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I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to tell her. “It was all right,” I finally said, keeping my tone neutral.

“All right?”

“It was fun,” I added, but Iva wasn’t satisfied. She had been texting questions since the night before, when she’d apparently talked to my dad and he had spilled the beans about our dinner at Tyler’s house, an event which I had been keeping to myself. When I hadn’t provided enough detail in my responses to her many messages, she’d called, because she really, really wanted to know more.

“Kasia, all I’m doing is sitting in a hospital, worrying. I’m worried about my baby, my livelihood, my boyfriend…” Her voice broke. “Dominic may be dead somewhere!”

“He’s not,” I said. “I’m sure he’s fine.” I had no doubt that stupid Dominic was more fine than she was.

“I don’t want to think about any of it, just for a few minutes. Distract me,” she suggested.

I understood the desire to live vicariously—wasn’t I doing the same thing when I looked at Shay Galton’s posts and tried to replicate her snake pose with a rolled-up towel? I didn’t want to hurt Iva’s feelings by describing how great things had been, though, so I kept it short. “There’s really nothing. I already told you all about the game.” I had given her every detail of that after she’d been discharged the day before and I’d driven her home. “The rest was no big deal,” I continued. “My dad and I went to Tyler’s for dinner, and it was good.”

But she kept asking questions. “What did you have?”

It couldn’t have hurt to answer that. “He eats really healthy. He and his mom made three roast chickens with little potatoes and also a bunch of steamed vegetables. Dad and I brought them even more from our garden and they made a huge salad. They cook so well together even if she can’t get around much in the kitchen.”

“Three chickens? Wow.” Then she asked another innocent one: “Did your father do ok? He said so, but what do you think?” I didn’t see the harm in answering that, either.

“He had fun,” I said, happy that it was true. “Miss Gail really drew him out. They talked about how it was hard for both of them to get around and she told him how nice everyone was at the stadium, how they helped her. They really hit it off.”

“I’m glad,” Iva said. “He’s been texting me to check in and saying the most supportive things, and I think that he deserves some fun. Maybe he and Miss Gail could go out.”

“Like, dating? I don’t think so,” I answered doubtfully. “He’s not at all interested in that, but it really would be good for him to have a friend. He told her all about working at the pickle factory and how we make our own, and then she listened to the recipe. She even convinced him to go for a little walk after we ate, but there’s nothing romantic happening.”

“Too bad,” Iva said. She sounded sad. “I wanted someone to get a happy ending.”

“You’re going to,” I told her. “You have beautiful baby Balderston, and we’re going to fix everything else.”

“Right,” she sighed. “Sure. Thanks, Kasia.”

Now she sounded so down, I was glad that I hadn’t told her more. She didn’t need to know what had happened when my dad and Miss Gail had taken their walk after dinner, leaving me and Tyler to clean up.

“That went pretty well,” he had mentioned as I cleared the table. “At least my mom didn’t start bragging. I’m sure you heard enough of that when you were sitting in the stands with her.” His hair was getting longer and one dark blonde piece dipped forward over his sharp cheekbone as he bent to put the plates in the dishwasher. I’d started to reach to help him, but he had pushed it away with the back of his wrist.

“I do know that you’re a genius, as well as being the best football player to ever put on cleats. She also told me that your first kiss was in the third grade,” I’d said. “Precocious.”

“It was from Riley,” he recalled. “She said to wait for her under the monkey bars before we got on the bus and when I showed up, she laid one on me.” He pointed to his chin. “Right there. Then she told me that I better not copy off of her anymore when we labeled maps of the British colonies in America, because she had caught me looking. She said she wouldn’t kiss me again unless I quit that.”

I had laughed. “Did you keep cheating?”

“I started studying. Pass that bowl.”

“So you don’t mind putting in the work, if there are rewards,” I had noted, and he had looked at me and smiled. It wasn’t as if anything earth-shattering had happened, but when he smiled like that…well, it was better that Iva didn’t hear how it might have made you feel.

Her next question broke into my thoughts. “Did you see that Shay is on an island called St. Barts? She’s posting pictures of herself nude, with shells over the important parts. She looks so beautiful. But she said that she was walking on the beach and all the poses happened organically, like she found the shells by chance, and there’s an Irish malacologist in the comments saying that those kinds of scallops are not native to the Caribbean.”

“An Irish what in the comments?” I asked.

“It’s a scientist who studies mollusks. Somebody sent him the post to ask about the shells and he doesn’t think there’s any way that what Shay said is true, so now her fans are mad at him. I have too much time on my hands, sitting in here and trying not to worry, so I messaged him. I told him what happened to you and I said that they’d move on and hate someone else soon enough,” she explained. “Did you get to find out why Shay and Tyler’s mom didn’t get along?” We had previously dissected that question at length, after he had told me that his mother hadn’t visited them when he and his girlfriend had lived together in California.

“I asked him. I said, ‘Your mom is great. Why didn’t your ex like her?’ And he just shrugged. But judging from how Shay Galton acted with me and how she got jealous over nothing, I would assume that she was jealous of his mother, too, of the love they obviously have for each other.”

“I think it’s great. If a guy can care for his mom that much, you get a good idea of his capacity for loving other women, too.” She started sniffing. “You know, Dominic and his mother didn’t get along very well. Was that where I went wrong?”

“Iva, does it matter now?” I asked impatiently, and apparently it did. It really did, and she got really mad at me and hung up. I sighed, but we would talk when I saw her later at the hospital. I planned to get groceries and then cook a few meals to leave in her fridge and freezer, too.

I had plenty to do, because although Tyler was still paying me for some things, I obviously didn’t need to be there as much with his mom now around. He had a list that he kept sending me, but it didn’t feel right to charge him the same fee we had worked out before, not when I was hardly doing anything.

So I had taken on another job, in tech support. I was supposed to be responding to customer issues with their scientific calculators, but I really hadn’t expected so many of those issues. Since I knew next to nothing about scientific calculators (like, I hadn’t been aware of how to turn them off), I had read the manuals as fast as I could. The company had also given me various scripts which directed what to say to the upset customers who called, polite phrases of apology and assurances that we were going to fix their problems.

Unfortunately, my study of the manuals and those stock phrases weren’t too great in actually getting the little machines going. I felt sorry for the unhappy callers, because it must have been so frustrating to need help and then have to deal with me. As I worked on various invoices and maintenance problems relating to the condo complex, I also double-dipped into my secondary job.

“I understand your frustration,” I was saying for the tenth time to a woman whose calculator screen had gone black. “Um, can you check the input mode again?” I scrolled down, looking for a script that fit this problem, but then I stopped in alarm as she kept describing what was going wrong. “Ma’am, if the unit is actually smoking—”

She hung up and hopefully, she got a fire extinguisher. But my day only got worse, because next I heard a familiar and unwelcome rumble in the parking lot. He was a little late today and I’d been vaguely hoping for multiple flat tires, a water company bankruptcy, or a decision by everyone at this complex to drink right out of the tap.

No such luck. I saw the truck pull in and stop exactly where I’d told him not to go, blocking the walkway to the units. Cody got out of the driver’s seat and stood looking directly over at the trailer, directly over at me. I knew he couldn’t see me, not with the sun shining in his face and with the way I was hiding, but I still shrunk back. And I gave him the finger. I watched him heft two big, clear bottles out of the back and walk them up the path he’d obstructed. He disappeared behind the hedge and I tried to focus on the real job I had, the one beyond trying to explain to people where the reset button was located on their calculators. That was in different places on different models and was hard to find, even for me as the supposed expert.

But soon enough, Cody was knocking on the office door, which I was no longer locking except on water delivery day. I would have let him stand out there, but I knew him. He would knock for long enough to be very, very annoying and then he would start honking the truck’s horn. There weren’t that many people here on weekdays but there were enough that I couldn’t let him do it. On top of that, I was supposed to monitor his deliveries, and he’d claimed more than once that no one had been in the office when he’d had a problem—Iva had handled it, but I didn’t want to hear it again.

So, sighing, I opened the door and Cody swaggered in, as obnoxious as ever.

“No-Kasia!” he said.

“What do you want? Do I need to sign something?”

His eyes swept up and down, surveying me. And yes, I had put a little more effort into my outfit today, but it wasn’t for his benefit! I’d felt like it, that was all, but he noticed. “What’s with the clothes?” he asked.

“I wear them every day, in order to avoid a public indecency charge.”

“Yeah, but there’s no crowd outside waiting to see you naked. I’m probably the only—”

“What do you want, Cody?” I asked again, and tried to will myself not to blush, blink, or otherwise show that his words affected me at all.

“Just saying hello. You know how I like to stop in when I’m here.”

I did know that. Every other week, he showed up with a water delivery and then he dropped in to bother me. “There’s no need.”

“It’s fun,” he told me, and I pointed to the door.

“If I don’t have to sign anything, then it’s time to go. Bye,” I said. I used a piece of paper to swish him toward the exit, like I would have done to a bee that got in by mistake.

“In a minute. I wanted to tell you that my delivery window is switching around so I’ll be here next week in the afternoon. You’ll get to see me even sooner than usual,” Cody said.

“Do you really think that I’m waiting for you to show up? I don’t give one, single—”

His laughter drowned out my words as he left, knowing that he’d triumphed over me. Again.

After a while, I went to the hospital to see baby Balderston and Iva, who hugged me and said she was sorry for hanging up on me before. “I could blame postpartum hormones, but I’m not sure what my problem is,” she told me. I was aware, of course, that the problem was stupid Dominic, but I managed not to say so. We visited and I held baby Balderston, then returned him to his mother and went to the store to load up on groceries. I didn’t pick the expensive varieties that Tyler selected for his food deliveries but my monthly budget was feeling the pinch, anyway. It was ok, though, because Iva needed all the help she could get, and my dad and I could make do. I needed to get home to him soon enough but I did want to leave her with some meals, so I headed to her house to cook on-site. She had a lot more counter space—not as much as in Tyler’s kitchen, but…

What was that? I slowed my car as I got closer to her little house, not understanding the sign that was planted in the front lawn. Then, suddenly, I did get it, and it was bad. It was so bad. My first thought was to prevent Iva from coming home, but that wouldn’t work—she would see it eventually. I couldn’t stay here in the driveway, blocking it with my car, either, because my back seat was full of food. Summer was officially coming to an end, but it was still warm enough that perishables were going to perish—and so would Iva, when she arrived after being with her tiny baby and saw that there was a “coming soon” real estate sign planted in front of the place that she called home. Like, it was coming soon to the market, and Iva’s house would be sold.

I still sat there, trying to figure out my options. She was going to stay at the hospital with her son for several more hours, so I had time. A little time, I corrected myself. I called the real estate agent but he wouldn’t tell me much, except he did share the listing price and he also shared that there was currently a tenant who would be leaving soon. “It’s a great little property,” he assured me.

I thought about some of the problems we’d had at the condo complex. “I’ve been in there,” I said. “There’s a garter snake infestation and crickets throughout the house, there’s little to no insulation, and the neighbors have a Limp Bizkit cover band. Before you try to sell it, you better clear up those issues.” That would give him something to think about, and maybe slow this process a little. Maybe. Then I drove to the closest place where I could unload the food into a refrigerator and where I could also think for a moment.

I knocked rather than letting myself in with my keypad trick, and Tyler opened the door. “What are you doing with all these groceries?” he asked.

“They’re for Iva and she’s getting evicted. I didn’t want to bring food into her house if we’re only going to have to take it right back out. I need to find a new place for her to live and I need to prep meals as I do that. And I have to find stupid Dominic and also hire a hitman.”

“What the hell is going on? Come in here,” he said, so I did that first. “Why does Iva need a new place?”

I explained about the sign in the yard, about how it was really stupid Dominic’s house, and again, how I would have to kill him. “While his baby is in the hospital, he does this?” I asked. “At least Iva will believe that he didn’t disappear due to some kind of mistake, or because he’s dead. She keeps trying to excuse him! Of course, he will be dead, once I find him.”

“If stupid Dominic put the house up for sale, then the agent has a way to contact him,” Tyler pointed out. “And if he makes money on it, Iva can get some.”

“That’s fine except for the immediate problem. The agent told me that the tenant is moving out, which means that stupid Dominic may try to evict the mother of his child at any moment. I wish I had already gone to law school—I’m not doing that anymore, but if I had gone, then I would know what to do. I would know if she has rights in this situation, but she must have some. She lived there with him for four years!” I grasped at straws. “How long does adverse possession take? Do we have common-law marriages in Michigan?”

He completely missed my main point. “What do you mean that you’re not going to law school?” he asked.

“She can stay here,” I said as I started to put items in his fridge. It was brand-new because we’d replaced it after the last tenant left this unit, since he had broken it and the other appliances by trying to run a commercial doughnut kitchen. “I don’t mean exactly here, but in one of the empty condos in the complex, at least for a while. She’s really worried about money and no one has to know…” I paused with a quart of milk in my hand. “Except, there wouldn’t be utilities, and we have to worry about Oren. He would notice and he could say something.”

“Does that guy actually speak?” Tyler asked. “No, she and the baby can’t stay in a place without utilities.” Then he repeated his question from before. “What do you mean that you’re not going to law school?”

“I don’t have time and I need to spend money on other things, rather than wasting it on tuition. Ok, if not here, somewhere close so she’s near the hospital. Now that summer’s over and people are staying downstate, there should be more places coming up for rent.” I sat on the couch and opened my phone. “I’ll present some options to her and we’ll just tell stupid Dominic and his real estate agent that she’s not leaving yet, not until she has a safe place to go, and they can go fu—” Before I swore, I looked around. “Where’s your mom?”

“Physical therapy to work on using crutches, and she’s getting a ride home. She told me that she was going to help you out with this, but I can. I can help you.”

“That’s ok,” I answered. “I only need your refrigerator for a while. I should have gone into Iva’s house but all of a sudden, I felt like it was breaking and entering. It does belong to stupid Dominic, after all.”

Tyler stared at me, and he seemed to get mad. “I’m not useless,” he said.

“What? I know that. You’re not at all useless,” I agreed. “Your whole thing about hiring me wasn’t true.”

Now he asked the same thing. “What?”

“As soon as I unpacked, I knew that you didn’t really need me to do anything. Maybe some help would have been good, because you’re busy with football,” I acknowledged. “But you acted like you couldn’t do it by yourself. Then I opened the moving boxes and I saw how organized you were. I saw your kitchen stuff and I watched you cooking your meals with it all, and you obviously could have gotten your own groceries without me ordering them. When you needed to move out Shay Galton’s stuff, you did it without any issues. You even shipped off the casket, and I don’t know how you managed that. You said that you wanted me to come to your game to help your mom, but she didn’t need me, either.”

Tyler sat down next to me. “It would have taken me forever to go through all the shit in this place if you hadn’t done it.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but you would have accomplished it. And now, you could find a place for Iva, but I don’t want to make my boss’s life your problem. Maybe I could start paying you for help like you did for me, but since I don’t have any money, it would have to be more of a barter thing.”

His eyebrows lifted. “What are you bartering?”

“Um, how about poetry?” I suggested. “I still have all my old journals from high school. Before my dad’s stroke, I thought that I would be a writer. There are pages and pages of terrible verse.” I shook my head as I remembered some of it. “I thought my style was like razor blades, very cutting and sharp. It was more safety scissors, though, along with a mouthful of honey. That bad.”

“I’ll pass on your poetry,” he answered, and he hadn’t been the first. “You better talk to Iva about that ‘coming soon’ sign before she gets home and sees it.”

I did call her and it was terrible. “What?” she kept asking and when I explained, she would say, “No, I don’t think that Dominic would do that.”

He had already done it. “Iva, this is happening,” I finally told her. “We need to make immediate plans for the future. I’ve been reading a little bit and they can’t just come in and toss you out to the curb, but—”

“Dominic wouldn’t do this,” she repeated.

“He left you and his baby and you don’t even have a forwarding address. I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t put anything past him. You can stay with me until you find your own place,” I said. “I know it’s far away and run-down, and I know there’s only one bedroom, but you always have that as an option.”

There was silence on her end and I got the feeling that she was so horrified by the idea that she couldn’t immediately speak. The whole situation was totally horrifying, and living with me would have been mud icing on a dirt cake. But then she thanked me and said that she was going to try to contact the real estate agent. “I love that house,” she told us. “I paid to remodel the kitchen and I painted the whole exterior, one wall at a time.”

I remembered, because it had taken her forever. “Iva...hold on.” I turned to Tyler, who was gesturing, pointing at himself and the floor. “What are you trying to say?” I whispered.

“She can stay here. Tell her that she can stay here.”

“There are empty units, but—”

“No, she can stay here ,” he repeated, emphasizing the last word and pointing at the floor again. “I have two other bedrooms. It’s a great feature that each one has its own attached bath.”

That was one of my lines when I gave tours. Did he remember me saying that? “No,” I told him, but he was nodding.

“If that shithead boyfriend wants her out of his house, then it’s better for her to leave. Is she going to pay a lawyer and fight to stay where she’s not wanted?” he asked me.

I had put my hand over the phone as soon as I’d heard “shithead boyfriend” and I shook my head at him. “She just gave birth and stupid Dominic left her!” I hissed. “Let’s not call him names. I don’t want her to hear.”

“Kasia, you put me on speaker by mistake,” Iva’s voice told us from the phone. “I can hear everything.”

“Oh…”

“That’s a real offer,” Tyler told her. “You can come here, rent-free. My mother’s staying with me and she’d love to have some company. I should probably pay you.”

“No, I couldn’t,” Iva told him. “They just told me that the baby will be discharged soon and I need a safe, stable place…” She stopped and we both heard a sob through the speaker.

“You can both come here,” he stated. “My mom loves babies. She’d be happy to have…what’s his name?”

I was shaking my head again and I broke in before we could delve too far into the topic of waiting for stupid Dominic to show up so that they could name baby Balderston together. “He’s really getting discharged, Iva? That’s great!”

It was, but she was also terrified to have him on her own without the amazing nurses there with her. “My mom can help,” Tyler put in, and we all talked more, going back and forth until she wore down.

“Maybe it would work, for a little while,” Iva finally said. “I don’t want to be in that house if some agent is giving tours and bringing in strangers and their germs.”

“I told you how nice Miss Gail is. Just wait until you meet her in person,” I encouraged. But Iva would only say maybe, and she needed to think.

We hung up and I stared at Tyler. “You don’t know her,” I noted.

“Sure, I met her when I came in the first time. Iva was in the office.”

“Do you really remember or do you just remember me telling you that?”

He squinted a little. “I think I remember the real woman and anyway, you’re always talking about her. I’m hardly around and it would be nice for my mom to have company.”

“You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to invite a total stranger into your condo,” I told him.

“It’s no problem.” He leaned back against the couch, a nice, big one that had come with the movers from California. It was comfortable for me and even big enough for him, and I was glad that Shay Galton had stolen it (and he had paid for it in the amount that I’d negotiated with his former landlord).

“Tyler?”

“What?” He turned his head to look at me.

“Thanks for offering, even if Iva says no. I’m really glad that she has more people looking out for her. She needs it.”

“I was thinking about her son, too. What’s his name again?”

“Baby Balderston.”

“Baby Balderston didn’t do anything to deserve this situation,” he said, and I nodded.

“Neither did Iva. People can make bad choices—I sure have. It would be really awful if someone decided that I didn’t deserve any help because I’d dug the hole myself. She grew up with a dad exactly like stupid Dominic, always taking and never around, never dependable. She hasn’t ever said that exactly, but I could read between the lines and I think that people repeat stuff. They mimic what they saw when they were kids.” Now I shrugged. “I don’t really know. I’m not the person to turn to for relationship advice, even though she keeps asking me for it.”

“I wonder what your bad choice was,” he said, but I didn’t want to discuss that. “I wasn’t blaming Iva, either,” he continued. “I was thinking about her kid and I was also thinking that people did a lot for me and my mom when we needed it.”

“Why did you need it?”

“In your research into the Woodsmen, did you ever read anything about my father?” he asked.

“Just that he was absentee.” There had been a real dearth of information about the guy, and I didn’t feel like I needed to add that I knew he had a criminal record and was now deceased.

“He wasn’t totally absentee,” Tyler said. “He used to pop up and then we’d have to run again.”

“Run?” I repeated. “Why? What did he do?”

“He beat the shit out of my mom, for one thing. He beat the shit out of me, too.”

“Oh.That’s…”

“Yeah, it is,” he agreed. “He was ok sometimes, when he was sober, but sobriety wasn’t his natural state. He’d roll in and maybe he’d be ok for a while, but eventually he’d start something. Then he’d get arrested and go to jail, we’d move and hide, and he’d show up again. It went around in a circle. It was like there was never anything that anyone could do—they could never do enough to keep him away from us. But we had a lot of help. We couldn’t have made it all that time without the kindness of friends and strangers.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I looked at Tyler and thought of how big his father must have been, and how scary.

“He’s dead,” he mentioned.

“Good.”

“Yeah, no one was sorry except for his own mother. She never knew him to do anything wrong, not even when he set fire to her trailer. It’s better that he’s dead.”

“And that’s why you’ll help Iva?” I asked.

“It’s one reason.” He was still looking at me, his hazel eyes meeting mine. “What did you ever do that you needed forgiveness for?”

“I delayed telling my dad that I backed up into the light pole,” I said, remembering one of the more recent examples. “Oh, I also told the calculator company that I had three years experience in using their exact brand. I never even saw one in person, and I shouldn’t have lied. I really didn’t believe that so many people would have problems with those dumb machines. I think they sell a faulty product.”

“What else?”

“Too many other things to count. What have you done?”

“I won’t be like my dad, if that’s what you’re asking,” he told me.

“What? No, I wasn’t asking that, not at all!”

“Because you just said that people repeat stuff and behave in the same ways, acting out what they saw when they were kids. I won’t, no matter if I was drunk or if I got angry. I don’t drink, actually.”

“I think that’s a good plan.” Then I admitted something to him, and a little bit to myself, too. “When I was thirteen, I tore a ligament in gym class. I didn’t want any pain medication because I don’t want to repeat stuff, either.”

“You said your mom overdosed by mistake.”

“It was a mistake. It was! But she had been taking those pills for years and years. I just…just in case,” I said.

“That’s probably a good idea.”

I nodded slightly, because I had always thought so. “I’ll find a new place for Iva as fast as I can. She won’t have to be here for long.”

“I know you get things done.”

“Even when people don’t actually need me to,” I reminded him.

“No, I did,” he told me. “I really did.”

Sure. I looked around the condo, which had been immaculate even before his mom had arrived, because he had kept it that way. I also remembered unpacking his citrus reamer. He had wrapped it up in paper and put it in the box labeled “juicing/grating implements.” I strongly believed that a person who did that would have been capable of getting his own life in order. Why couldn’t everyone be that way?

“I wish that people would behave how they were supposed to,” I announced.

“That would make things easier. It’s good to have someone who does. Someone you can depend on.”

“Like your mom,” I said, nodding. “It will be good for Iva to have her.”

He turned his head to look at me again.

“And you,” I added. “You’re that kind of person, too.”

“You think so?”

I nodded. “I hope I am, as well.”

“If I needed help, you’d be the first person I would call.”

“Really?” I smiled. “I would come.”

“I know,” he told me, and he smiled back. I tilted up my chin like I would have toward the sun after clouds parted.

“Did you get those groceries for a specific reason?”

“I was going to make some dinners for Iva and freeze them,” I explained.

“Let’s do that,” Tyler said. He got up and held out his hand to pull me along, too. “We’ll see if we can work together.”

I had my suspicions, and it turned out that I was right. We worked together very well.