” I said fervently. “Depending on royalties is terrible, because they vacillate so much. My mother earned next to nothing from her books but her taxes were always a mess with grant money, speaking fees, and all her other income streams.” They’d been more like trickles.

“How do you know? Were you doing her taxes?”

“I figured out how,” I answered. I had also figured out that she’d gone for years without filing, which had been another problem. “That was my first bookkeeping job.” I had handled all aspects of her money; someone needed to be responsible.

Levi said the same thing. “Very responsible of you. What?” he asked. “Why do you look so confused?”

“I don’t think I ever told anyone that before,” I said. “I never talked about my mother that much to anyone.”

“Is it private?”

“No, but it seems like I was keeping things secret. I wasn’t,” I added. “I guess that subject didn’t come up before, since it’s not very interesting.”

“Emerson, you’re always talking about forming bonds and relationships,” Levi reminded me. “This is how is how you do it. You have to have real conversations.”

“We have plenty of conversations,” I protested, but he shook his head.

“I don’t mean shooting the shit like when we go on walks, when I tell you about baseball and you discuss issues with your feral cat. To have a real bond, you have to go deeper.”

“Like discovering that someone spoke Spanish.”

He smiled. “Like how I told you about my book. The only other person who knows about it is my friend August.”

“Not even Ava?”