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“H e’s perfect. Aren’t you?” Her voice was high and singsongy. “Aren’t you perfect?” She said a lot more mushy, silly nonsense and kissed his tummy a few times.

Baby Balderston stared back at his mother, totally unimpressed. I swore, if he’d been capable of raising his middle finger? He would have done it. As it was, he couldn’t even get his tiny hand into his mouth as hard as he tried, but I liked that he had standards for conversation.

“He’s an angel,” Miss Gail agreed. She had told me that I should call her by name, without the “miss,” but I was unable to do that now. “May I hold him?” she suggested.

Iva reluctantly let go of her child and Miss Gail removed two of the three blankets that covered his little body. He immediately looked a lot less grumpy. They had already set the heat at seventy-five in this condo, and it was still very nice outside. I was roasting, and I hadn’t been triple-wrapped like baby B. Miss Gail had said that she herself didn’t feel it, since she “ran cold,” and I was pretty worried about how she’d do here in the winter. But she would probably be going home to Georgia soon enough. Her knee and hip were a lot better and she was close to only needing a cane for a mobility aide.

I wondered if she was thinking about a departure but I didn’t want to ask in front of Iva. Since she’d brought home baby Balderston—at least, since she’d brought him here to Tyler’s condo, she’d leaned a lot on Miss Gail, who didn’t seem to mind in the least. Anyway, we had other things to discuss right now.

“I was going over all guys on the offense to decide who should be Tyler’s friends, and I have a few names picked out,” I announced. When they didn’t immediately respond to that, I prompted, “Do you want to hear who they are?”

“First, I’d like to hear why you’re picking out friends for him,” Iva volunteered. “How about we start there?”

“Ty always struggled with that and I was always so sorry that he couldn’t stay somewhere longer and let friendships happen naturally,” his mom said, and seemed distressed.

“It’s going to happen now,” I assured her. “He’ll be a Woodsmen for the rest of his career, so these relationships will be keepers.” He would be staying orange, because the team’s front office made good decisions. They’d signed the amazing Tyler Hennessy, hadn’t they? And he was making them glad that they had, every time they looked at his stats.

“I’ll ask you again,” Iva said. “Why are you trying to pick Tyler’s friends?”

“Because I know all of these guys,” I answered. “Who else puts as much time into studying the Woodsmen as I do?”

“You haven’t done that lately. You’ve been so busy helping me,” she said and sniffed, but before she could cry, Miss Gail asked her to come help with a diaper change. They’d put a second table with supplies right here in the living room, and I hoped that it didn’t bother Tyler. Sometimes there was a smell…

While they worked on the baby’s tiny butt, I was busy with my list, and I was also busy reading an email I received from the human resources division of the calculator company. I had already foreseen this outcome: I was fired, which I was aware that I deserved because I was much better at diagnosing my own deficiencies as a calculator tech than I was at fixing the problems with those devil machines. I had other ideas for the future, anyway, so I wasn’t too worried about the email.

And it was time to go down to the trailer, back to my other job. That was where I was when Tyler came home from the stadium. He made a big show of opening and closing the door a few times, then looking at me with his eyes narrowed.

“Yes, Mr. Holmes,” I said. “As you’ve discovered, I’m not locking it.”

“After what just happened with the villanelle guy, you should be.” He sat in his chair and reached for the cards, shuffled and dealt me a hand. “Iva just texted that you’re trying to plan a playdate for me.”

“I’m never telling her anything, ever again,” I announced. “No, it’s not a playdate. I’m trying to connect you with your teammates and first, I had an idea that you might want to have a party. But Iva won’t want people in that hothouse with baby Balderston. Ante up.”

Tyler pushed over a paper clip, a big one because this was a high-stakes game. “Last night, he fell asleep on me, skin to skin. I think he liked hearing my heartbeat.”

I imagined doing that myself, and decided that I would like everything about it. “But he’s not really ready to be a fun guest,” I said, and Tyler agreed and gave himself two cards.

“Tell me why I would I have a party.”

“To be collegial. You know, nice,” I answered. I pointed to the deck. “I’ll take one.”

“You’re going to win. I already know it,” he said, and frowned. He wasn’t a sore loser, but he didn’t really enjoy it.

“Because of the limitations in your condo, a party is out,” I continued. “I made a dinner reservation for you instead, for tomorrow night.”

“What?” Tyler asked. He was focused on his hand and tossed another bet onto the pile. “I raise you a clip.”

I saw his bet with a safety pin and raised a rubber band. “I said, I made a—”

“No, I heard you just fine,” he interrupted. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about. I call. Two of a kind.”

I also laid out my cards. “That’s a straight, which beats your hand,” I said helpfully.

“God damn it, tomorrow I’m bringing my own deck, and we’ll see how you do with those.” He picked up my cards, shaking his head. “Who am I supposed to be going to dinner with?”

“You can pick from a list of people. I considered the Woodsmen offense, and I narrowed the possibilities down to five. It’s based on your personalities.” I held out my phone. “Take a look.”

He did, very briefly. “There are more than forty guys on our offense. How the hell do you know all their personalities?”

“I study how they play and I watch them on the sidelines. I listen to their interviews and read whatever I can,” I explained. “I look their social media, I look at their girlfriends’ and wives’ and exes’ posts, I find out at what other players say about them.”

“That doesn’t mean very much,” he disagreed. “If you did that about me, what would you think?”

Probably nothing good. Shay Galton’s recent pictures had been mostly sales pitches for different products and had contained enough nudity and sexual content that several of them had been removed. In interviews, Tyler was very quiet and hard to read, and if you had believed what the other Seal players had said about him, then you wouldn’t have liked him at all.

And you really would like him a lot. “If you think I’m wrong about them, choose other guys instead,” I encouraged. “But take a look at my list.”

He did. “Yeah, he’s not bad.” He was pointing at the first name there, the guy who was the second-option wide receiver.

“Great!” I said happily. In my brief interactions with Santiago at Fan Day, I had always thought he was nice. His wife was a former Woodsmen Wonderwomen cheerleader, so I already knew all about her, of course. “That’s a good choice. I’ll send you the restaurant information and you can ask him to go this afternoon, at your practice.”

“Do I have to give him flowers or make a cute sign, like asking a date to prom?”

“Did you really do that for your prom date?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine how excited that girl must have been.

“I didn’t do a sign, but I did give her a rose. She said yes,” he answered, but that was obvious. “Did you go?”

“Shockingly, I did. For some side money, I was tutoring a guy who had just moved to our town from Portugal, and we went together. First, we had eggs and pancakes that I made for a special ‘breakfast for dinner’ prom meal that we shared with my dad, and then we drove separately because Jo?o was hoping to run into the girl he actually liked and he thoughtfully suggested that I’d need to find my own way home. It was nice of him to mention it,” I said, “because I couldn’t have afforded a rideshare to my house, and none of them would have wanted to drive that far, anyway.”

“Did you have fun?”

“Not really,” I confessed. “Back then, I was also working at a marina and the day before, I had dropped a small anchor on my foot. I wasn’t too excited about dancing, and I didn’t have people to hang out with once my date hooked up with his girl. Did you have fun at yours?”

“As we tried to leave the hotel where they’d held it, my car wouldn’t start, so I popped the hood to look around. My date leaned over to see what I was doing. But she was drunk and she made herself dizzy. She threw up into my engine,” he said. “She had already lost her phone at a pre-party we’d gone to so she wasn’t answering her mom, and she obviously wasn’t at that location when her dad and big brother went to find her. They were driving around looking for her, and when they saw her lying in the back seat of my car with puke all over her dress, they tried to kill me. They had brought baseball bats.”

“Good grief!” It was much worse than mine, because Jo?o was really nice and had walked slowly so that my bruised foot and I could keep up with him. “Did you fight them?”

Tyler shook his head. “It was one of those times that it was smarter to run, and neither of them could keep up with me. I don’t think I’ve ever gone much faster than I did when I left my screaming date in that parking lot.”

“I don’t understand the thing about trying to prevent people from having sex on prom night,” I mentioned.

“Yeah, that ship had sailed a few weeks before, and I wasn’t going to touch her when she was drunk. I never talked to her again, actually. It was hell to clean the engine bay and I had to change all the filters, too,” he reminisced. “High school was hell in general.”

“You had good luck with girls, though, romantically,” I mentioned, and he nodded to acknowledge that. “You just weren’t good at making friends, and here’s your chance to change things around.”

“Why do I need to do that?” he sighed. “I’m fine how I am.”

“‘Fine,’ like your ankle is ‘fine?’” I asked. “If you’re so ‘fine’ by yourself, then why did you have me come to that lunch at the practice facility last summer? Why were you paying me to help you?” He didn’t answer, so I provided my own response. “Because you wanted to have a friend. You were paying me to be around, because you were lonely.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, it’s not! Listen, I know how it is to be on the outside,” I told him. “With my haircut, the rumors that Cody spread about my malformed female organs, and all those insult couplets I threw around myself, only one girl in the school would talk to me. She played piccolo and she was nice because she was involved in a lot of community service, so she took me on like I was one of her projects. Like, I was the same as painting over graffiti or picking up trash on the side of the road.”

“You couldn’t have been that bad,” he said.

“I was,” I assured him. “And being alone all the time was terrible. When my dad got sick, I really could have used friends, but I didn’t have anybody to turn to. Now, of course, I’m too busy to need anyone, but—”

“Bullshit,” Tyler repeated. “What about Iva?”

“She’s my boss,” I answered.

“That’s it? Because never, not in any of the jobs I’ve ever had, did I go out on a limb for someone like you did for her. You dropped everything to help her out.”

“Well, that’s what you do when…ok, Iva and I have developed more than just a boss and employee relationship.”

“And what about my mother? You two are texting, talking on the phone. I heard her telling you that she wanted to do your hair.”

“I like her a lot,” I admitted.

“And what about me?”

“What about you?” I asked cautiously. I wondered if he would say something regarding last Saturday night on my creaky bed; we had seen each other a few times since, but I hadn’t brought it up, and neither had he.

“I come in here almost every day to play poker and shoot the shit,” he said. “I send you all those funny jokes.”

“Those aren’t very funny.”

“They’re hilarious,” he told me. “Isn’t that a friendly thing?”

“Well…”

“Well, yes, which is why I don’t need to go out to dinner with any of my teammates,” he leaned back and folded his arms, looking smug. “I won,” his posture told me.

“I’m not playing poker anymore until you say that you’ll ask out the wide receiver.” I folded my own arms over my chest. “I’m not touching those cards. And I’ll tell Iva that you would like the heat turned up at night, too.”

“Please don’t do that. I’m already sleeping naked because it’s so hot. If she sets it any higher, I’m going to have to put ice packs on my body.”

I blinked as I imagined sliding a clear cube around his pecs, outlining every square abdominal muscle, and moving it down—

“Fine,” he sighed. “Fine. You deal, and I’ll text him.” He got out his phone and typed. “Done,” he announced after a moment.

“I want to see,” I told him, and took the phone. “Wait a minute. You wrote, ‘You and your wife should come out with me and Kasia.’ I’m not going.”

“Yeah, if I have to, so do you,” he said. “I know you don’t have class tomorrow night, so it will be the four of us.”

My classes might not have been happening after tomorrow, anyway—but the problem was that the way he’d written his text was misleading. “You didn’t say who I was,” I pointed out.

“I said ‘Kasia.’ They’ll meet you and put your name to your face.”

“No, that’s not what I meant,” I started to explain, but the radio on my desk suddenly crackled and then beeped.

“What is that?” he asked.

“It’s Oren,” I said. “I finally got him to carry his walkie-talkie.” I picked it up. “Oren, did you just roger beep on purpose?”

It beeped again and Tyler looked at me. “Does that mean yes, or no?” he asked, and I wasn’t sure. I needed to go find out what was wrong so I wasn’t able to finish our conversation about his friendly dinner. The message he had sent about “me and Kasia” definitely gave the wrong impression, one that I was sure he hadn’t meant to convey.

But it wouldn’t have been so bad to eat out, I thought. I would just need to prep everything at home so that my dad was ok, and then I’d be able to enjoy myself. He and Miss Gail were walking together tomorrow, which meant I would go home after my meeting with the college registrar to pick him up, and then I would drop him off at the condo complex and work there. Before that meeting, I had an interview for another administrative job, because I’d been expecting that email from the calculator company human resources department. This new position would give me more hours and also, more benefits. If I got it, then I wouldn’t have time to do a second job during the day, like selling snow shovels in July or troubleshooting calculator problems that I didn’t understand. I wouldn’t work at the condo complex anymore and I also wouldn’t have time for classes. It was for the best.

But first? Oren. I roger-beeped him right back, following the noise until I found him. He stood in the shadows near the door of the unit where the guy had the treasure chest, the one full of prescription drugs.

“What’s up?” I asked, and he pointed to a mess on the pathway. “What is all that?”

He still didn’t answer, but I could see for myself. It was a pile of pills and an empty amber bottle, with the white safety cap lying in the sparse grass nearby. I picked it up and read the name of the resident whom I’d advised to dispose of all that extra medication.

“It looks like he dropped these,” I mentioned. “I’ll take a picture and send it to him, so he can get a refill or something.”

Oren stared at me.

“What?” I asked, but he only shrugged a little and walked off. “I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me.” He kept going, and he still didn’t respond. “Please clear the drain on the east side of the parking lot,” I called, but he had disappeared behind one of the high hedges that separated one unit from the next.

I hadn’t told anyone about my upcoming meeting with the registrar or about my job interview, for various reasons. My dad would have been upset, Iva would have blabbed, Tyler would have been mad, and Miss Gail would have asked me if I was sure. I wasn’t, not at all. But I had to do something, didn’t I? Wasn’t that obvious, after everything happened with Iva? And it was like I could see my dad slipping farther away…so the next morning was serious, and I needed to sleep well that night. But as I lay in my bed, my thoughts raced and the mattress poked, and I couldn’t.

Besides my lack of sleep, other things went wrong the next day. The back of my car fell off and I didn’t notice, so I had to waste tons of time finding it and wiring it on. While I’d done that, I got grease on the skirt of my best outfit, and that wasn’t looking great, either. Kind of ratty, actually, because I had been wearing it a lot. The meetings were nerve-wracking, too—it was my future that was at stake, as well as my father’s. Was I messing it up or making it better?

So, by the time I got my dad and walked him up to Tyler’s condo, I was a bit of a mess. He happily went to see baby Balderston, since it had been a few days, but Miss Gail stayed with me and seemed concerned. She never looked anything but perfectly turned out (like, even for a walk, her makeup was on point), and she was startled by my appearance.

“Baby, what are you wearing tonight for your dinner?” she asked me, and I saw her eyes quickly flick to the grease stain. It probably wouldn’t come out in the wash, but the worst part was that it had happened on the way to my job interview. I’d had to keep my hand or arm covering the upper part of my thigh and it had been an awkward position to hold as we’d walked and they’d asked their questions.

I also looked down at myself and felt underwhelmed. “I know it’s not great, but this is my best outfit, and I don’t have time to go home and get something else. And honestly, I don’t have any extra money for gas.” I lowered my voice. “We’re going to see the nutritionist because my dad listens to him, and I have to pay for that. It’s fine,” I assured her, because she was looking even more concerned. “There’s just not enough for extras right now.”

“We’ll think of something for tonight,” she told me. “Don’t worry.”

I went back to the condo after I’d put in my hours at the leasing office, which was an experience that was more fraught than usual. The guy with the pharmaceutical treasure chest had flipped out about the spilled pills that Oren had come across on the ground, insisting that he hadn’t dropped them, and that he had heard our complex was overrun with raccoons.

“I bet they stole that snowblower that went missing!” he accused.

“No, absolutely not. No raccoon could have carried—”

“They’ve been in my home!” he told me furiously, pounding a feeble fist on my desk. “I’ve seen their eyes.” He glanced around us, checking the trailer for more trash pandas.

“Don’t hit my desk, and don’t raise your voice,” I told him, and he apologized. I managed to calm him, kind of, and got rolling on the rest of the work for the day. When I was finally done and went back to the condo, Iva and my dad were gone—she had taken him in her car, without me noticing, for a haircut.

“Really? I usually do it at home,” I said. I hadn’t exactly told my dad how stretched we were this month, and I wondered where they’d gone and how much it would cost.

“Iva had a coupon for a big discount. He was looking a little shaggy,” Miss Gail said, and I knew that was true. I did my best with haircuts but I wasn’t overly successful. “I wanted to get her out, too, so Jerry and I came up with a plan. They’ll bring home dinner, and that’s my treat.” She smiled at me. “Now it’s your turn! Bring that baby in his bouncy seat and come on into my bedroom. We already laid out your wardrobe choices for tonight.”

“My what?” I asked, but I followed her.

Tyler got home and took over the care of baby Balderston while she was dressing me, like she would have done for a doll. In fact, she told me that she’d loved to play with those when she was a little girl and she’d always wished for a daughter.

“Of course, not all girls like doing this,” she said. We’d been in the bathroom for what felt like hours to do hair, makeup, and nail stuff.

“I don’t mind it,” I said. “You did a very good job with what I had.”

“You were good to begin with,” she told me, but she’d made my hair look shinier and neater, with the almost-black waves tamed to be less…less than usual, tamped down and controlled. She’d also made my skin look like it had never had a blotch before, and my eyes seemed bigger and bluer.

“I like it a lot,” I told her. “Thank you. I can’t believe how much work you put into me.” I turned my head and checked other angles, and I could easily tell that she had done a much better job than I ever had on my own, in the quiet of the night after my dad had gone to bed and I practiced in front of the bathroom mirror. “I don’t know if I could do this every single day,” I commented. “It takes a lot of time.”

“You don’t have to. I love the way you look without all this, but it doesn’t hurt to do more when you feel like it,” she answered. She looked at me in the mirror and nodded as if she felt satisfied with the outcome, and I looked back at her. Miss Gail wasn’t as tall as her son but she stood a few inches above me. She had his dark blonde hair, too, but her eyes were blue. “Ty never let me play too much with his hair, but he used to let me do his toenails. He has beautiful feet.”

“I know,” I agreed. I’d noticed how nice they were, but I hadn’t seen any polish on him. “You gave him some good genes to work with.” I thought about his hazel eyes, so different from hers.

“Some women might be concerned about what came from the other side,” she mentioned. “He must have told you some about his father, since you knew that we’d been on the run for all those years. But Tyler’s not like him. He doesn’t have that mean streak. I met his dad when I was fifteen and I saw it then, but I thought…” She didn’t finish.

“I was basically bananas when I was younger,” I said. “I met a terrible guy too, and I would have stuck with him if I’d had the chance. I also thought I was the next Emily Dickinson, and I’m embarrassed to admit that out loud. I even believed that my mom would come back. Isn’t that silly? I pretended to myself that she wasn’t actually dead.”

“Oh, baby,” Miss Gail said. She put her palm over her heart.

“I got over it by the time I was about ten,” I assured her. “But I used to tell myself that for some reason, she’d gone to Europe for a while. I used to look up pictures of Poland and imagine that she was there, and a few times, I wrote letters and I really mailed them. I say, ‘Dear mayor of Gdańsk, please tell my mom to come home to me and my dad.’ I thought that she’d be back someday and we would be a family again.”

“Come here, Kasia.” She hugged me hard, regardless of all the work she’d done on my hair and face.

“It’s really ok, now,” I said, to make her feel better. “I’m good, and so is your son. I don’t see any mean streak at all in Tyler. When he fights and acts like a booty hole, it’s not because he’s a bad person.” I had other ideas about his booty hole behavior, some of which he’d already admitted to me.

She let me go and smiled, but she blinked away tears, too. “I’m glad you agree,” she said. “I’m very glad. Come on, we don’t want you to be late.”

Tyler was ready and waiting in the living room with baby Balderston. “Wow, Kasia,” he said when I walked out. “Where’d you find that getup?”

“My clothes? They’re Iva’s.” She had lent me the skirt, which was a little shorter on me than it was on her, and the shirt which Miss Gail called a “top.” It was kind of tight and dipped a little lower than I was used to, since all of my own tops covered my collarbones. “Your mom did my hair.”

“You made it flatter,” he remarked to her, and they discussed various products as he handed over the baby. He must have gained a lot of knowledge due to living with Shay Galton, who’d moved a box of hair stuff to Michigan that was so large, it wouldn’t have fit into the trunk of my car. Nothing else would either, not at the moment. When I’d gone home to pick up my dad, I’d tripled down on the wire and the trunk was permanently closed.

Yes, she had made my hair less frizzy and more controlled, and she’d given me a slight trim because apparently, I had some split ends. I had eventually switched from my dad’s barber to a stylist who was more familiar with women’s cuts, but I couldn’t remember that woman’s name or where she was located, which told me it might have been too long since I’d visited her.

“Kasia has very nice natural body,” Miss Gail said. “I wanted to, um, compress it a little so we could also see her fine bone structure.”

But Tyler’s eyes were on the rest of my body, which felt quite exposed. I didn’t feel cold, because it was so hot in this condo, but there was a lot more skin on display than was normal for me. It wasn’t bad, just different—and I didn’t mind how it had attracted his gaze.

We had to leave to make the reservation and I asked Miss Gail to text and let me know how my dad was, how he was for real, when he returned with Iva. I could track his location, of course, but he would probably only say that he was fine. I wanted to know the truth.

“I’ll tell you,” she promised, and Tyler and I went out toward his car.

“This can’t go too late,” I said. “I need to get my dad home at a normal-ish time.” What I meant was that we wouldn’t be able to linger over dinner, which was a shame because lingering was a better way to make friends—but he’d been the one to invite me tonight, so it was his own fault. I also meant that he’d have to drive a little faster, somewhere above the pace of a slug.

“My mom was looking into transport vans,” he said. “They have those up here, to get people around who aren’t able to drive themselves.”

“I know what you mean,” I answered. “They always told me about them when I took him to therapy, but I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Why?

“Because he doesn’t need them. I’m available.”

“Don’t you think he’d like to get out and around, without you?”

“No,” I answered plainly. “I can hardly pry him out of the house. Although, it wasn’t hard to get him to leave today.” He’d been ready and at the door, and he’d even called me to make sure that I gave myself plenty of time to pick him up so that we wouldn’t be late.

“You think you can do everything better,” Tyler said. “You told me that before.”

“What? No,” I repeated. “No, I didn’t say that!”

“You did,” he countered. “You told me that you understood how I was feeling about my mom’s surgery, that I’d want to take care of her myself because no one else could do it with the same love.”

“I mean, maybe that’s part of it for me,” I allowed. “I’m afraid of my dad being with some weirdo on the road, some guy who was just behind the garage smoking pot before he goes to pick up a load of people who are too frail to drive themselves. And then he would take corners too fast, and what if someone was on oxygen? That bus would go up in flames like the Hindenburg.”

“Has that happened around here?” He sounded shocked.

“Well, no,” I said. “But doesn’t it sound like it could?”

“It sounds like you’re afraid of something happening to your dad.”

“Yes, of course I am! But I also want him to get out and be more independent. I don’t know how to balance those things,” I admitted. “I got really upset when I heard that he’d left with Iva and I’ve been tracking them.”

“Let that go and have fun tonight on this date that you organized.”

“It’s not a date,” I corrected. “We’re not—”

“I meant between me and Santiago,” Tyler interrupted. “But do you also want to go out with me?”

“Is that a real offer?”

“What would you say?” he asked back.

“I would say, figure out your intentions and then bring some flowers and a cute sign,” I told him, and he smiled. We continued on our very, very slow way to the restaurant.