Page 30 of Except Emerson (Detroit ABCs #7)

“It’s ok,” Levi soothed her, and then he answered me.

“She swore that she didn’t, but the fact that it even sounded plausible made me realize that we had serious issues, worse than how much she hated the idea of my book, worse than how my sisters didn’t like her.

There was this time she got into it with Liv at a grocery store…

” He stopped again. “Didn’t your boyfriend do that for you, too? ”

“Grant? Are you asking me if he cheated? No!” I said, still too loud for Coral. She batted my hand and I moved it.

Levi shook his head. “Didn’t he look out for you?”

“No,” I repeated, but at a more appropriate level for the cat’s ears. “Grant was independent and…why are you laughing?”

“Because you’ve told me about all the shit you did for him. Not only did you get him a job and organize his money, but you organized everything else, too. You did the laundry. You did the grocery shopping, you paid the bills, you cleaned. You were the captain of the ship.”

“When did I tell you all that?” I asked, amazed.

“You told me gradually, in little bits and pieces,” he said. “You never want to say a lot, but I got dribbles of information and I remembered.”

I wondered if he wrote it down, like I did. “Ava said exactly the same thing about how I don’t talk, but I do. I talk all the time,” I defended myself.

“Hm.” He looked at me steadily. “Why would both of us say the same thing?”

“Because you planned it?” I suggested. “More likely, because you share much of the same gene pool and were raised by your parents in the same household. You probably share a lot of characteristics.”

“How dare you say that to me,” he stated. Coral climbed up his chest and cuddled into his neck on the other side of his body, so I had to sit closer to reach her again.

Was I really like that, secretive and tightlipped with information? No, I said plenty. But I already knew how people formed solid bonds of friendship. Levi had said it before: they shared parts of themselves.

“My mother didn’t watch me at all,” I volunteered. “She was busy because she had to support us, but she also didn’t like children very much. I was mostly on my own.”

“She didn’t like children?” he echoed, and I shook my head.

“No, she really didn’t. When I hear Ava talk about volunteering at her kids’ schools, I try to imagine my own mother doing that.

The bus picked me up for kindergarten and I don’t know if she was aware of where it took me.

I hardly remember spending any time with her, definitely not in the same way that Ava does.

She knows all about them, what they like to eat or their clothing sizes, for example. ”

“She and Jeff would notice, for example, if their offspring were having trouble decoding words,” Levi said, and that was also true.

My mother had not, but I hadn’t ever blamed her for it, or thought that it was strange…

it was a little strange that she had never read with me, since she was such a great reader herself and also an author.

“I just took her as she was,” I explained. “She didn’t like babies or children and we didn’t do much together. That’s all.”

“How did she meet your dad?”

“On an airplane when they were both flying from Detroit to Portland. She was going to a conference and he lived there. It was just a one-night thing,” I answered.

“Not even the whole night, because he zipped up his pants and left her hotel room to go home to his wife. I had always thought that she got pregnant as an experiment, like how she took LSD or how she lived on the streets of San Francisco for a while. But it turned out that I was a total mistake, and she regretted the decision to have me.”

“She said that to you?” He seemed confounded. “And how the hell do you know about your father running out of her hotel room after they had sex and about her using drugs? I can’t believe she told you that stuff.”

“I knew about some of the things she did because I read the articles and books she wrote. She spelled out her feelings about having a baby and raising me in her last book, Dimidiate . She also wrote about my dad in Dimidiate but what she said about him wasn’t true,” I said.

“Luckily, she had saved his emails in a special folder that held rejections from different publishers and also job rejections. I hadn’t realized that she’d applied to teach at a bunch of different colleges, but it didn’t work out. ”

“Wow. That was a lot to learn about your mom.”

“She was only human,” I noted. “We all have problems, but maybe I wouldn’t have saved those emails in the folder that I called ‘See You in Hell.’ I learned a lot about her past by reading all that, like how she’d never tried to get child support.

” When I had asked about applying for it, she’d always said that she’d gone to court but somehow failed, and then she’d refused to explain it any further.

But I had seen in the emails that she’d actually only requested money from my father and she’d only done it once.

She had never tried to do things legally and I’d assumed that it was due to her pride.

“I think I would have swallowed my pride if it was something for my child,” I mentioned aloud.

“Maybe she thought that she was handling everything all right without it. Was she?”

“Well, no. We struggled but I didn’t understand how much until I was old enough to notice what other kids were doing, like what was in their lunchboxes and the clothes and shoes they wore.”

“Did it bother you?” he asked.

I thought for a moment before answering again, “Well, no.I like things to be comfortable and I don’t mind if they’re pretty—I like that,” I admitted.

“Grant’s friends were very focused on their possessions and I never really understood why.

It’s just stuff…anyway, that makes me think of tomorrow night. Did you pick up your tux?”

“Ava was going to do it when she got her husband’s, and I’ll grab it from her.” He moved his hand away from Coral to take mine. “You don’t have to worry. I’m not going to ask you anything else, or try to make you talk more.”

“I don’t care,” I said, but I was conscious of a distinct feeling of relief that we were done with that.

I asked him about his practice that morning and about the chances of taking Everly out in a boat, which she had been angling for.

We had more to unpack, too, and then we had dinner together in his new house.

“ Salud , neighbor,” Levi told me, and clinked his bottle to mine.

The next morning, I woke up early with plenty to do.

First, Coral and I had breakfast, and then I went for a walk.

I wanted to be loose for tonight’s reception where I assumed there would be dancing.

In preparation, I had been watching Swing Time and On an Island with You , among others, and I’d moved my coffee table to the side to try out some steps.

Grant hadn’t been a dancer, unless he absolutely had to do it, but I already knew that Levi planned to be out there and so did his sisters.

I wouldn’t be Ginger Rogers, of course, but I didn’t want to shame him.

I also needed to make sure my dress was set, my shoes were ready, and my makeup was non-expired. There was a whole lot to prepare.

But when I got back to our building, Ava’s car was in front, and she and her husband Jeff were waiting outside. “Thank goodness,” she called when she saw me. “Why doesn’t anyone answer their phone?”

I had left mine charging in my kitchen, since the battery had died the night before as I re-watched Top Hat in bed, and I assumed that Levi was still in his own bed because this was his one day to sleep in.

I started to explain those things to Ava, but she was on a rant about the buzzers being broken at this building—she seemed extremely upset by that, or maybe she was upset in general.

“I’ll unlock the door for you,” I promised, and looked at the empty seats as I passed by their car. “Where are your children?”

They were at home with Liv and her family, who’d driven down for the wedding. They were fine, but Ava wasn’t and Jeff wasn’t very happy, either. “I have to talk to Levi and fix this,” she stated as I let them in.

“What’s going on?” I asked Jeff, and he shook his head.

“We’re having a little problem with the tuxedos,” he answered. “Little, that’s the operative word.” He held up the garment bag in his hand and shook his head again.

“What’s going on?” Levi also asked as he opened the door to his apartment.

He looked pleasantly disheveled, like he’d just woken up.

I’d been watching the movie last night, which was one of the reasons I hadn’t been able to sleep.

Another was that I’d been imagining him just across the hall, lying there in his underwear or maybe naked—he’d put on pants now, though, and he told us to come inside.

“Get dressed. We have to go shopping,” Ava announced.

“What? No, I got them something off the registry,” her brother answered, then turned. “Hi,” he said, and smiled at me. “Were you already out walking?” I smiled back, feeling a warm glow of happiness.

“Levi!” Ava snapped, but then she inhaled deeply, and we all heard the sound that she made. It was like a whimper.

“Baby, it’s ok,” Jeff told her. “It is. Levi and I don’t care what we wear.”

“Yeah, Aves, whatever the problem…” Levi started to say, and she reached over and unzipped the garment bag in her husband’s grasp.

“Why do you have a toddler tuxedo?” I asked. “I thought no kids were allowed at this wedding.”

“Oh, damn,” Levi sighed. “Is that what I’m supposed to put on?”

She was searching in her purse with one hand and pulled out a napkin while Jeff answered. “There was a mix-up at the store and we got the wrong order.”