Page 35 of Except Emerson (Detroit ABCs #7)

I leaned back from the screen and blinked a few times, and then I rubbed my hip.

I’d been sitting in the same place and working for hours on the accounts of two clients, new ones passed along to me through my new contacts.

One was a bakery owned by a friend of Ava’s husband Jeff, and another was a burgeoning fashion enterprise run by one of the Curran sisters, Levi’s former neighbors who had taught him to dance.

Her finances were in perfect order but the bakery was a real mess, and it was taking me forever to get through everything.

In anticipation of that, the baker had dropped off a pink box of doughnuts and other pastries that I appreciated a lot. Levi would, too, when he got home.

That should have been by now, but I wasn’t monitoring him Hernán-style.

Levi was an adult and he had lots of friends and family members that he might want to hang out with.

Or maybe he was staying later at work to make a good impression so he would move faster up their corporate ladder, even though the job didn’t really interest him and made him frown.

So I wasn’t monitoring, but I did look at the time every now and then and wonder.

I definitely didn’t text to ask where he was.

I was fully aware of how people didn’t like you to be all over them, spamming them with messages.

Also, it was none of my business where he was because the relationship bonds we had didn’t give me any claim on him.

But I quickly swiveled when I heard a car in the street outside the building.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t the noise of his particular car.

This was a vehicle I didn’t recognize, but it was very nice—no, I did recognize it, I realized when I walked closer to the window to get a better look.

It was the white Porsche that had been here before, and I also recognized the woman who paused for a moment to check her hair in the rearview mirror, to apply lipstick, and then to examine her teeth before she opened the driver’s door and exited.

Vivienne was back.

“What is she doing here again?” I asked Coral, who meowed.

“I better go see before she has another fit about the apartment buzzers not working.” I paused as I thought.

“You know what? She can just stay there and whine! Hernán’s not around anymore to let her in and I don’t care if she’s on the steps all night.

She would never last, anyway. She won’t do for anything for more than a few minutes without getting bored and quitting. ”

Coral didn’t care, but she listened instead of hiding or sitting by the front door, tense and ready to escape. She hadn’t done either of those things in a while, which was a relief.

“Hello? Hello?” Vivienne’s haughty voice demanded from outside.

The knocking started, too, but I turned back to my laptop screen. “We’re ignoring her,” I told the cat, and now she did run away. I couldn’t blame her; the knocking had become pounding and these walls were pretty thin.

“Emerson?Open this and come out!Emerson?Emerson?Emerson!”

It went on like that for much, much longer than I expected.

The only other time I’d heard Vivienne carry on in a similar way was when there had been mushrooms on her plate when we’d been served our entrees at one of the nicest restaurants in Chicago.

The thing was, she’d ordered mushroom risotto, but then she’d also said that she didn’t eat carbs and made them take the whole thing back.

“Emerson!”

It was too loud. Now I knew some of the other neighbors on this street due to all the walks I was taking, and I was aware that they wouldn’t appreciate what Hernán would have called a jaleo on our doorstep.

He’d continued to try to teach me Spanish by sending voice memos and texts, and then I would practice the words with Levi. I seemed to be picking up a few things.

I went toward the bathroom to check myself in the mirror but halfway there, I stopped and shook my head. Instead, I swiveled went to open the front door.

“Finally!” Vivienne said. “I could have been mugged.”

I looked up and down the quiet, safe, residential street. “No, that wouldn’t have happened. What do you want now?”

“I can’t stand out here,” she answered, and she actually looked nervous about it.

“I’m not letting you in,” I told her. “The last time I did that, you wouldn’t leave. What do you want?”

“At least come sit in my car so I can lock the doors,” she said, and I hesitated but answered fine, ok. The sky had turned very dark and it looked like rain was coming, and there was no awning over these steps. Also, and despite myself, I wanted to know why she was here. Again.

First, she had to get all the exercise equipment out of the front seat to make room for me. She did that by gathering it into her arms and throwing it into the back, dropping a few resistance bands, a yoga mat, and earbuds into the gutter next to the car by mistake. I ignored all that and got in.

“Yes? Why are you here? Again?” I asked her when she joined me.

“You’re still here too,” she pointed out, and I saw that this conversation was going the same way that our last one had, directly into the Land of Incomprehension. I reached for the door handle.

“No! I do need to talk to you,” she said, but then she stared through the windshield and got a strange expression, something I’d never seen before on her face. Her eyebrows drew down and her full lips pursed together in an odd way. She brought her thumb to her mouth…was she biting her nail?

“You’ll probably see it anyway,” she said. “Maybe someone already told you.”

“Told me what?” I asked.

“Lance and I are getting a divorce,” she stated.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, given the longevity of many of the marriages in their friend group. But Vivi and Lance had been together before Grant and I had met, since their freshman year of college. I’d never seen any signs of trouble between them. “You are?”

She nodded, and fully bit her thumb nail. “You probably heard,” she suggested again.

“No, I haven’t been keeping track of you guys anymore. I’m sorry to hear it now,” I told her, because I was. It was too bad when a marriage failed. Even if I didn’t like either one of them, they had mostly seemed to like each other.

“His mom fired me,” she mentioned next.

Lance was employed by his parents’ company, and Vivienne had held some kind of position there, too.

She’d had various titles, like “social media liaison” and “chief décor advisor,” but I’d never had a good idea of what she did for them and I didn’t think that she had either gone to an office or worked from home.

“What does this have to do with me?” I asked her. “Why did you come here to share this information?”

“We had a prenup,” she said, which didn’t answer anything. “You know that Lance’s mom is a bitch.”

I knew that she was smart and that she was the one who really ran things in his family.

“So I don’t have a job and I guess I have to get one now.” She turned to look at me and the worry was gone from her face. It had been replaced by horror and dread.

“Have you ever actually worked before?” I asked curiously.

“I guess,” she said vaguely, which meant “no.” “I think I have to get a number,” she continued, and it took a few more questions before I understood that she meant a social security number. I didn’t bother to mention that she probably already had one.

But again, despite my better judgement, I wanted to know more. “Why can’t your parents help you?” I asked. Vivienne had grown up with money, so what was the problem now?

“My dad died last year,” she said, and I remembered it vaguely. I had seen it at about the same time that I landed in my apartment, with no furniture, no boyfriend, and an inbox full of bills. The information had barely registered but now I did feel sorry, and I told her so.

She waved her hand around a little and said, “Yeah, yeah. He left money and real estate and stuff to my mom and to his college, but there was nothing for me. She was supposed to share.” She sighed heavily, and I waited.

“Six months after he died, she married another guy she met at a hotel bar and they moved to Anguilla, then last week, she told me that her new husband took off for Brazil. She let him manage their lives like my dad used to and he stole almost everything. She’s poor now. ”

“Oh,” I said, finally understanding. “You need my services as a bookkeeper.”

“I’m not talking about reading, Emerson,” she informed me. “I don’t care how many books you keep around.”

I blinked. “Why are you here?”

She slapped the steering wheel in frustration. “Why are you here? Why are you going out again?”

“What?” I asked, and she grabbed her purse, a very beautiful bag that I hadn’t seen before, and started to rummage through it. “You know, you can sell that if you need money,” I suggested. “You can sell your clothes and shoes, too.”

Vivienne froze and then slowly turned to look at me.

“Are you crazy?” she asked incredulously.

“If I sell my clothes, what am I supposed to wear?” But then she nodded and answered her own questions.

“Right, you hit your head in the car accident and you don’t think straight anymore.

Here, look.” She thrust her phone in my face just as rain drops started to patter down onto the car.

She was displaying a picture of me and Levi on the dance floor at his cousin’s wedding, taken before the photographer had made her exit with the band.

I had my head tilted up to look at him and he was smiling down at me, total happiness on his face despite the hunger pangs I was sure he’d felt at that moment. In fact, we both seemed totally happy.

“I didn’t know the photographer used this picture. I didn’t even see her take it,” I mentioned. I had been wrapped up in thoughts of him.