Chapter 4

“S o, I’ll just say it.” Those words were very confident, but right now as I uttered them, I was also biting a nail. “I’ll just come out and say it.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Really? You think I should stay with Briggs?” I asked. “I shouldn’t break up with him?”

Mina shook her head. “I meant that you shouldn’t bite your nails. You could get worms, and I’ve seen them. You don’t want to know where they come out.” She pulled my hand away from my face and put it onto Mr. Campbell’s kitchen table.

No, I didn’t want to know that about the worms. “But what do you think about Briggs?” I pressed.

She looked again at the astrological chart in front of us and then tapped it with her own finger. Despite all the housework and cooking that she did, Mina always took such good care of her hands. No nail biting, none, which was a habit I’d also mostly given up—except that this was a very stressful time. “We can see the answer right here,” she said. “Look at your second house.”

I did and I understood what the zodiac was telling us, but I also wanted to hear her opinion outside of the stars. “I think that we should break up,” I stated confidently, but my nail was back in my mouth before I realized it. Then I watched her shake her head in response and I felt myself waver even more. “Of course, I don’t want to jump into a decision that I’ll regret,” I added.

“And you’re compatible,” she reminded me, now nodding at the chart. “There are bigger forces at play here. Are you denying them?”

“No, I’m not. But my feelings also matter. I feel…” Angry. Annoyed. Trapped. “I do love him,” I said aloud. “I do. He has so many good points. He chops vegetables very neatly, like perfect little cubes. It does take a long time so it’s probably lucky that he cooks so rarely. He’s careful with campfires. I’m pretty sure he would help an older person cross the street.”

“Those are all good qualities in a man,” Mina agreed.

“Also, Briggs and I have been together for more than three years, which is not an insignificant amount of time to devote to someone.” I sighed. There were a lot of reasons to be with him but I couldn’t seem to convince myself to trust in them. “I’m twenty-six and I should know my own mind better than this,” I burst out in frustration.

She waited and she didn’t speak, but her neatly polished nail gently tapped the chart. I knew what it said, and I knew she thought I should be guided by it. But I wasn’t convinced of that, either.

“My family criticizes him a lot,” I mentioned. “He has a lot to say about them, too. But if one of my sisters was dating a guy who got on our bad sides, I would tell her that she should do what makes her happy and not worry about the rest of us. What do we know? Not one of us Currans is in a mature, stable relationship, not even my parents.” I paused. “Except for me! I’m the example for everyone. I never was, not for anything before.” I paused again. “But Briggs is driving me crazy.”

Mina nodded as if she understood but she was frowning at the same time.

“Why is that happening?” I asked. I didn’t understand and I needed to know. “Suddenly, everything that he does is so irritating. Did I tell you that when he came home from Frankenmuth, he suggested that he brought a take-out container of food as a gift for me? And I know that it was just leftovers and I have no idea when he got them. And it may have been his mom’s, and I don’t want to eat her old food. Although, I’m not picky…that’s not the point.”

Mina made a face. “I wouldn’t eat someone’s old food.”

“That’s because you’re an only child,” I said. “In my family, we ate what was there, and sometimes that wasn’t much. One year when we were all on summer vacation from school, my mom used the grocery money to splurge on a tattoo for the bottom of her foot. We were over at the neighbors’ houses eating breakfast and lunch until my dad found out and then he had about a million dollars of food delivered. He was so embarrassed.”

“She got a tattoo on the bottom of her foot?”

“Now she claims that it was supposed to be ironic and some kind of message to the patriarchy, but I think the real reason she did it there was that she’d always wanted a tattoo a lot, but she didn’t want my dad to see it because he wouldn’t have understood. He really wouldn’t have, because neither of them understand each other at all.” I sighed. “Anyway, I need to figure out this Briggs situation before Mr. Campbell wakes up,” I said, but then we heard his grouchy call through the baby monitor. He didn’t know that we had hidden the microphone part of the set in the study where he slept on the couch, and he would have fired us both on the spot if he ever found out.

It was a big day because in the afternoon, we were going to the lawyer’s office. That didn’t happen as frequently as the trips to the analyst, but we were there at least once a month. Mr. Campbell liked to look at his paperwork and ensure that everything was in order. It always was, but he still wanted to check.

He also liked to change his will. A lot. He and Mrs. Campbell never had children of their own, but he’d had an older brother who’d had a lot of kids himself. That older brother had been mostly cut out of an inheritance because he married a woman whom his parents had hated. As far as I understood it, “cut out” meant that the brother only got one or two of the properties and he didn’t get millions and millions of dollars, but he did get a lot. For Campbell standards, he was practically poor but in a general sense, the guy was still wealthy.

Anyway, the story of family estrangement over love might have sounded sad and Shakespearean, but at the beginning of my employment, I’d met both the disowned guy and his wife…and they were both awful people who treated each other and everyone else just terribly. So maybe they hadn’t deserved a Mount Everest-size pile of money, but had Mr. Campbell deserved the lion’s share for himself? I wasn’t sure about that, either.

Anyway, now the cut-off brother and his wife were gone and they had outlived their children. However, there were Campbell grandnieces and -nephews and other scattered relations, and many of them were panting over a possible inheritance. But as a mean person himself, Mr. Campbell kept them all in suspense and dangling, and he changed his will again and again depending on his mood and what they’d done for him lately. There were some relatives that I’d never met and who didn’t seem to participate in the bootlicking, but there was a regular bunch who frequently visited. I was ashamed for them when they came over to bow and scrape and I had to witness it.

Mr. Campbell made it worse by never disclosing who was getting what and simultaneously dangling the riches in front of them, talking about the yacht that he hadn’t stepped foot on in twenty years but still held on to, the stocks, the cash, the “Florida house” that was a mansion in Palm Beach, the eight-bedroom “cottage” in Harbor Springs, and the other properties scattered around the globe. I had no idea how much wealth there actually was (other than recognizing that it was a whole lot), but I knew that they were all calculating it down to the penny. Mina told me that the inheritance spectacle had been going on for years, and as old as Mr. Campbell was, he was going to keep it up until the day that he departed from this Earth. I was sure that they’d fight over it up until their last living moments, too.

After the visit to the attorney, we were on our way home when we drove through Corktown. I sat up straighter and looked out the window as we passed by Amunì. It wasn’t yet open for customers but I bet that Granger was already there, because he always was. He wouldn’t be there tomorrow morning, though, because that was when he was meeting me.

“What are you gawking at, Addie?”

I snapped back to attention and turned to Mr. Campbell. I’d tuned out his usual complaints to the driver and hadn’t noticed that his focus had shifted. “Nothing much,” I answered.

“What is that restaurant?”

“It’s called Amunì. That’s a word in Sicilian, from Palermo, meaning ‘let’s go.’ I think,” I added, but I was sure. I’d looked it up and had practiced saying it.

“Why would you know that?” he demanded.

“I know things,” I said. I knew that he was cranky because the lawyer had told him that they were raising their hourly rate, for example. I’d overheard him cursing out a paralegal about it, although it hadn’t been that guy’s decision to make clients pay more. It had reminded me of when Briggs had been so rude to that waitress—why had she been at fault for his weird pepper preferences? I also knew that Mr. Campbell had been exchanging emails that morning with his grandnieces and nephews, because he had me turn on the Wi-Fi, fetch his ancient laptop, and heft it up onto his desk (it must have weighed forty pounds). I’d watched him cackle at the screen as he spent forever two-finger typing out messages that I was sure were rude and incited conflict. That was the way he always dealt with his family.

“You know little to nothing,” he announced now. “You should have gotten a liberal arts degree.”

That was one of his usual harangues and I let my mind wander as he continued to spout off. He strongly believed that every kid needed to go to college and spend four years studying literature, philosophy, art, music, and languages. Like Sicilian, for example. Mr. Campbell had spent four years at Yale majoring in theology, although he wasn’t any more religious than the next guy, and he couldn’t seem to understand that those degrees didn’t work for everyone and that college didn’t, either. It had been great for him, the heir who owned more houses than I had siblings, but not everyone was like that.

I started thinking, though, that learning another language might have been interesting. I had taken Spanish but for only two years in high school and honestly, I had sucked at it. I had a very hard time not pronouncing everything exactly the way I would have in English and my teacher had acted like something pained her when I spoke. At least I had learned how to say “ lo siento ” with a good accent because I did feel bad about hurting her ears like that. I looked at some language learning apps as I snuggled in my bed that night and thought it would be broadening to know more than those two words.

And yes, I totally understood what I was doing, because it was something that I indulged in quite a bit: avoidance. I was avoiding Briggs (again) and I was avoiding my own thoughts, the ones in which I was asking myself if I should end things or not. There were many reasons to stay, such as…

Sugar. I couldn’t even think of anything that reminded me of how he was a fine person and why I loved him. Because I did love him, of course I did, but I didn’t get up to check the list I’d made of his good qualities. I also didn’t look at my phone again before I went to sleep, although I was sure that he’d been texting. He’d been upset with me all week that I hadn’t done the rug shampooing that his mom had requested while they were on vacation and I just didn’t want to hear about it again.

The next day was Saturday and when I awoke, it was to sit straight up in my bed and gasp. I’d been having a terrible dream in which Peanut (the dog with the severe stomach issues that belonged to Briggs’ mom) had grown to the size of an elephant and was chasing me down West Grand Boulevard past the Motown Museum. In the background, I had heard my boyfriend yelling. He wasn’t trying to help me or telling the terrifying animal to stop.

Instead he’d called, “Addie, this wouldn’t have happened if you’d cleaned the carpet!”

His voice still rang in my ears as I sat there in my little bed and then shivered slightly, because the upcoming warmer weather that I’d promised to Granger hadn’t yet come to pass…oh, holy Mary. Granger. This was the day that I was going to see him.

I had already confirmed my outfit with my sister Brenna and she’d assumed again that this was something I was wearing for Briggs. She’d been horrified anew by my clothes but she’d also expressed that she was impressed that I was still making an effort after all the years of our relationship.

“So many girls let things go. No wonder they’re single,” she’d said. She was single, too, so it didn’t make much sense—and that was exactly why I should have stayed with Briggs, because I was a good example to my sister Brenna who was so busy criticizing other women for their behavior that she didn’t recognize the problems with her own.

I hadn’t said anything in answer, considering that I might soon have been one of those single women…but maybe not, because there were many reasons to stay with Briggs and now that it was the morning, I reread the list to remind myself of more of his good qualities. Here was one: he knew CPR. If I ever choked, he would be able to help me. And he regularly changed his sheets, especially when his mother nagged him about it. She was able to talk to him about his house and cleaning habits anytime she wanted since she lived right next door and that was pretty close...

Ok, well, there were other things. I’d never known him to misplace his keys for longer than an hour or so. He had gotten me flowers once, carnations that my sister Grace had said smelled funny and hadn’t lasted too long, but how many people just got random flowers? Of course, on my birthday, he hadn’t gotten me a present and we’d been thrown out of Granger’s restaurant…

Granger. He was coming here and I only had two hours to prepare. I jumped out of bed and hurried to the bathroom, where the mirror showed that my hair had reached fright wig status and was definitely looking more orange although I’d been using special toning shampoo all week that was much more expensive than the one that I usually bought. It was probably just the poor lighting bringing out that unfortunate shade, that was all, but I didn’t enjoy seeing it. I took a long time smoothing out my curls so that they closely resembled my sister Nicola’s, because her hair was exactly like something you’d see on a poster in a salon except that she always let it get too dirty, and she usually wore it back in a messy wad. When I was done styling, I decided that the expensive shampoo had worked. My Nicola-waves weren’t orange at all.

My blue eyes still looked anxious, though, as they stared back at me from that mirror. To prevent a repeat of what had happened last weekend at the bar, I’d mentally prepped conversational prompts beyond “weather,” “your terrible work schedule,” and “the loss of your wife.” I felt like I was set with that, and by the time that the appointed hour rolled around, I was also dressed and ready. I was waiting at the front of the building under where there used to be an awning when a Jeep bounced over the potholes into the parking lot. I walked to the passenger door.

“What are you doing outside?” Granger greeted me when I opened it. “I would have buzzed your apartment.” He looked around and seemed a little angry. “You didn’t have to stand out here alone.”

“My doorbell doesn’t always work,” I explained. Also, Briggs always got annoyed when he had to wait for me to come down the stairs, because the elevator generally didn’t work either and he said I walked too slow. “How are you?”

“I’m doing all right. What about you?”

This conversation was already going much better than the last time, and I was so relieved. “I’m great,” I said happily. “Isn’t the sun so nice today?” Sugar! I hadn’t meant to mention the weather.

He glanced toward the sky. “I guess it is.”

“I always want to yank off all my clothes when it starts getting warmer in the spring,” I admitted, because apparently I couldn’t leave that topic alone, and was I referencing nudity? I pivoted. “What do you want to do this morning?”

“Bowl.”

“What did you say?”

“Let’s go bowling,” he stated more clearly. “I was thinking that a planned activity would work better than us sitting there staring at each other with nothing to say.”

“Oh.” It sounded slightly harsh when he put our previous interaction—not a date—in those terms. Also, I’d never been bowling on a Saturday morning, but I was game. “Sure, I love to bowl.”

“Really?”

“Detroit is the bowling capital of the world. Didn’t you know that?” I thought everyone did. “We went to the lanes with my grandpa every Thursday night. Juliet, the sister you met, is very athletic. She used to win even when the ball was so big that she had to use two hands to roll it. But I can keep up,” I assured him. “I don’t have my own shoes anymore, which is a shame.”

“You had your own shoes?”

“Brenna wouldn’t wear the rentals and with how often we went, it made more financial sense to buy them. We just passed them down, like all our stuff. Nicola was so lucky because she always got the new things and Sophie was always mad about that, even though as the second person in line, she was a lot better off than Grace. By the time that shoes and clothes worked down to her, they were in bad shape. She didn’t care much.”

He was smiling a little. “I didn’t know I was riding with an ace,” he remarked.

“No, I’m not at all!” I told him. “I’m not a very competitive person, either, and I definitely don’t get mad when someone beats me. I’m not a sore loser or a gloating winner.” I was thinking of Briggs again because he was both of those things, but I turned my mind away from that. “Do you bowl a lot?”

“I haven’t been in at least ten years. No time like the present.”

Ten years? It was on the tip of my tongue to ask if his wife hadn’t liked bowling and if that was why he hadn’t been frequenting the lanes, but then I remembered that the topic of his spouse was off-limits. I was curious about her, but I was going to have to learn to live with that and not pester him with questions about such a sensitive, sad subject. “Ok, if you’re not bowling, what are you doing?” I asked. “Before you opened the restaurant, you must have had more free time.”

He had to think about it. “My former job involved a lot of travel,” he said finally.

“What did you do?”

“I was in the military. When I retired after my injury, I recovered then was on a contract basis for a while. At the same time, we were planning for the restaurant and that kept me busy. I was still traveling frequently. That only stopped when I opened Amunì.”

“But that’s all work,” I interjected. “In my free time, I love to read. I also really like gardening, which is hard in an apartment, but I design imaginary ones and sometimes I get to plant real things in the back of my employer’s house where he can’t see them. Lately, I’ve been thinking about learning another language. I also like to hang out with my sisters.”

“And your boyfriend. Skurwysyn. You must spend your free time with him, too.”

I hadn’t officially placed Briggs in the Do Not Discuss column, but I found that I didn’t want to talk about him at all. “Yes, him too. And what about you?”

“Are you asking if I’m seeing someone?”

No, I hadn’t been, but I did want to know the answer to that question. I shrugged a little and he said, “No, I’m not.” He seemed to ponder for a moment. “I do have a car I’m working on.”

“Like, fixing it up? Is it a Thunderbird?”

“Why would you ask that?”

“Because I heard you mention it to the robber guy,” I answered. “You said that you wanted a 1956 Thunderbird, a black one.”

“Raven Black. That year, they came in nine colors,” he told me, and then I found out what his hobby was: loving cars. No, that wasn’t what he was working on (he said he didn’t know enough to restore a classic, so he was only trying to get an old truck running so he could pick up more supplies for the restaurant). But it was clearly what he was interested in, because once he started, he talked for the rest of the way to the bowling lanes about Thunderbirds and a bunch of other models that I had never heard of. I listened carefully and was learning a lot when he stopped abruptly.

“That’s what you said you do with Skurwysyn,” he told me as he pulled into a parking spot. “You said you mention sports to get him talking and then he won’t shut the hell up.”

“Did I say that? I don’t remember putting it that way but…yes. That’s what happens.”

“My trigger must be cars. Say the word, and I’ll bore you to tears. Ready?”

“I wasn’t bored,” I said, but he was already out and coming around to my side to open my door, too. As we walked toward the bowling alley, he did a visual sweep of the parking lot and he looked over the interior, too, just as he had when we went to the bar. We got shoes, picked balls, and chose a lane, then he said it was ladies first.

I settled for a spare and took a seat and it turned out that Granger was not a bad bowler. We had fun for a lot of frames. We were the only ones there for a while before other people started to show as well, mostly families with kids who had probably been awake for hours (if they were anything like my younger siblings). The lanes on either side of us filled and while I waited to go, I also talked to a little girl who was bowling with her parents and brother. We got so involved in discussing the swirls on her ball (they were like a hurricane, and she could tell you exactly why) that I missed that it was my final turn.

“I’m up by a few. You think you can pull ahead?” Granger asked. “I don’t know. I think you may wilt.”

“What? Oh, I hope I don’t! Let’s see,” I said. And I got a strike, and then another, and then I finished by knocking down nine, so I did pull ahead.

“Congratulations,” he told me, and we shook hands very formally. “You know I was bullshitting you. I knew you were going to wipe the lanes with me and I enjoyed going down in defeat.”

“Juliet will trash talk like that, too, and I don’t take it personally,” I said. “You were kidding but she really wants to win. You should have seen her on the blocks at the pool when she was on the swim team. She didn’t say anything but she would look at the other girls like she was going to kill them instead of doing the butterfly against them.”

“You’re not much into trash talk, yourself.”

“No, I let my score speak for me,” I said, and laughed. He also got a smile which he wore very well. “Bye, Janae. Good luck with your game,” I told the little girl in the next lane, but she was focused on her turn. Like Juliet, she was there to win.

“You make friends with people pretty easily,” Granger noted as we returned the shoes. The pair of mine could have fit inside one of his.

“You mean how I was talking to that little girl? Maybe. I do really like kids, but I like people in general. I even like my boss, Mr. Campbell, and he’s generally called a jerk by the rest of his employees. He gets called other names that are a lot worse.”

“But you don’t mind him. After you,” he said, and held the door.

“Thank you. I don’t mind him too much. I do have limits, and I let him know when he’s overly salty.” That reminded me of all the pepper on the salad that Briggs had ordered at my birthday dinner, and Granger was thinking of him, too.

“Your boyfriend swore at you at the restaurant. He told you to sit your ass down, and then he told you to fuck off. That was salty.” He closed the door of the Jeep behind me.

“We talked about that later,” I said as Granger started the engine, “and he apologized. I know it wasn’t right and there’s no excuse for it.” I found myself wanting to give one though, and I did: “When he loses his temper, he says all kinds of things that he doesn’t mean.”

“I can’t imagine talking to my girlfriend like that. Ever, no matter how much I lost my temper.”

Well, he was different from Briggs, then. He talked like that to me, to his mom, and to perfect strangers who made him angry. “I’ve been thinking about breaking up with him,” I said, which was a topic I hadn’t prepped at all. “It was on my mind even before that night, since last summer. He got into a big argument with my family at my parents’ house in July and it made me look at him differently.”

“Pretty soon, summer will be here again. You’ve been thinking about dumping him for that long?”

“It takes me a while to decide things,” I explained. “I was in college studying nursing for four years before I came to the conclusion that I didn’t want to be a nurse. I know it doesn’t make sense, with me as a Capricorn.”

“What?”

“Capricorn is a cardinal sign,” I said. “I should be ready to take charge and grab the bull by its horns, or the goat, I guess. It makes more sense because my birth chart—” But he had glanced over at me in confusion, like I was speaking another language. It was exactly how I must have looked in my Spanish classes. “When I get settled with something, I have a hard time changing it,” I stated and now I was watching him, so I saw him nod slightly. “Are you that way, too?”

“Not at all.”

Oh.

“I study a problem, cycle through the options, then make a decision,” he went on. “I’m not chiseling anything in stone, because I make mistakes. But I don’t hesitate, either.”

“Well, that’s not me,” I said. “I think about things, go back and forth, consult the charts—”

“That’s the second time you’ve mentioned those. What charts?”

“Astrological,” I explained.

“You mean, you think that the position of the planets is going to tell you whether you should break up with your boyfriend?”

“I think that they’re a guide,” I said. “It’s a really fascinating and complex topic. I never knew anything about astrology until I started working for Mr. Campbell and met his housekeeper, Mina. She’s been a student for years and she uses astrology to steer everything that she does. It’s just like when people go to a psychic for guidance, right? Or they could use an analyst as a sounding board, like my boss Mr. Campbell does.”

He wasn’t nodding anymore, and I felt like I wasn’t getting my point across.

“People have trusted in it for millennia. Lots of people use it.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” he said.

“I’m still learning. Mina’s the real expert,” I answered. “Briggs thinks that it’s stupid, too, but I don’t laugh at him when he has to wear the same shirt for every Michigan State football game, and I don’t make fun of his mom for going to church. People believe in different things.”

“I’m not trying to make fun of you. I wouldn’t let someone’s interpretation of stars and planets make my decisions for me, though. I’ll ask for advice if I need it and I’ll listen to what other people have to say, but I have to come to the conclusions myself.”

“That’s what I’m doing. Basically. It will just take me a while longer to get there.” We rode for a while in one of those silences that we’d suffered through the last time we’d met up, until his phone rang and he put the call on speaker to talk. It was someone from the restaurant needing help with problems there, something about a delivery and a bunch of prep stuff going bad and wrong. Granger went back and forth trying to solve things but then said that he was on his way.

“I wanted to take you to lunch,” he said after he hung up, “but I think I’ll need to drop you off.”

“I can go to the restaurant with you,” I volunteered. “I wouldn’t mind.”

“You don’t want to do that.”

Or, more likely, he didn’t want me to come with him. “Ok,” I said.

“I’ll probably get stuck there for hours.” I watched him move his jaw back and forth, as if he were loosening it. “I’m never really away from that place.”

“Well, I’ve never worked in a restaurant before, but I’d be happy to go. I manage a lot of stuff for Mr. Campbell, like the household finances, the groundskeeping schedule, and problems between other employees. Maybe I could help you.”

“You don’t want to do that,” he said again, but then he asked, “Really?”

“Sure,” I told him. “Maybe it would be better than the two of us just sitting there staring at each other with nothing to say.”

He did the jaw movement again. “Did that remark come off as rude when I said it?”

“Well, maybe it was a little abrupt,” I answered.

“I didn’t mean it like that, like a knock on you. When I said that we needed something to do, an activity so we weren’t staring, it was about me. I’m out of practice with…” He seemed to search for a word. “With people. I wasn’t ever great, anyway, but now I don’t appear to have any conversation left in me.”

“I think you’re doing fine. I had a great time bowling.”

He looked skeptical but did say, “You seemed to enjoy it.”

“I really did, and maybe you’re quieter than some, but to me it just seems like you’re thinking a lot. I appreciate that. And I agree that it felt a little awkward when we went for a beer, but now we’re much more used to each other. It’s not like that anymore—it might be quiet but it’s not awkward. Not as much as before, for sure,” I felt I had to add for honesty’s sake. “It will probably keep improving, and that’s normal. It’s how you get to know someone.”

“I’m glad you feel that way,” he said, and I nodded back. “I’ll try to wrap things up fast at the restaurant and we can get out of there. Maybe we could have lunch and talk while we do.”

I thought that sounded great, but it was clear to me when we arrived that things were really not going well and that we were not going to get out of there fast. People were running around and there was some yelling happening, as well as a delivery truck blocking (and maybe stuck in) the alley. Granger started to try to sort things out, his raspy voice cutting through the noise with authority rather than volume. I went outside to talk to the delivery driver, and when that was taken care of, I asked a woman in the kitchen where I could wait without getting in the way. That was where I was when he found me.

“Addie? You’ve been sitting in my office?”

I looked up from the paper I’d been writing on and nodded. “Hi. Did you get everything settled?” I stood up from his chair and shivered a little, because he kept it cold in here.

“For now,” he answered, and walked around to where I was sitting. “I’m sorry I made you wait for so long.”

“That’s ok. I met your head chef and he gave me a huge plate of food for lunch, and I’ve been fine in here. I was going to get a car to take me home, but I did want to talk to you about the delivery.”

“What?What delivery?”

“Well, Tiago meant to be here yesterday with the produce, but he’s having problems because the business belongs to him and his cousin and their grandmother is sick,” I said. “He was wondering if it’s ok if he changes his schedule to come on Saturdays, Saturday mornings, since Fridays are when she has her weekly doctor appointment. Poor lady. It sounds like they’re really going through it.” I shook my head, because it had been a very sad story. “Anyway, I told him I’d get your answer and text him.”

“You dealt with the delivery?”

“He and I talked for a while and everything is all put away now,” I assured him. “You were up by the tables fixing that broken light, which was pretty impressive. I didn’t know you could do electrical stuff.”

“Yeah, I guess I picked up…the delivery guy’s name is Tiago?”

“Yes and he’s Brazilian,” I confirmed. “I was thinking I’d take up Spanish again, but we talked about Portuguese and he was helping me with my accent. I may look into that instead.”

Granger nodded slowly. He looked down at the desk, which was very unlike the one that Mr. Campbell kept in his huge study because the one in this little office was almost empty. Mr. Campbell had piles of folders and loose papers, messes of documents that he swore were organized (but were not, not in any way). The only thing on the desk in this room was one framed photograph. I’d been looking at it a lot, at Granger with his arm around a very beautiful, dark-haired woman. They were both smiling widely and seemed so young and happy. It was his wife, of course.

Both of us turned away from the picture and our eyes met. I imagined that I could see regret in them, like he was sorry that the lovely woman from the picture wasn’t sitting in the chair that I occupied. But when he spoke, it was to express his gratitude. “Thank you for dealing with…”

“Tiago,” I supplied. “It was no problem. I’m glad I could help a little, and it seemed like you were getting everything else back under control.”

“It’s all right now,” he agreed.

“Great, well, I’ll get a ride—”

“No, let me drive you. At least I can do that, after dumping you here in this office for so long. And taking you bowling on a Saturday morning, and then not getting you lunch.”

“Well, it wasn’t a date. It was just two people hanging out together and expectations are a lot lower for things like this.”

“Is that true?”

I nodded. “When I get together with my sisters, I don’t have any expectations at all. No, that’s not right. I fully expect that one of us won’t be totally dressed, missing a bra or socks or if it’s Grace, her pants. I expect that one of us will be having some kind of breakdown, or will need money, or will have an empty gas tank, or will have just had a fight with our mom. I still love to see them, though.”

“I did remember to put on pants, so looks like I’m ahead,” he noted and I laughed.

“For a date, maybe we’d need a carriage with four white horses,” I said. “I’d be in a ball gown and you’d have tux with tails. It would be a lot of pressure.”

“That would be an experience. But since this isn’t a date, you’re going to have to ride in my Jeep.”

“That’s ok with me,” I told him. “Low expectations don’t bother me at all. I’d rather be relaxed.”

“Would you want to go bowling again?”

“Definitely,” I said.

“You think we could hang out doing other things, besides staring at each other?”

“I’m sure of it,” I told him.

“Good.” He made a triangle with his arm, and patted it with his other hand. “The Jeep awaits.”

I put my hand there, resting in the crook of his elbow, and we walked out. We had to stop on the way through the kitchen because there were four or five new problems, but it didn’t bother me. There was no pressure, and I’d had fun.