Page 18 of Except Emerson (Detroit ABCs #7)

“She would insist on reading a draft and I know I can’t withstand her pressure. I’d buckle and let her, so I haven’t said anything yet. I’m not giving her the opportunity to intervene. Only two people know, and one is you.” He smiled again. “It’s nice to see you happy.”

He could tell that I was, since I was smiling back at him. “I’m glad you told me about it. It does feel like a bond.”

“Because it is. Talk to me more,” he encouraged.

“You want to hear more about me?” I thought. “Did I mention that I know how to make hard candy?”

“You need a special thermometer,” he said, so I guessed that I had already relayed that fact.

“There’s not much else.”

“There has to be. What were you like as a kid?” he wondered.

“I already told you. I was bad at reading but I could keep track of money. And I skied.”

“Because you like to be outside.” He sighed. “Right. Let’s get out of here, too. I’ll take you home.”

I got the feeling that I’d messed up, maybe badly. “Wait!” I said and he stopped walking.

“Yeah?”

“Um, there’s more.” What, though? I racked my brain and came up with something that Grant had thought was ridiculous. “I didn’t learn to ride a bike until I was twenty.”

“Why?” he asked as he sat back down.

“I guess it’s that I’m…well, Grant said that I was a…

he used a word that I don’t like too much, and he said that I had to learn.

I did.” I brushed my fingers over the top of my knee where I had a bumpy scar from some gravel I’d fallen on that day.

But the stripes from the self-tanner were gone so it showed less, and that was optimism. “Um, also, I dislike my last name.”

“Mack?” he questioned. “I like it. It sounds tough.”

“No, it always makes people think of that rhyme, which I’m not going to say and I don’t want you to, either,” I added quickly as I saw his eyes light up. “My middle name is Olympe, after an eighteenth-century French feminist.”

“I’m Levi Wallace,” he answered, pointing to his chest. “Wallace was my grandfather’s name.”

“That’s nice to have a family name. I don’t share one with anybody, except for famous and semi-famous people who don’t relate to me at all.”

“You shared a last name with your mom,” he said, but I shook my head. “Mack is from your dad?”

“She made up the whole thing. Mack is the surname of an early twentieth-century blues singer. My mother spent a lot of years doing research into her life but she never learned very much, and she was never able to publish anything. She gave me that woman’s name to honor her since there wouldn’t be a book. ”

“That’s unusual,” Levi said.

“It made sense to her but it made problems for me,” I said. “And now, that’s really it.”

“Wait a minute,” he told me. “What kind of problems?”

So I had to get into that story a little, about how I’d been born at home and my mother hadn’t registered my birth and then, when she had, she hadn’t put either my father’s name or her own real name, and she’d created a new surname for me on top of all that.

“She didn’t put her own name on your birth certificate ?” he asked, a lot of emphasis in his words.

“She didn’t believe in that kind of thing, like official documentation,” I explained. “There’s a long passage in one of her books about the patriarchy of paperwork.”

“I thought you didn’t read her books.”

“Oh, no, I read all of them,” I corrected. “I was her first editor, before she sent anything off to her publisher. I hated it.”

“But you did it.”

I nodded. “And that’s really all there is about me,” I told him. Thankfully, he gave me a break and started to talk about baseball. We ended up blowing off the rest of the day and even ordering dinner, an extravagance in which I didn’t often indulge.

“I have to go,” I finally said. I was very reluctant, but I had to. “I’m late with Coral’s food and she’ll be so nasty about it.”

Levi nodded and showed me his phone. “Hernán has been texting me, too,” he said. “He got concerned that the girl in the white Porsche might have done something to you, since you’re never away from home for so long.”

Thinking of someone’s home reminded me that I was going to search property records to see where Vivienne and Lance had moved, after I made up the work that I hadn’t completed today.

It didn’t really matter where they lived—it didn’t really affect my life at all.

But I wanted to know because something was going on, even if I didn’t quite understand it yet.

Levi drove me back to my apartment. “Thanks for coming over,” he said when he walked me up the two steps to the door.

“Thank you for everything,” I replied.

“We split the bill for the pad Thai and the curry.”

I hadn’t been referring only to our dinner.

This had been so fun, such a good day, even if it had started strangely with Vivienne’s appearance at this building.

I didn’t want it to end but I also didn’t know how to make it continue.

I couldn’t invite him inside, since there was no place to sit and Coral was so unfriendly.

Maybe, I thought, I should invest in more furniture. It looked like I would need some!

On that happy thought, I said goodbye to Levi and went into the building, and I stood at the front door to watch through the glass as he drove away. It was only then that Hernán, who was slow tonight, opened his own front door to see what was going on and talk about it.

And it turned out that he also had some big news of his own.

“He’s moving,” I told Coral a little later, but she couldn’t have cared less. She was engrossed in eating the dinner that had been late tonight. “He’s moving to Nevada to be close to his daughter.”

“I’ve told you that I was thinking about it,” he had claimed after he cornered me in the hallway.

But he must have done so in Spanish because it was news to me that he wanted to leave.

He said that he’d been considering the idea for a long time, ever since his daughter picked up and went west. “You and I talked about it so many times,” he’d insisted.

“I gave my notice to the property manager so, I’m really doing it!” he had also said tonight, a huge smile on his face. “And now I’m asking myself why I didn’t act before. Why didn’t I go with her?”

“Maybe his daughter wanted to get away from him,” I suggested to Coral, who continued not to give a crap. “No, that’s not right, though. They talk all the time. They talk even more than he talks to me.”

That had been a lot, starting on the first day that I’d moved in.

He had come out of his apartment to introduce himself and see if I was ok, since he’d spotted my limp and my snail-like pace.

I’d been dizzy and exhausted—not ok at all.

So he’d helped me go out to the curb and carry up the garbage bags of my clothes and the box of my mother’s papers, and he’d worried about where I was going to sleep that night since he noticed that I didn’t have any furniture.

Later, when I’d been sitting on the floor of my living room and crying, he’d come by again with a blow-up mattress that he claimed to have found in his closet, unused and in a box that had never even been opened.

“He’s a good neighbor,” I told my cat. She looked up at me, but only to hiss.

“He never plays loud music and he doesn’t smoke, not cigarettes or pot.

He doesn’t have tons of people over and he doesn’t ever block the hallway.

I loved the house that Grant and I had rented, but we did have a guy next door who liked to start his truck each morning at five-fifteen and then let it idle in the driveway for half an hour to forty-five minutes, right next to our bedroom window.

Hernán has never been an inconsiderate neighbor and you never know who might move in after he leaves. ”

I looked at the door, thinking about that.

I hadn’t minded when he’d come out onto the front steps with me.

At first, I had been annoyed at the intrusion, but then I’d gotten used to it.

I didn’t mind that he kept trying to teach me Spanish, either, although it was increasingly obvious that I was never, ever going to learn very much.

He’d been nice to me after knowing me for only a few minutes, when people like Vivienne had disappeared after I’d spent five years of my life with them.

People like her and people like Grant, too.

I didn’t go to bed in the pleasant mood I’d expected, and I woke up the next morning with the same general unhappiness. Hernán had invited me to come over for breakfast, and the scent of something delicious already permeated my front door.

“That’s another thing,” I told Coral. Despite hating me and constantly plotting her escape, she chose to sleep on the pillow next to my face and I’d woken up with her staring daggers.

“What if the person who rents that apartment likes to cook cauliflower all the time? That smells terrible. Or what if they make microwave popcorn? Not only will we smell it, but we’ll hear the popping, too. ”

She reached to bat at me and I jerked away. I had to get up and get dressed, since I was expected across the hall.

“Emerson, buenos días ,” Hernán greeted me. “You can remember that it’s ‘ buen-OS ’ because you open your mouth wide like an O when you yawn in the morning.”

“What?”

“ Entra ,” he ordered. “ Bienvenida a mi piso . Huele muy bien , ? verdad ? He cocinado churros y chocolate . Es un desayuno típico en Espana …”

He kept going, but the only thing I’d understood was that we might be having chocolate this morning, and that was ok with me.

It turned out to be in the form of a thick drink into which we dipped sweet fried bread, and it was delicious.

The whole time we ate, he talked to me in Spanish and I didn’t understand.

It was good that he didn’t expect an answer, because I was busy filling my mouth.