Page 38 of Except Emerson (Detroit ABCs #7)

“H oly—” Ava glanced over at the kitchen table, where I sat with two of her children, and stopped herself from finishing the thought. When she began again, I thought she had altered the original syntax. “Holy cow, no. No, I’m not using this,” she continued, and shook her head. “It’s awful.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Levi looked at the computer. “I had just gotten a haircut, which you like, and I’m wearing a shirt with a collar, your other favorite thing. Emerson, this is good, right?”

I told Elliott to try to fit another puzzle piece without me, and I went to see what they were arguing over on Ava’s laptop screen.

“That picture looks like a mugshot, except without the lines for height painted in the background,” I said when I saw the image there.

“After Hernán and I found it the first time, he looked for your arrest record.”

“What?” Levi started laughing. “This is the picture I got for my passport, from when I thought that Mary Evelyn and I were going to move out of the country for a job.”

“How did it get online?” I asked.

“I updated my social media after we broke up,” he explained. “That’s the picture I used.”

“It was the saddest thing I ever read,” Ava said. “He told everyone that he was alone and living in my basement, with no job and no hope.”

“It was supposed to be funny,” he told us. “I guess this is the whole ‘I’m not a comedian’ problem again.”

“No, it was pretty funny,” she acknowledged. “It was funny but also depressing.”

“I probably could have used your app for therapy,” he mentioned to me. “I think I’m much better now.”

I studied him and hoped so. I hoped he hadn’t felt that there had been a strange, grey film over life, or maybe just over his eyes when he looked through them.

He didn’t act that way, as if everything was hard and exhausting, like it was just easier to stay inside and let the dulled-down world go on without him.

But I also knew that he was upset about August—

“Emerson,” Levi said, and took my hand. He pulled me closer until our bodies were touching. “I’m not actually sad. I’m fine.”

“Are you worried about him?” Ava asked. Her mouth twitched in an odd way and I stared at her.

“Yes. You are too,” I pointed out, and then I recognized what she was doing with her lips. She was trying to keep them from smiling and thus revealing that she was thrilled that I cared so much about her brother. “Don’t you have a big project to finish?” I asked, and she immediately frowned.

“Yes, I have to get this done so it can be printed. Levi, I’m going to need a better picture than your mugshot,” she told him. “Don’t you have anything that looks less carceral?”

“Aunt Memerson,” Elliott called from the kitchen table and waved a puzzle piece. “Help.”

His big sister immediately corrected his pronunciation. “Em-er-son,” she told him, and patted his head condescendingly. He tried to bite her.

“I don’t mind if you call me that,” I said, and made myself disengage from Levi.

When I sat back down, Elliott climbed into my lap and all in all, there was a lot of physical contact going on here.

I thought it was great. I didn’t mind when Everly leaned over look for more pieces and also leaned on me, and I planned to hold the baby, who was napping as his mom tried to finish this giant project that she’d embarked on.

Mr. and Mrs. Lassiter were coming up on their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary and Ava was planning a family party, one she’d assured us would have food.

She was also planning to present them with a memory book of their years together that would include recent pictures of their adult children.

That was where Levi’s mugshot had come in, and she was collecting other images from her sister, her brother-in-law, and—

“I’ll need yours, Aunt Memerson,” she mentioned. “Send me a few different pictures so I can play around with them.”

“What?” I swiveled so fast that I knocked two puzzle pieces on the floor and Woofy the dog almost got them before Everly managed to wrest them away. “Why?”

“She needs to put your picture in Grandma and Grandpa’s book,” Everly explained, and Elliott told me about wearing your nice clothes and not getting dirty until you had smiled and stood still, and then you were allowed to play with the dog as much as you wanted.

“That was for my last day of school picture,” his sister then explained to him, and she had a lot to say about posing and about how their baby brother had tried to escape, but she’d held onto him real tight.

“That’s true,” Jeff said as he came in with baby Ezra. “Grandma had to step in to save this little guy.”

Elliott decided that he was done with the puzzle and wanted to play with the dog, and his sister joined him. I needed to get going, too, because I had a meeting with a new client, but I did hold the baby for a moment before Levi walked me outside. “Sure you don’t need a ride?” he asked.

“No, you don’t have to chauffer me,” I told him. It was nice when he did, since we got to see each other more that way, but I didn’t want him to have to leave his family. “I’m only going to the coffee place where you and I met for the first time.”

“I look back on that day with fondness and shame,” he said, and jiggled his jaw in a way that looked a lot like a chicken drinking.

“It was memorable,” I answered. “It made me laugh after I left. I stood on the sidewalk cracking up.”

“Good, then I did better than I thought I had. Despite your concerns about my mugshot, I’m also doing well now.” That was also good. I leaned against his side and soaked up the closeness until my stopped at the curb and I had to disengage.

I was on time for the meeting at the coffee shop, but my potential client was a little late.

That was ok. It didn’t have to mean that she was inconsiderate, but maybe that she was as busy as Ava.

That level of industriousness also could have pointed to a successful business, one that needed my help.

Her schedule had been too full to meet with me during the week, after all, which was why I was waiting at this table on a Saturday.

Then a woman walked into the café and looked around, and when her eyes focused on me, her jaw dropped. She strode over quickly. “Pandora? Hi, I’m—” I started to say, but she was already talking.

“Oh, shit! This is crazy. It’s crazy!” she said, and stuck out her hand. “So good to meet you!”

“I’m Memer—Emerson Mack,” I responded, but she kept going.

“It’s crazy!” the woman repeated. “You look just like her.”

“What?” I asked, and then I saw what she had in her hand.

She carried a copy of Dimidiate , my mother’s final published work.

“What is that?” I asked. “I thought we were meeting to discuss bookkeeping—why do you have that?” No one had it.

It had sold about three copies and been panned by all the erudite reviewers, which was one of the reasons…

what was the reason that this woman was here?

The person who had called herself “Pandora” flipped over Dimidiate and pointed excitedly to the small picture on the back.

It was the publicity photo that my mother had used for everything.

In it, she wore glasses and a hat as a way to diminish her beauty, but it hadn’t worked.

I’d always thought that she looked like a model wearing a detective costume for Halloween.

“She wrote about you in this,” she told me. “Her approach to motherhood was fascinating. Don’t you think so?”

I didn’t agree and I didn’t understand. “Are you here to talk about my mother, and not your business?”

“I can’t believe I found you,” Pandora answered, swinging her head back and forth. “I looked for so long but it was hard because you had a different surname, and she was so deliciously cagey about the details of her life.”

“Deliciously cagey,” I echoed, and now she nodded excitedly.

“But she did mention the name ‘Emerson’ in that chapter about your birth, how she wasn’t thinking due to the pain and exhaustion, and how the midwife came up with it and she’d failed herself by submitting instead of fighting more against conventionality.

I wasn’t even sure if you were a boy or a girl or if you were dead, too.

I drove up north to look at her grave and it doesn’t say ‘mother’ on it, just ‘scholar’ and the dates of her life.

It’s a really small headstone,” she noted, and looked at me like she was waiting for an answer.

I was waiting for one, too, but unlike the situation with Vivienne, I believed that I had figured out at least part of this. “So, you’re a fan of my mother’s work, and you tracked me down and lied about offering me a job so that I would meet with you,” I stated.

“I did try to email but you never answered,” she said. “That was very rude, and also? I’m not just a fan. I’m a PhD student, an academic like she was.”

“I have nothing to say,” I announced, and stood up.

“Wait! Can’t you answer a few questions?” She stood too, and reached out like she was going to grab my arm. “Do you have any unpublished works? Do you have any of her papers? Did she leave a note?”

“No,” I said, just generally. I had to get away from here.

“Wait,” she repeated as I walked through the tables, and she followed me.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to ambush you, but this is vitally important.

It’s my dissertation! And I’m drawing a correlation between your mother and Virginia Woolf.

I mean besides the obvious, of course. The parallels between their lives aren’t quite as perspicuous as it seems and my dissertation certainly won’t be so facile… stop!”

I didn’t stop and continued out onto the sidewalk, where a cool wind augured the arrival of fall. I also didn’t respond to Pandora as she continued to talk about famous women of the past, all of them dead.