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“H as anyone ever told you to go fu—”

“No-Kasia, you never used to talk to me like that. What put you in such a bad mood? You don’t think I’m funny anymore?” Cody asked me. He grinned. I didn’t remember ever thinking that he was funny, but I’d definitely thought he was handsome. I’d thought he was the best thing that had ever happened to me, too.

Not anymore. “Maybe I never said it, so let me tell you now to go—”

But again, I was interrupted, now by a bellowing horn. Cody went to the window. “Shit, I gotta get out of here. Until next time, No-Kasia.”

“Don’t call me that,” I said automatically. “What’s happening in the parking…no. Hold on,” I yelled, waving my arms as I ran outside. I certainly wasn’t trying to prolong the visit with Cody, who was backing out fast in his delivery van.

“You can’t drive in here! Stop!” But the three huge moving trucks I was hollering at went right past me without even slowing down and continued into our parking lot.

“They better hurry up,” I heard a woman say. “I’m not wasting my time with this shit.” I turned and saw her speaking into her phone and walking quickly in from the street. She wore tennis shoes instead of fur boots today, and her head was also bare of the fur hat. Instead of a long-sleeved, full-length unitard, she had on a bandeau top and little shorts, all in camo, and she looked so cute. She also looked like she’d accepted that it was summer even in northern Michigan, and she had dressed for it.

Shay Galton was back.

“Miss Galton!” I called to her, but she continued walking toward the condos without responding. Ok. I went to the first truck to confront the driver instead. “You can’t leave this here. How are you guys going to get out? How is anyone else supposed to use this parking lot?” I asked him. “The other tenants will be coming home from work soon and—”

He shrugged and walked away in the middle of that sentence. Now he was at the side of the trailer messing with a latch.

“No,” I said immediately. “No, no! Do not open those doors, because you can’t unload—” He opened them. “Ok, do not put down your ramp—” Too late.

I ran to the next truck and to the next, but I wasn’t the one paying them and they wouldn’t listen to me, the non-boss. So I went to Tyler Hennessy’s rental unit to find his girlfriend and make her understand.

She was in the living room, which was empty now of all our model-home furniture. “I’m at our new house!” she was saying brightly to her phone. “T and I are so excited to be here in Minneapolis together.” She talked for a while longer about what she was wearing and where she would be going next. Then she showed a bottle of serum that she was using to protect her skin against the cold weather, so she hadn’t totally accepted summer yet. Also, we were in Michigan.

I waited, trying to be respectful, but I got more and more anxious about the situation in the parking lot the longer she talked. Finally, she put down the serum and the phone and stopped smiling, and I stepped in.

“Miss Galton, you need to get those trucks out of here,” I stated. “You didn’t let me know that you were having them come today and they can’t stay like that, blocking everyone else.”

One of the moving men brushed past me with a large box. “Where do you want this?” he asked her, but Shay Galton went toward the bedroom, ignoring both of us. He shrugged and dropped it, but I followed her.

“Uh, Miss Galton,” I said. “As I emailed to Tyler Hennessy and as it also says in the lease he signed, we have specific times set aside for move-ins and departures. You needed to let us know forty-eight hours—”

“I’m peeing,” she announced, and I could hear that clearly because she hadn’t closed either of the double doors. In the other room, the guys continued to come in and out and drop more stuff. There was definitely the sound of something breaking, and I also heard them laugh.

“While you pee, can you listen to me?” I requested. “Because I need you to tell those movers that they—”

She walked out and right past me, pulling up her top to cover her breasts as she did. Good grief, they were gorgeous! And why had she bared them to go to the bathroom? I shook my head and followed again.

“Miss Galton?Shay!”

She stopped when I said her first name. “Why are you still here? I’m going to call the police on you,” she told me, and walked outside.

“The police?” I went too but got waylaid by an angry tenant from the next building who didn’t like the movers talking outside his window, and also, he thought there were quarters missing from the jar of change he kept in his closet…by the time I arrived at the parking lot, she was at the exit to the street, which was already blocked by a car. It was her ride, I realized, because she opened the passenger door and then got in, and the driver backed up fast. They were gone in an instant, leaving me with a holy mess.

Because soon enough, more tenants did start to arrive, and they wanted to use the lot that they paid for in rent and mortgages. The movers had emptied one truck and managed to back it out onto the street, which meant that there were only two gigantic vehicles in the way. It was slightly better but still not great, because they blocked several aisles and even with our paltry number of residents, there still weren’t enough spots for them. I tried to deal with the tenants while hurrying along the rest of the move as much as I could. This was a moment when it would have been so great to have Iva here, but I couldn’t call her and make her come in to deal with the chaos. She was supposed to have been resting, after all, not standing under the sun on a blacktop and yelling herself hoarse.

I was in the midst of trying to assure a man from Building B that no, the parking lot would not be blocked forever and to please, please temporarily leave his car in the street, when a yellow SUV slowly turned into the already crowded space.

And it honked.

“Really?” I hollered at the driver. I stomped over and he put down the window. “These are your moving trucks!” I told Tyler Hennessy. “This is all your fault, so don’t honk.” After I spoke, I realized that it probably wasn’t the appropriate tone or word choice, but it was too late, now. “Hello and welcome home,” I added, to mitigate. I tucked my hair behind my ears and smiled.

He stared at me for a moment through his stupid sunglasses and rolled up the window. He then backed up, angling his car sharply, and parked in the flower bed next to my office.

“No,” I started to tell him, but one of the moving guys tapped me hard on the shoulder.

“Where do you want the casket? Once we put it down somewhere, it’s staying.”

“The what?” I asked in shock. Eventually, I determined that it wasn’t actually a coffin, but instead a giant machine that did look a lot like a container for a body because it seemed like you were supposed to lie down in it (although between the moving men and me, none of us could figure out what it was meant to do). I certainly didn’t care where it went, as long as it was out of the way.

By the time I had finished sorting that out and had turned around to tell Tyler that he was absolutely not allowed to park there, he was gone. But his car was a problem I could deal with later, and luckily, Iva had been right about the landscaping company doing a bad job. The flowers that they had planted in that bed at the beginning of the summer were already very dead, so his mega-sized tires hadn’t really hurt anything.

I stayed in the parking lot to expedite and I had to give it to them: these guys were professionals and they worked fast. The other tenants were generally understanding that this had been a one-time inconvenience and accepted my offering of free t-shirts to soothe any ruffled feathers. The second truck left, and finally the third was almost empty, too. I accompanied the movers carrying the last load up to the unit so I could talk to Tyler about the fiasco he had created.

“It’s crowded in there,” one of the guys mentioned as we walked. “I’ve moved a lot of people and I’m telling you now, it’s not all going to fit when they try to unpack. It’s bad.”

It had seemed like a lot of stuff; this condo was one of our largest, but still, three trucks was more than I’d ever seen in my years working here. “It’s a four-bedroom unit,” I answered. “How bad could…”

I stopped when I got to the front door, because here was the answer to my question: it was a huge mess, horrendous chaos, confused havoc. It didn’t look like someone would be able to walk through or even that there was room for one more thing, but they squeezed in the last giant wardrobe boxes, and there was enough of a tunnel through the other boxes and stretch-wrapped furniture that I was able to enter, too.

They all looked at me without speaking and it felt like they were waiting. “We’ll divide the tip with the other guys,” the one told me, and I finally understood.

“Oh, hold on.” We’d started off fighting but they had done a good job and I thought they did deserve something, especially since I’d seen that Tyler Hennessy had recently been signed as one of the spokespeople for a German company that was marketing a new energy drink. He had plenty of money to give away, so I just had to find him.

There was another tunnel that seemed to lead to the bedroom, and I wound my way through. That room was equally crammed with the casket, boxes, chairs, dressers, and tables, but there still was not, as far as I could tell, a bed. I’d emailed Tyler when his lease began and told him that he was welcome to come, except that there were rules about moving in. I had reminded him of everything he’d agreed to in the lease (all the rules that he and Shay Galton had ignored today). Over the past week or so, I’d seen him coming and going in the parking lot, probably heading out to the Woodsmen practice facility and over to the stadium for meetings and visits with the trainers.

But without a bed, where had he been sleeping? And where was he right now?”

“Tyler?” I called. “Mr. Hennessy?”

“What?”

I followed his voice. The doors to the bathroom were still open, now because there were too many boxes in the way to close them. I made my way over, weaving around the casket and wondering again what it was and how they planned to use it. “The condo is in a lot of disarray but the movers are done and you’ll need to pay—sweet Jesus!”

Tyler Hennessy was in the big bathtub, which we’d had to replace after the last tenant moved out. It had been scratched and damaged to the point that it appeared that guy had been doing rock tumbling. Now the tub was gorgeous…and so was the new tenant lying in it. He was submerged in water and ice cubes which did nothing to disguise his present state.

He was…

“What?” he repeated.

“You’re naked!” I informed him. I looked at the ceiling but at the bottom of my field of vision, I could still see his reflection in the bathroom mirrors. I could see all of him!

“You never saw a naked guy?”

“I’ve seen plenty of naked guys,” I further informed him, which was a big stretch of the truth, but I thought did a lot to disprove my reputation of antisociality. “I’ve seen hundreds of naked guys, but I just wasn’t expecting one right now. You need to pay those movers.”

“Shay didn’t do it?”

I didn’t know what she’d worked out with the company, but I didn’t care about that. “I mean, you have to tip the people here right now, the ones who did all the work,” I said. I knew about tipping them because I’d seen other people move in and out of these units, not because I’d been personally involved in going somewhere myself. I had lived in the same house forever and I wasn’t ever leaving, either.

“My pants are on the floor,” he remarked. “My wallet’s in the back pocket.”

“You want me to get it? Fine,” I said, and lowered my gaze. Oops! I’d lowered it directly onto the figure in the bathtub, that naked figure. His own eyes were closed and there was a huge bruise forming on his upper arm, which itself was huge so that the mark was the size of a volleyball.

“What happened?” I asked. “How did you get hurt?”

“Tough practice.” His eyes opened. “Are you getting my wallet? Go ahead and give them something.”

“Fine,” I told him, and I did fish out money and wend my way back outside, where the movers were waiting. I was generous and they were appreciative.

“That’s a shitshow in there,” one of them told me. “What are you going to do?”

“Me? Nothing. It’s not my house,” I answered, and they said they were glad for me. I was happy for myself, too, but…it really was terrible. Instead of heading to the office, I found myself entering the condo again.

“Tyler?” I called as I approached his location. “Are you still naked?”

“Do you get in the tub with your clothes on?” he asked me back, so I stayed in the bedroom and perched on a box marked “shoes.” It was also nearly casket-sized.

“How are you going to sleep in here?” I asked, looking around. “Where have you been sleeping? I don’t see a bed.”

“I’m fine. I didn’t know she had scheduled this for today,” he answered, which wasn’t much of an answer to my questions.

“What is this? Does it belong to Shay Galton?” The big boxes had labels like “makeup,” “straightening products,” and “lingerie,” words which didn’t seem to relate much to him but would have been important for her job.

“I think most of it’s hers. I guess.”

“There’s no room for it all,” I remarked, which was beyond obvious. “Is that her point?”

“What do you mean?”

“She was complaining—she was telling you that this condo was too small,” I reminded him. “This might be her way of showing you that she’s right and that she needs more space.” It was a petty, juvenile way to communicate, but I’d seen people act plenty petty. One of our previous tenants had poured bleach into all the washing machines in the public laundry room because she was mad about someone else’s illegal dog (no pets allowed here) pooping on the pathway. Another guy had bought a drum set and a trumpet, and had taught himself to play both. It wasn’t due to his love of music but because he thought that the woman next door used her microwave too often, and he could hear the annoying beeps through the wall. Those seemed to be very, very thin in this complex.

Right now, I heard splashing, and then Tyler appeared in the open bathroom doors. He held what looked like a wadded t-shirt in front of his crotch, but it didn’t cover much. It sure didn’t cover anything on his other side, which was totally visible in those large mirrors on the bathroom wall behind him. His butt, back, and legs looked like they’d been carved out of marble, as did the rest of his body in the front, like the squares of muscle that trailed down his stomach toward where he held the t-shirt. Except, instead of veiny, cold stone, his skin was the warm honey that I remembered from the underwear commercial that I’d paused so very often on my phone. The commercial was stunning, but the real thing was even more impressive.

Except for the marks and bruises, which covered a lot of his honey-toned skin. “You guys really beat each other up in practice,” I commented, and he glanced down at his body, shifting the t-shirt slightly as he checked himself over. My gaze went right to that meager covering. “Um, I gave the tip money to the movers and I should go.”

“Where?”

I checked my phone. “I missed class, so I guess I’ll head home.” My father was probably tracking my location and wondering why I wasn’t at Emelia Schaub College, where I should have been. He got worried if I went off schedule, and I quickly texted him to explain. It was easier to keep my eyes on my phone, anyway.

“What class?” Tyler asked.

“If we’re going to have a conversation, do you want to put on some clothes?” I suggested, and suddenly, he broke into a huge grin. I’d seen him smile in pictures and on screens, both big and small, but in person and fairly up-close? It was like being bathed in sunlight or something. I smiled back, and I even laughed a little.

“My stuff is in the closet,” he mentioned, and that was totally blocked. He started to make his way over, pushing aside boxes and gear and totally dropping the wadded t-shirt as he did.

I decided that was my cue to leave, but when I was in the tunnel in the living room, I heard him again. “Kasia.”

He knew my name, I thought, and it gave me a lot of pleasure to hear it. “Yes?”

“Wait for me.”

Due to his strength, which was due to all those carved muscles I’d seen as they’d gleamed and dripped with droplets of water…anyway, due to his enormous strength, he’d been able to fight his way to the closet and he joined me soon enough on the front steps. “I need to eat,” he commented. “I don’t have any food in there. Are you hungry?”

“Yes,” I admitted. I had missed a meal along with my class. “I usually eat in the car on my way to the college. I bring a little cooler.”

“Like I did. In kindergarten,” he said. He started to walk toward the parking lot. “Come to dinner with me instead.”

“What?”I followed him.“Dinner out?”

“Unless you want to eat from your lunchbox.”

“It’s a much better idea to pack food for myself,” I explained as I walked. “I don’t have time to stop after I leave here and do you know how much money I would waste if I bought something every night? Right now, we have so much from the garden, too. It’s delicious.”

“What college? What garden?”

We ended up at his car, the one parked in the flower bed, and I decided it was better that he moved it now. I also decided that yes, I would go to dinner with a Woodsmen football player, and I would act just as nonchalant and disinterested as when Iva and I had spied and casually commented on the other guys through the office windows (e.g., “Lots of puddles in the parking lot. Oh, I guess it’s because Robby Baines is washing his truck with no shirt on.” I had fallen over the wastebasket in my rush to see.)

“Are you coming?” he asked, and I got in.

“Make a right out of the lot,” I told him. “Also, don’t park in that spot again. In theory, I could have you towed.”

“I didn’t know if I could walk all the way to my condo if I parked in the street,” he said.

“Really?” I looked over at him. “What happened at your practice?”

“It got rough.”

“Isn’t it a bad idea to hurt a starting player before the season even begins? Is it even normal for guys on the same team to hurt each other? It shouldn’t be allowed—think of all the money they’re paying you. It would be a total waste if you couldn’t play!”

Tyler glanced over at me.

“I’m mostly concerned about your well-being,” I felt constrained to add. “I’m sorry you got hurt.”

“Maybe you could mention those ideas to the defense. They went after me.”

“What did you do to cause them to act that way?” I asked.

I didn’t think that he was going to answer, but then he spoke: “We haven’t been getting along.”

“That can’t be the whole story,” I disagreed. “In my life, I don’t always get along with people but they don’t beat me up.”

“Who doesn’t like you? You mean the people who live in the condos?”

“No, the tenants like me fine! I fix all their stupid problems, don’t I?” I shook my head and pointed at a restaurant. “This is it, right here.”

He squinted at the sign as he pulled to a stop. “Greek? They have more than burgers in this town?”

“Just get out,” I told him, and he did.

I was getting out, too, when he came walking around the car. “I would have opened the door for you,” he said.

“Really?” I asked skeptically, and he glowered.

“Yes, really.”

“Ok, next time. Plenty of the Woodsmen come here to eat, so no one will flip about your presence,” I mentioned as we walked toward the restaurant. “And why do you think the tenants don’t like me?”

“You know, because of all that bossy crap you do. ‘Don’t park there, stop moving in, you can’t have fun.’ That’s all in your lease, too. I read it through.”

“Hold on,” I ordered. “I didn’t write the lease! And I don’t care if they think I’m bossy. Without Iva, I’m in charge so I am the boss, and I have to get everything done in less time and with less help than before. It’s a big complex and…you know, you never finished explaining why your teammates are trying to beat you up.”

“You never told me about your class. Or your garden.”

After we were seated, I did tell him, because I wasn’t the one who seemed to want to withhold information. “I’m an undergrad at Emelia Schaub College,” I said, “which isn’t too far from here. My dad really, really wanted me to go, and I wanted to make him happy.” I had always tried to do that. “I’m getting my degree in history and then I want to go to law school, to do transactional law. Like real estate and land use,” I explained. “I’m only taking one class during this summer session, and I wouldn’t have signed up for it at all if I’d known that Iva was going to go on maternity leave so early. Iva Balderston was the other woman who was in the leasing office when you and your girlfriend came in for the tour.”

“I don’t remember her.”

I did remember how he hadn’t spoken to us and had been looking at his phone, and how they’d shown up forty-five minutes late for their appointment. “Right now I’m trying to balance things. I wasn’t able to balance well today because your moving trucks showed up.”

“That was because of Shay.”

“You two are a team, aren’t you? Don’t you plan things together?” He only shrugged a little instead of answering. “Didn’t you live together in California?”

“Yeah, she moved in with me when I got the house. I thought I’d be there longer.”

“And all that stuff was from your place there? Did you sell it?”

“It was a rental and I have no idea what all that shit is. The house came furnished, so if she had movers pack up everything and take it, it’s stolen.”

“Oh, no! You should call them and explain right away.”

“Sure,” he said, but he sounded unconcerned. He looked across the table at me. “I can just pay for it.”

“Right, of course. About me preventing fun—”

“What’s your garden? What do you grow?”

“It’s my dad’s,” I answered. “We have tomatoes, cukes, summer squash, herbs…we have a variety. He’s out there every day.”

“You live with him?” I nodded, and then he asked, “Is he retired?”

“He can’t work anymore,” I said. “About five years ago, he had a stroke and he wasn’t able to go back to the pickle factory, and it closed anyway.”

“They can’t fix his problems?”

“No, there’s not a pill to cure hemiparesis,” I said. “That means he has weakness on one side of his body, and he gets numbness, too. He did different therapies that helped. They also did a lot for his speech, but it’s still hard for people to understand when he talks, and he still struggles with mobility.” The garden was a safe place for him to be, close to the house, nice and flat.

The waiter came and we ordered a whole bunch of food. I said that I would pay for mine only and that I didn’t want to split the bill, and Tyler seemed to take in that information although he didn’t bother to answer. And speaking of bills, I wondered about the cost of other things.

“Did you pay for that move?” I asked. “Did you pay for the whole load of furniture that you didn’t actually own to be wrapped and shipped across the country?”

He sighed, very quietly. “Probably. Shay has my credit card.”

“And you didn’t know it was happening?”

He didn’t answer that, so I tried another one.

“Are you really going to live in the condo with all that stuff?” When he still didn’t respond, I went ahead and filled in my own conclusion. “I don’t think it’s possible. It would be horrible, like the worst claustrophobia you ever had.”

Appetizers arrived, a lot of them, and the waiter spread them across the table. Tyler started to eat very fast, as if he’d been starving.

“They have really good spreads for you guys at the Woodsmen practice facility. Right?” I nodded, answering myself again. “I’ve seen pictures of buffet tables that are unbelievable.”

He nodded, too. “When we broke for lunch, I was still with the trainers.”

“Because you got attacked. Why?”

“Who gives a fuck?”

“I do,” I told him. “I’m curious, for one thing, but I’m also worried about team camaraderie and how it will effect the upcoming season. And I don’t want you to get hurt,” I added, but it didn’t sound too good, coming at the end like that. “I really do care about you as a person.”

He looked at me with an expression that approached hatred. “Yeah, I bet.”

I stopped talking, but I didn’t eat anything on the table since I wasn’t planning to pay for it. There wasn’t enough for me anyway, because Tyler finished every last bite, right down to the parsley garnish.

Then he looked around. “I hope it doesn’t take too long to bring out the rest.”

“You had a real workout today,” I noted. “Did they give you the ice to bring home for your bath?”

“They’re generous like that.” He sighed, another small exhalation. “I could have stayed at the practice facility to sit in the ice bath there, but I wanted to get the hell away. And then I walked into the shitstorm at my house.”

“It’s bad,” I said, quoting the moving man. “What are you going to do?”

He didn’t respond.

“Shay Galton should fix it,” I mentioned, “since she’s the one who seems to have created the problem.”

“She’s not going to do anything to fix it. She already flew back to LA,” he said. He leaned back and looked again for the waiter.

“What are you going to do?” I repeated. “Don’t you have people? Like, agents and assistants, hanger-on types who can take over?”

“No. Yes, I have an agent,” he corrected himself. “I don’t have an assistant. I have a stylist but she won’t help.”

“That’s like, a dresser,” I clarified. “She picks your clothes and your haircut, like my dad did for me when I was in kindergarten.” Yes, I remembered his previous remark regarding how I carried my dinner in a cooler. “Was she the person who told you to wear fur in July?”

“It’s all through Shay,” he said, and rubbed his head like he remembered the feeling of that garment. “Her look is important and I’m in a lot of her stuff.”

I knew that, because I went through her pictures all the time and they were amazing. I also remembered how cute she’d looked when I’d seen her in person, even better than on my phone. “I think the stylist does great for her, except for not understanding how seasons work. Your girlfriend always looks beautiful. Don’t you think?” I could admit that, even though I was furious at how she had acted today, how she’d driven away from her responsibilities and left me with the mess.

Surprise, surprise, he didn’t answer my question. The rest of the food did arrive and as we ate in silence, I thought more about what had happened today, about Tyler Hennessy’s responsibilities and about mine.

“I could help you,” I mentioned, when he was scraping the last bite of rice onto his fork. “I could help you with your apartment and with getting situated here.”

“Why?”

“For money,” I said. “I need it and you could pay me, because you need help. You can’t live like that. I can determine if you actually stole that furniture and I can return it, or work out a payment. And I can sell stuff, because it won’t all fit in your condo even though that place is so huge. I can do everything.”

He didn’t respond but I kept going.

“I can organize your possessions and put them away. I could buy towels for your bathroom so you don’t have to walk around naked, and get groceries so you have food in the kitchen. I can clean, because I bet the movers carried in a ton of dirt, too. I can do everything,” I repeated, sure that I could. I would definitely work hard and try to make it perfect for him.

“You just said you were busy with your class and your job,” he reminded me. “You want more work?”

“My class ends next week. If I’m at the complex, I can split my time between your apartment and the leasing office. I have to be on the premises but I’m not always busy.”

“So you want to double-dip, to take money from your current company and from me for the same hours.”

“Exactly,” I said, nodding, and he smiled again. “You make it sound like I won’t do my real job, but I will. I’ve always done two at once.” I had done magazine billing, conducted surveys, and worked for political campaigns. Sometimes it had driven Iva bananas, but she had good headphones.

“How much do you want me to pay you?”

I didn’t have any problem haggling, since I’d been dealing with the topic of money for years—bills, insurance, repairs, and everything else had become my domain when my father had first gotten sick. Tyler didn’t seem to mind arguing either and we went back and forth for a while before, suddenly, he stuck out his hand.

“Does this mean you’re hiring me?” I asked.

“It means I want a place to sleep. Let’s see if you can do it,” he said. “I’ll hire you on a temporary basis to clean up all that shit.”

“You’ll be amazed at what I can accomplish,” I promised, and we shook. I was almost giddy with the thought of what I would do with the extra funds that would be coming in. Now I could quit doing cold calls to sell the heated snow shovels, which were tough to move in the summer months. “Just wait and see. You’ll wonder what you ever did without me.”

He didn’t look very convinced, but he really would see. I’d do such a good job getting his condo and his life in order that he’d want the temp job to become permanent, and maybe I could do it for the rest of the time I had left before law school—or even during that, too. I envisioned Woodsmen players lining up for my services, which could be seasonal for the guys who were only here for a few months. I could specify that in the contract I planned to write up. Maybe the team could even hire me to work with all their new players, like the consultant position that Iva’s boyfriend had wanted at my college. Except, in my case, I’d really get things done.

It was just like I’d told Tyler: they wouldn’t know how they’d gotten along without me.