Page 20 of Except Emerson (Detroit ABCs #7)

I made myself ignore it. I would not check my phone to see the time, not again, because lateness was normal for most people.

I’d certainly gotten used to it while I was with Grant—not exactly “used to it,” because it had never ceased to upset me, but I’d come to terms with the fact that he was just not as punctual as I was.

“Not everyone has a clock shoved up their ass,” he’d let me know on many occasions.

“That’s disgusting and all it takes is glancing at your phone to know that you have to hurry,” I’d let him know right back.

He done a lot of glancing at it, pretty much constantly, but that hadn’t helped with his timeliness.

He looked at it even while driving, even after he’d gotten into a fender-bender because he’d been texting and had been distracted.

He just had so many friends to keep up with, that was the reason.

Despite my attempt to change my attitude, I still felt that people who were late were showing that they didn’t care about you.

They were saying, “I have more important things than my commitment to you. I’m doing them while you sit there and waste your time, which isn’t as important as mine.

” And sometimes, that was true! For example, Ava was probably late today because there was a problem with one of her children, or because something had happened with her job.

Levi had told me that she had a lot of responsibility at her firm and that the place might have gone up in smoke without her.

It was likely that there was a figurative fire that she’d needed to put out, and it was why she wasn’t yet here at this restaurant.

I didn’t have to check the time again anyway, because suddenly, she came through the door and rushed over to the table where I waited.

“I’m so sorry,” she apologized. “I was running right on schedule.” But then she described an issue at work which had kept her from arriving promptly.

“I texted as soon as I could,” she also said, but I had been preventing myself from looking at my phone so I hadn’t seen it.

Her lateness wasn’t the only reason that I’d been avoiding it.

I could see that there were a number of emails waiting, unread, in my inbox, and they were probably all bills or notices that I was overdue again.

I was aware that they would germinate and flourish just like mold, but I wasn’t ready.

I needed Hernán’s support, maybe. It was going to be hard when he wasn’t around to give it.

“It doesn’t matter that you’re late,” I told her.

“Yes, it does.” She seemed upset, which signaled that she hadn’t actually been thinking that she had more important things to do than to meet me.

“I hate being off schedule like this. I’m just…

” She stopped and I watched her take a breath, and she seemed to reset.

“This is fine. It’s a busy period of my life, but I can handle it with grace. ”

“You didn’t have to squeeze me in,” I told her. “I could have met you another day.”

“You know what? I’m a little tired of pushing everything I want into second place, or third, or fourth.

I came today because I wanted to talk to you!

What I didn’t want to do was volunteer this morning at the summer camp at the preschool, where they stuck me in the group with the kid whose parents never say the word ‘no,’ and then I didn’t want to deal with the intern at my office who…

” She stopped again, took a second deep breath, and shook her head.

“This is a busy, overwhelming time but I can be calm and flexible.”

“I guess, but it must be really hard to have a full-time job, a dog, three kids, and a house to take care of,” I pointed out. “Especially when you still think that you have to watch over Levi and your sister, too.”

“Well, Liv’s doing great, and I don’t worry so much about her anymore,” she answered.

That left her brother, though. “I think Levi is also ok. You know he got a new job, right?”

To my surprise, Ava didn’t seem very happy about that. “Yeah,” she sighed. “Yeah, he told me and I said congratulations.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“I just can’t imagine him sitting at a desk all day,” she confessed. “I picture him more as an outdoor guide. Has he told you how much he likes to hike?”

I thought about the walks we’d been taking, a few blocks every other day. “Um, no. How far does he go?”

Well, he had done the Appalachian Trail, for one thing, and he’d talked about trying the Pacific Coast Trail as well.

“Besides that, he’s always out for some kind of exercise.

And he’s always doing something creative, too,” she said.

“When he was little, he used to tell us stories that went on for hours. They didn’t always make sense but they kept us entertained. ”

“I thought that you wanted him to get a serious job.”

“That was what I kept drilling into him.” She picked up the glass of water near her bread plate and took a long sip. “Anyway, that’s enough about me and my brother. I didn’t really get to talk to you when you were over at my house.”

“Your mom asked most of the questions,” I agreed.

“So, here’s my chance,” Ava said, but then the waiter came over and I managed to get a little more of a respite from what I expected would be an interrogation, kind of like what had happened at her cocktail party when her mom had wanted to hear every detail of my life, no matter how useless or boring.

To my happy surprise, she went another direction. She started talking about a wedding that she would have to attend for her cousin, and what she would wear. Apparently, the dress code was extremely restrictive, not just for the wedding party but also for guests.

“Demanding that we all wear jewel tones and then sending out hex color codes seems excessive to me,” she said. “It’s going to be hard to find something! What do you think?”

“I think that’s very weird, but I never understood trying to tell people what colors they can wear,” I answered. “Why wouldn’t you want guests to pick what they wanted, so they feel good about it?”

“I agree,” she said, “but I meant, what are you going to wear to the wedding?

“Me?”

“Won’t you and Levi be going together?”

“Me?” I repeated.

“Because he has that plus-one,” she said, and took a bite of salad.

She then started to eat very fast. “I’m starving,” she mentioned.

“I didn’t have time to grab anything before I volunteered at the camp, and then I had to get my tire fixed, and I had to pick up my dry cleaning so I would have something to wear to work. I changed in the back seat of the car.”

“It’s a good salad. What plus-one?”

He’d been invited when he was still with Mary Evelyn, she explained between forkfuls of lettuce. So Levi had RSVP-d “yes” for two guests, and that was what her aunt was expecting.

“He can just tell them how he broke up with that woman, so she won’t be attending,” I said.

“They already did the seating chart. Didn’t he talk to you about this? It’s our aunt Kellie’s daughter.” She raised her eyebrows when she spoke the last few words.

But I shook my head, since the name meant nothing to me.

“Aunt Kellie acts all holistic and wholesome, like she’s so serious about compost and she bakes her own dog treats, but she’s not really a nice person on the inside. She makes Levi feel terrible about his lack of progress.”

“I think he’s fine,” I defended him. “He has a job now and he’ll be renting his own apartment. He’s doesn’t do anything crazy, like carry a piece.”

“What?”

“He doesn’t have a gun,” I translated. I’d been up late the night before, watching The Maltese Falcon . “He’s not a criminal, that’s what I’m saying.”

“No, he’s not. She’s mean, though.”

“So he needs a stand-in for Mary Evelyn? To protect him from your aunt?”

“Not really to protect him,” Ava replied. “I just wanted a person to have his back. You know, if anyone said something nasty, his plus-one would tell him that it doesn’t matter.”

I also took a drink and captured a piece of ice, and I swished it around my mouth with my tongue.

Levi had never seemed fragile, as if he needed protection.

But Grant had always told me that I was bad at reading the room.

Besides my clothing choices, it was another issue we’d had in our relationship.

“Why would you have talked about graduation?” he’d raged after I’d asked the girlfriend of one of his buddies why she hadn’t walked with the rest of her year. “She failed three classes this semester so she didn’t get her diploma. Nice to rub it in, Emerson.”

I had known that this particular girl had tutors for everything; the only reason I could imagine that she’d failed was that she hadn’t paid them, so they’d let her suffer the consequences.

But even I had seen that she was very upset when I’d brought it up, and I certainly wouldn’t have mentioned it if I’d been told in advance that it was a sore subject.

I’d apologized but Grant had considered that to be another symptom of a problem I had: my lack of understanding.

I also hadn’t understood why he’d needed a jet ski or a two-hundred-dollar haircut, or his new car, either.

After the accident, the vehicle had been declared a total loss.

Anyway, I was already aware that Levi had wanted to show Ava and the rest of his family that he wasn’t messing up, and that he was taking life seriously and was putting in effort.

Maybe he would react badly if other relatives asked intrusive questions and mocked him.

Maybe he would need someone there for him, and I could be someone.

But one issue did loom large in my mind: “He didn’t ask me to go to this wedding with him,” I pointed out to his sister.