Chapter 3

G ranger Moore. That was his full name, and he was from Chicago originally but it looked like he’d lived here in Detroit for at least seven years in two different residences. He’d been born on May second (a Taurus) and he was thirty-two; he had no criminal record, he owned his current home but he apparently leased the space for the restaurant (that property was owned by the Fidelis Corporation). He was a college graduate who had served in the armed forces doing things that weren’t very clear and his work history after he left the service wasn’t clear either.

Also, he had been married. His wife, Benedetta, had died three years ago.

“That’s so sad,” I said, staring at the screen. “Does it say what happened to her?”

“Car accident,” my sister Sophie answered briefly. She looked at her other screen and typed something, then snorted. “Idiot.”

“His wife caused the accident?”

“Huh? No, she got hit while stopped in traffic. It wasn’t her fault.”

She had been calling someone else an idiot, then. Even if Sophie was a little brusque, she wouldn’t have made that comment about a poor, deceased lady.

“That’s all there is. And you want to find out about this Granger Moore person because…” My sister let her words trail off, and she raised an eyebrow at me just like Juliet did. They got it from our father; when his eyebrow went up, though, we knew we were in deep trouble. I’d only seen it three times, once when my brother had gone joyriding in our grandpa’s Cadillac, again when Sophie had been working on his computer and accidentally wiped out all the data on it, and finally when Grace had dropped out of college for the final time. It was the third one she’d attended.

Sophie’s eyebrow raised another few fractions of an inch as I didn’t immediately answer. “Well? Is it a secret?”

“No! I met him and I’m interested, that’s all,” I said, and unlike some of my other siblings who would have pressed for more, Sophie only nodded and turned back to her screens. That was partially because she thought that prying was rude and partially because she didn’t give a flying you-know about most other people. I knew she loved me, though, and I was very glad that I didn’t need to explain any further. I wasn’t exactly sure what I would have said because I wasn’t sure what I was doing.

“Thanks for doing the search,” I told her, and kissed her cheek. I’d tried to look him up myself and come up mostly empty— I hadn’t even seen an obituary for his wife that mentioned his name. But Sophie was a pro.

“You were right that it wasn’t easy,” she answered, interested in me again. “I had to dig pretty deep just to find this stuff, and it’s so bare bones. Usually I can get financial info, background on family members, and all kinds of things that he wouldn’t have wanted us to know. But he’s very blank. No social media, no pictures except one in uniform. It’s a little weird.”

“Weird?”

“Well, I did you, to show a comparison,” she said, and opened something on a third screen. A picture popped up, an old one that Mom must have posted of all of the Curran kids. I stood in the back but you could immediately see my hair. It looked really orange, but it must have been because she’d used the flash on her phone or a filter or something. Underneath that picture there was a list and…

“Holy Mary. This information is public?” I asked, flabbergasted. “I don’t want people to know all that about me!”

“You hardly posted any of it yourself,” Sophie mentioned. “There’s nothing about you on your boyfriend’s social media, either. It’s mostly Mom and Juliet.”

“Speaking of JuJu, has she said anything to you about money problems?”

“No. In fact…” Sophie went to screen number four and showed me our other sister’s latest posts. “She’s planning a vacation to Madrid.”

“She took me out to dinner and her credit card got declined,” I said. “How is she paying for an international trip?”

Sophie shrugged, disengaging again. This time, I thought it was because she truly didn’t care. “I guess she’ll figure it out,” she said briefly. “Addie, I have work to do.”

“Ok. It was good to see you and sorry I kept your dress for so long.” I had finally given back the one I’d worn to Granger’s restaurant.

“Huh? Oh, yeah, whatever,” she answered, already engrossed in typing.

It was a Sunday, but Sophie kept odd hours. I had been lucky that she’d answered me at all because lately she’d been hard to track down, but I’d lured her out of her radio silence by offering to bring cookies. I was glad when she told me to come over, but I’d been sorry to see the state of her house. It was always a mess—she had kept her stuff that way since we’d been little. But based on the number of food delivery boxes in the fridge and by the trash bags piled just outside the back door, I was able to determine that she hadn’t physically left the place in a while, not even to put her garbage in the can and roll that to the curb.

So I’d enticed my sister into getting dressed, taking out the trash, and helping me to straighten up before we moved on to my stated purpose for the visit: getting her intel on Granger Moore. What she’d found made me more interested and also, very sorry for him. It had been hard to pin down an exact date, but it seemed as if he had married pretty young. They’d been together for a long time when his wife passed away. The restaurant was fairly new and I wondered what else he’d been doing with himself since he’d retired—was the word?—from the military.

As I got into my car, I heard my phone and I knew that Briggs was calling me again. He was out of town with his mom, but I was house-sitting for them both. He took that task very seriously and expected me to do so as well: I was supposed to be texting him regularly with updates on the plumbing (to verify there were no water leaks or frozen pipes) and to confirm that there hadn’t been any break-ins. He’d wanted me to sleep at his house, next door to his mother’s place, to be right on top of any problems.

I hadn’t yet told him, but I hadn’t done that. I’d gone over yesterday and walked around, made sure that everything looked ok, and then left. I hadn’t been responding to his texts or initiating all-clear messages of my own, and I could tell by the increasing frequency of his calls that he was getting increasingly annoyed.

I found myself feeling the same way. I just didn’t want to talk to Briggs right now. I didn’t want to respond to his questions about potential problems with the hose bib next to his deck or to discuss the broken lock on the window in the back of his mother’s house. She considered that aperture to be a prime magnet for burglars because it was right off the ground (easy access) and they suggested that while I was in charge, I could repair the lock for her.

The hose bib and the window issue weren’t the only problems that I was ignoring. I had been ignoring him in general, which I didn’t usually do…I paused before I started the car. No, I hadn’t ever done that, I realized. But it was too cold to sit here and ponder why I was doing it now.

All the texts from my boyfriend about potential burglars and crime had made me think about Granger and his actual robbery. I hadn’t been back to the restaurant since Juliet and I had gone there together so of course I hadn’t seen him, except for the picture that my sister Sophie had just dug up. He’d been a lot younger in that and had shorter hair, but he looked much the same as when he’d walked me to my car. He seemed serious and—

Holy Mary. My phone was ringing again and it was, again, Briggs. I’d already silenced it but even seeing his name and picture on the screen bothered me a lot, a whole lot. In fact, lately I found that many things about him had been bothering me. Like, this trip that he was taking? He hadn’t asked me if I’d wanted to go with them. I hadn’t, because I didn’t relish the thought of spending two full days in Frankenmuth with his mother, but I liked fried chicken as much as the next person. It would have been nice to have been asked. It also would have been nice if he’d asked me to house-sit, rather than assuming that I would and texting me a list of instructions. His mother had left her own, handwritten list on her kitchen table and it had included the words “rug shampooer.” I hadn’t read anything after that.

Anyway, I was annoyed. It had started before his trip to Frankenmuth, too. I was feeling less and less like soothing Briggs when he got into a mood, even though I could often tell that he needed it. That meant that more and more of our time was spent with him sniping at me, which wasn’t fun at all. I remembered things as much more enjoyable in the beginning of our relationship, three years ago—three years exactly, which was a long time. By now, his mother referred to me as her daughter-in-law, which was probably why she felt comfortable with suggesting that I fix the window and deep-clean the carpet in the places where her dog had recently had those terrible problems.

Maybe that was the whole issue with Briggs: we were just too comfortable. He was taking things for granted, like that I would house-sit with little notice and at a place where I had to park on the street instead of inside the garage because he thought my car might leak something and stain his cement pad. Likewise, I was too comfortable with him to appreciate all the good things he did, and was only seeing the very, very annoying ones.

He did so many good things. I ran through the list again in my mind. He never squeezed the toothpaste tube from the bottom—in fact, he was truly great about oral hygiene in general, a spectacular flosser. He had reusable grocery bags that he sometimes remembered to bring into the store. He kept his tires properly inflated and rotated them regularly. He drove below the speed limit in school zones, even on weekends and during off-hours.

He had so, so many good points, I reminded myself. But then the screen of my phone lit up with his picture and I stuck my tongue out at it and threw it into the back seat.

It wasn’t like this period of turmoil was a surprise. Mina and I had seen it coming at least a year ago when we’d looked at our transit charts one afternoon over a cup of tea while Mr. Campbell napped. “Oh, fuck,” she’d said, and pointed at Pluto’s path. I’d exhaled a slow breath, because I’d understood what it would mean. “Transformation doesn’t have to be bad,” she’d reminded me.

I remembered the conversation so well because of what she’d said next. “It’s the planet of death, sure, but also rebirth. Maybe it’s very literal.” And she’d smiled and pointed in the direction of my midsection, by which she meant my baby-producing organs. Mina knew that I did want a family, and we’d been scheming for months about my forthcoming engagement with Briggs, about how our wedding would be, and about how many kids I would want after that event. She always reminded me that I could have a lot of them, since I’d grown up in a family of nine and was used to chaos. Mina herself was an only child, and me having more siblings than I could count on one hand had always seemed remarkable to her.

Right now, though, even the thought of marrying Briggs was irritating me. I tried to recall more of his good points from the list I’d made—he was careful when cleaning up broken glass, I’d never seen him spit on a sidewalk…my mind went blank.

Sugar! There had to be better things than that. Oh, here was one: he loved his mother. He loved her so much, in fact, that they took vacations together, and had Briggs and I ever vacationed together? No, we had not. I turned into my parking lot a little too quickly and my poor tires made an unhappy sound. It sure wasn’t their fault that all this turmoil was going on. “Sorry,” I said, and patted the steering wheel. “It’s because of Pluto, and that wasn’t fair to you.”

My car got back at me, though: it swallowed up my phone, and I had to get onto my knees on the wet, cold pavement to reach under the passenger seat to find where it had slid. Seriously? Eight missed calls and thirty-six unread messages? Holy Mary, Briggs! Yes, the calls were all from him and so were a number of texts regarding the house-sitting and my responsibilities related to that important task. He wanted to know why I wasn’t answering but he didn’t seem worried about me, only angry at my lack of response.

So that represented thirty-five of the messages, but the last one came from an area code three-one-three number that I didn’t recognize. “Hi,” it read. “This is Granger Moore from Amunì restaurant. You left this number for the server to contact you.”

What? The image I’d just seen of him in his military uniform flashed in my mind, how handsome and young he’d been. I didn’t quite understand why he was writing, but I guessed that he wanted me to contact the waitress whom Briggs had insulted? It had been a while, but maybe she was still upset about it.

“Hi, can you give me her number?” I wrote back.

“Whose?”

I stared at the screen. What had been her name? Sarah. No, Serafina. I typed that and planned what I would say to her.

But then he answered, “Why do you need that information?” and I stared again. What was he talking about? Was this a prank?

The phone rang and the call was from the same number. “Hello?” I asked suspiciously.

“Addie, this is Granger from Amunì restaurant.”

He sounded very formal and just as serious as he’d looked in that picture in his uniform. I walked slowly toward my building, a little concerned. “If it isn’t about the waitress, is this about the check?” I asked.

“What check?”

“When my sister and I were there, we left without paying,” I explained.

“I thought she was your sister. You two look exactly alike.”

That was very flattering, because Juliet was so pretty. “Thank you,” I said. “I can send you the money right now. Just let me know how much.”

“For that dinner? No, that was on the house.”

“I don’t understand, then,” I confessed. “If you weren’t texting about Serafina, and you don’t want me to pay our outstanding bill, then what do you need?”

There was a short silence. “I’m not going into the restaurant today and I thought you might want to go get a beer.”

“A beer?”

“Or a glass of wine,” he suggested. “Coffee. Some kind of liquid.”

Another silence stretched as I stood in my building lobby and my mind went over those words.

“Addie?”

“Yes,” I said suddenly.

“Did you hear—”

“Yes, I would like to go get a beer,” I told him. “And this is probably silly for me to say, because I’m sure that it’s not your intention, but I do have a boyfriend.”

“Briggs Skurwysyn,” Granger said. “I know.”

I was embarrassed that I’d mentioned it. Of course he knew, and he wasn’t asking me out…what was he doing, then?

Granger was suggesting a time and a place and I heard myself agreeing, and then I found myself rushing up the stairs to my third-floor apartment, and when I looked at myself in the mirror next to my door, I also found my face to be flushed. Not red, only flushed, and I thought it must have been from the exertion of those three flights of stairs. I was really going to have to start exercising more, if that was all it took to give me so much color. Then I raced to my closet and started to go through everything but soon, I needed a second opinion.

“Your good jeans and what top? Hold your phone steadier,” my sister Brenna barked at me. I tried, but I still seemed to be having an adrenaline rush from my stair climb. My hand was shaking. “What is that?” she gasped when I managed to give her a clear picture of myself in my outfit. “Addie, ew! No, you can’t wear that color. Are you kidding me? Take it off before someone else sees.”

“No one else is in my apartment.”

“Thank goodness,” my sister said. “I’m ashamed of you.”

I had gotten this shirt on sale, and I thought it was really cute. “It’s that bad?”

“That shade makes your hair look like sweet potato curly fries and the style is for someone thirty years older. Holy Mary, is this the kind of thing that you’re wearing outside every day?” She had a lot more to say about the shirt but finally calmed enough to look at some other choices and help me pick. Brenna wasn’t shy about expressing her opinions, which was one of the reasons that two of our other sisters weren’t currently speaking to her, but I didn’t mind hearing it. Even if it wasn’t super exciting to learn that my hair looked like a delicious companion of hamburgers, I knew that her fashion judgment was on point and I was pleased with the top and shoes that we chose together. Or, actually, that she’d told me I had to wear because everything else I owned was offensive.

“This is you trying to impress Brett?” she confirmed.

“His name is Briggs,” I stated, which wasn’t really the answer to her question.

“Next time, just send me pictures,” she said. “Or get a stand for your phone, because you’re so jerky.”

It was true that my hands were still trembling a little as I drove to the bar in the Cass Corridor to meet Granger, and as I neared it, I got worse. He was waiting right outside of its front door and he waved and then gestured at me to pull over, and then I was at peak nerves.

“I’ll go with you to park,” he said as he got into my car. He reached under the seat and moved it back, all the way back, but he still didn’t seem to fit into the space very well.

“Oh, ok,” I agreed, and signaled as I pulled out. I did find a spot but I was a very, very careful parallel-parker, so it took us a while to get into it. The entire time I drove and then the entire time I went backwards and forwards into the space, he didn’t say anything else but I could feel his eyes on me. I was used to people scrutinizing me and then criticizing, because I had Mr. Campbell looking over my shoulder every day (or he would have, if he’d been tall enough to do so). But still—this was a little bit nerve-racking so I still didn’t calm down.

I finally parked and nodded at him. He nodded back to me. Ok. I got out and so did Granger, and we walked on the sidewalk towards the bar.

“Why—”

“What—” He stopped, because after all that silence, we’d spoken at exactly the same time. “Go ahead.”

“No, you first. Please,” I invited.

“What were you up to this weekend?” he asked, so I told him about seeing my sister and house-sitting. I was brief, so he asked me more questions about it.

“Skurwysyn is worried about break-ins but he wants you to be there alone?” he clarified. He followed me into the bar and we sat a small booth, and I watched his eyes scan everything in the room. It was dark in here, kind of moody, and quiet on a Sunday evening. I was glad because it would be good for someone who had problems with his vocal cords.

“There’s really no reason to worry about robberies at Briggs’ house,” I answered. “It’s a safe neighborhood but he gets overly concerned.” But now that I thought about it? Granger was right! Why would I have spent the night in a place that Briggs and his mom were sure would be burgled, a place where I couldn’t even park in the garage? And then there was the whole thing about me shampooing her carpet—and my boyfriend had also mentioned that he had some dry cleaning to be picked up, and there were a few loads of laundry in his hamper.

But it wasn’t appropriate for me to be talking about this to another man. If this situation were reversed, I would have been very angry to hear that Briggs was complaining about me to some random girl. I wouldn’t have liked to hear that he was going to a bar with another woman, either, and that made me hesitate before I ordered a beer. I knew perfectly well that I didn’t want an IPA when the waitress suggested it, but my thoughts were elsewhere as I reconsidered my presence here. I had to take a moment to choose.

I was also reconsidering how Briggs hadn’t blinked an eye when I’d said that I didn’t appreciate him going off with his mother this weekend and he’d left anyway. I hadn’t continued the argument but it had bothered me a lot, more than I’d let myself acknowledge before. “It’s our anniversary,” I heard myself admit, my voice blending with the soft sounds of the bar. “It’s our anniversary and he took a trip with his mom.”

Granger’s face didn’t register if he thought that was strange or not, but hearing the words out loud made me wince a little and wish I hadn’t spoken them. I was feeling weirder and weirder about being with someone else—although, I had very clearly stated that this was not in any way a date, and he had in no way thought that it was. So the guilt was probably all about me and my own confusing feelings toward the man sitting across from me, and not due to being in an inappropriate situation. I felt worse with that realization instead of better.

The beer arrived and it gave me the opportunity to change the subject and ask him in return about his own weekend, and the answer was that he had worked at the restaurant. It seemed like that was most of what he did.

“Are you the head chef?” I asked.

“I was doing a lot of cooking at first, but I had to step away. Miguel is good to take the kitchen now and there’s too much for me to manage. If I have my head down in the back, then no one’s in charge of anything else.” He frowned heavily as he spoke.

“How did you learn how to manage the business?”

“That was what my parents did. Growing up, my family had a restaurant and I worked there pretty constantly, every day after school, every weekend. It took all of us.”

“Was it Italian food?” Because Amunì was, but Granger didn’t seem to be. He looked Nordic to me, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t make whatever cuisine he wanted.

“No, our place was bar food. Hamburgers, fries.”

Sweet potato fries? I discretely patted my hair. “Where did you learn to cook in the style of Amunì?”

He paused, looking at his glass. “It was my wife’s thing. She was a chef. She went to culinary school and worked hard for years, and she was very, very talented. It was her dream to open the restaurant.”

“Oh.”

“It should have been a good partnership, with her skills in the kitchen and me running the business. My background isn’t fine dining but I spent time learning, especially in the last few years. It’s just me now.” His face didn’t show any emotion about that but I imagined that his heart must have been breaking.

And I hoped that I didn’t show what I was feeling, which was another wave of guilt. I’d already known about his wife because I’d already looked him up, spying on him. “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling miserable.

He nodded, acknowledging my words.

“I think you’re doing a great job by yourself,” I added. “I think it’s a great restaurant. It’s amazing.”

“Thank you,” he said again, and squinted slightly. “It’s a lot. I knew when I was getting into it that it would be hard but it’s actually all-consuming. This is the first night I’ve taken off…” He thought for a moment. “This is the first night I haven’t been there since we opened in the fall.”

“That is a lot.” And it didn’t seem as if he enjoyed it much, but maybe he was just tired. It reminded me of my sister Nicola and how she worked so hard that when she didn’t, she still couldn’t relax and enjoy herself. “Is that what you did before you came to Detroit?” I asked. “You ran your parents’ restaurant?” It would have explained the gap in his employment history that my sister Sophie hadn’t been able to fill in.

“No, I quit there when I left for college. Then I did other things,” he said briefly, and it wasn’t much of an explanation at all. “My older sister runs the family place now and I hear she does a good job.”

“You hear? You don’t talk much?”

“No, we’re not very close. Are you with your sister?”

“You only met the one, but I also have four other sisters and a brother, too,” I explained, and named them: Nicola, Sophie, Patrick and Juliet, Brenna, and Grace. “I come after Sophie and I get along with all of them, but they don’t always get along with each other. Sometimes it’s hard to like everyone else.”

“You do, though.”

I thought about that. “You’re right, I genuinely like all my siblings. Not just love them, because of course we all love each other, but I also like them. Sometimes they make it hard for me, too,” I had to admit. “Like my brother broke up with his fiancée and she was a girl that we were friends with, someone I really care about. It was awful because he didn’t want any of us to have contact with her.”

“I know this story.”

“You do?”

“I’ve been friends with her new boyfriend for a long time,” he said. “That was why they started coming to my restaurant.”

“Well, then you probably know that Patrick has his issues.” I talked a little more about my sisters, too, and I wouldn’t have expected him to have been interested in my family drama (and with so many of us, there was always plenty of that). If Briggs caught me mentioning one of my siblings’ names, he immediately said he was sure that he’d already heard this story and if he hadn’t, he didn’t want to. Mina at work liked to listen, or at least she had more patience than Briggs. But when I got going, I knew I could really go and that had to be annoying for anyone.

“Sorry,” I said, and firmly cut myself off from explaining how we were worried about Nicola but she was the oldest and had always been the one giving advice, so it was hard for her to hear any from us now.

“Your mom and dad must be something,” he commented. “How could you deal with seven kids?”

Most people assumed that my parents were superstars. “My dad worked almost all the time and my mom was with us, but she’s just a regular mother,” I said. “Just a regular person. We all had to pitch in.”

“Do you mean that you took care of the younger kids?”

“Nicola did as the oldest, and she was an amazing sister. She’s definitely the most industrious and I’d say the most practical, too. Sophie also took care of us, in a way. Like, she never let anyone choke or get kidnapped, but she wasn’t really into really loving the younger ones. She’s the smartest,” I explained.

“I guess everybody gets pinned with a personality.”

I nodded. “We all carved out niches for ourselves. Grace is the polar opposite of Nicola. Juliet is the athlete and Brenna is a diva. She always has been, even when she was an infant. I swear! And I think my role in the family was keeping us all united, but that’s harder now.”

He nodded a little too, and that was all the encouragement I needed to keep right on talking.

“People tend to grow apart, like, the twins used to think almost exactly the same about everything, but not anymore.” I smiled. “They were so cute when they were little and they were always my mom’s favorites, hands down. She loves my brother so much and she never says no to him. Juliet got swept along with that too, and neither of them could ever do anything wrong. He was a little brat sometimes, but he got away with murder. Now we call Brenna the Brat, because she never grew out of it.”

Granger nodded. “Between my sister and me, neither of us was the favorite. The restaurant always came first because was where the money came from. Why did the twins win in your family?”

“It was because my mom wanted a boy. Patrick is everything to her and Juliet got to bask in that glow, too. It was nice for them,” I said. “She got to do a travel team for sports—she was a really good swimmer.”

“You didn’t swim?”

“I’m not athletic in any way,” I answered. “How about you?”

“I’d say I’m athletic, but I didn’t have time to play on teams. When I said that we were working every day at the restaurant, I meant it. We were there all the time.”

“It’s funny that you wanted to do it again, to have your own place.”

He nodded a little and signaled to the waiter for another beer. “Benedetta—my wife was very enthusiastic about it, but she was enthusiastic about everything. Maybe ‘driven’ is a better word for her personality.”

“How else was she? I mean, what was she like?”

He seemed very surprised by my question. “Do you really want to hear about her?”

“Yes,” I said, “but you don’t have to tell me, not if it makes you upset.”

“I hardly ever talk about her,” he answered. “I haven’t in years.” He seemed to consider. “I don’t think I have since the funeral. Her family came from Europe and we had these conversations that didn’t make sense in English or Italian or Sicilian. No one could understand how someone so young…” He trailed off. “I haven’t talked about her in a long time.”

“But obviously, she’s been on your mind even if you weren’t talking to other people, because you spent all this time opening the restaurant,” I pointed out. “You made her dream come to life!”

“Maybe so.” But he didn’t add anything else.

Ok, that was enough of that. I had clearly made him unhappy and uncomfortable—why would I have forced him to discuss his deceased wife over a beer with me, a stranger? Maybe I could also have brought up the injury to his vocal cords. How about famine? Pestilence? “Sorry,” I apologized. “Let’s talk about sports.”

“Sports?”

“That’s my fallback with Briggs. I only have to mention ‘birdie’ or ‘greens’ and he can go on for hours about golf, for example.”

“I’m more of a hockey guy, but I haven’t watched a game in years. I don’t have time.”

Ok. I searched my mind for another topic. Briggs went practically unconscious if I mentioned anything about astrology, so that was out. As I sat there pondering, the uncomfortable silence stretched. I sipped, he drank, and both of us looked around the bar.

“How—”

“What—”

“You go ahead,” I said, because we’d done it again and spoken at exactly the same time.

“I think it’s your turn.”

“I was just going to mention that it might warm up a little next week,” I stated.

“Oh. That would be good.”

Right, it would be. This conversation wasn’t, though, and it continued in that awkward, stilted way to the moment that our glasses were empty. Granger insisted on picking up the tab and then walking me back to my car.

“It was nice to see you,” I told him.

“Likewise.”

“Thanks for texting.”

He nodded, not even using a single word this time. Holy Mary, it was excruciating.

“So, I guess I’ll see you around,” I continued, and he nodded again. “Ok. Ok, bye.” I felt those terrible blood vessels in my face blooming with heat which wasn’t due to any improvements in the weather. This was just so, so embarrassing and weird.

“Bye,” he agreed.

He waited until I’d pulled away and I saw him still standing there as I turned a corner. I wondered why he’d wanted to see me, and I tried to map a course in my mind of how it could have gone better. Asking about his deceased spouse? That was something I should have stayed away from. Babbling about my family? Also a no, because as Briggs always told me, it was like listening to a traffic report that went on for hours.

No, it hadn’t been the best date—not a date, just a meet-up over a beer and two people getting to know each other. I was glad that I’d gone even if it had been more awkward than I would have liked. It was always good to get out and now I would stop thinking about Granger Moore. From now on, he wouldn’t even be in my thoughts for a moment.

I came to a stop at a red light and took a moment to check my phone. I had finally told Briggs that everything was fine with their houses, but I still had six more missed calls from him and twenty-two messages. The phone rang again as I got to my parking lot and I looked over, annoyed, but then I grabbed it and answered.

“Hi, it’s Granger.”

“Hi.” I looked again at the passenger side where he’d briefly ridden. “Did you leave something in my car?”

“No, I wanted to tell you that I…fuck. I’m sorry for how that went.”

“I thought it was fine,” I said. “I liked my beer and I’d definitely go to that bar again. It was a good choice.”

“That whole experience was as awkward as crap,” he said.

“Well…”

“Well, yeah, it was. I have a suggestion,” he continued, “and it’s that we try it again. Are you interested?”

I was already smiling. “I am interested in that,” I told him, and by the time I made it to the stairwell, we had plans to meet, and I was feeling a lot better about my ability to speak in a normal way.

And when I went upstairs, I sent several pictures of potential outfit options to my sister Brenna. She thought they were all terrible, but I was still smiling anyway.