Chapter 1

Alex

M arch 20 th .

I’d had the dream again the night before, and woke up twisted in the sheets, my throat hoarse. I must have been screaming. I pulled myself from my covers and hung my head. It was always like this. I never slept very well anyway, but the nightmares made it worse. Whenever it got close to the date, they came more frequently, and I would wake up more tired than when I went to bed, feeling like I had gone ten rounds, yet not remembering in the morning what had obviously been torturing me through the night.

It was my anniversary.

In years past, I would have celebrated an anniversary with a shot of tequila. A bottle of beer, at the very least. With my friends in college, maybe malt liquor with a side of pot. In my pre-college days, a water glass full of my father’s thirty-year-old scotch. And actually, I had never needed the excuse of an anniversary to celebrate in order to drink. Any day was a good day: run into a friend? Let’s get lit together. Passed an exam? To the bar! Parents getting divorced? Why not get wasted?

But for the past eight years, the only liquid I had celebrated with was OJ or coffee. I wandered into the kitchen in my silent condo and flipped on the coffee maker, then watched the pot slowly fill. I raised my steaming mug. To me, and my traumatic brain injury.

I must have sat at the kitchen table for a while, thinking back. I rubbed my hand over my face and checked my phone. It was much too late to go row, now. Where had the morning gone? Occasionally time still seemed to slip away from me. I was going to be late for work, not that it made any difference when I showed up. I worked for my older brother Stephen at my family’s namesake real estate development firm, Whitaker Enterprises, but not in a corner office, as I had once assumed I would.

A lot changed eight years ago on March 20 th . I had just turned twenty-one, and had a really nice new Mercedes which I liked to drive very fast. I had already accumulated five points on my driving record that not even our family friend the judge nor my dad’s liberally applied money could expunge. I was driving alone (thank god) when a white-tailed deer ( Odocoileus virginianus ) ran across the county road in front of my car.

I didn’t actually remember any of this. I remembered the day before the accident, deciding to skip my Friday class (as usual) and drive up north on a Thursday night. Then my memories started up again about fourteen days later, waking up in the Elizabeth Blackwell Hospital ICU with my brother talking to me. But the police report stated that there was a deer carcass with severe trauma on the road, and the front-end damage to my Mercedes corroborated the story. There was other damage to the car: a white bump-out of broken safety glass in the windshield above the steering wheel, where my head had struck it. As the police report also noted, the driver (me) was not wearing a seatbelt. And the responding officer also smelled the odor of alcohol on the driver (me, again) immediately, which was later confirmed by a hospital blood test that showed I had a bodily alcohol content of .21. Drunk driving meant a .08 or more—I was well over the limit.

But as I said, I didn’t remember the day of the accident. I didn’t remember drinking, probably alone in my dad’s hunting lodge on that rainy March day (wet road conditions were observed in the report), instead of being in my apartment at college where I belonged. I didn’t remember getting in my car or where I was going, I didn’t remember hitting the white-tailed deer. I didn’t remember being extremely lucky that a volunteer firefighter was on her way home and found the wreckage of my car not too long after the collision. I didn’t remember the ambulance ride to Cherry County Hospital, or being transported downstate to a larger trauma facility. And of all that happened in the days and weeks after I woke up to my brother, my memory still remained a little spotty. I wasn’t sure if some of the things that I “remembered” were true. For example, I distinctly recalled that I was in the ICU in Florida. I knew logically that Blackwell Hospital, where I had been taken by medevac, was actually outside of Detroit. I even remembered seeing palm trees through my window, but there were no windows in the ICU there. Why did my mind kept insisting on Florida? Other things were also confusing: did my cousin Luke get into a dramatic fight with my mom, yelling over me as I lay in the hospital bed? That didn’t sound like something Luke would do, so was it actually my dad fighting with her? But I remembered Luke being there, screaming. Had my ex-girlfriend from freshman year really visited, like, a lot, or had I just imagined her? And who had kept tickling my left foot? It had driven me crazy .

I chugged the rest of my coffee, rallying to get dressed. Another day, another dollar. Except that my brother didn’t trust me with money, so my paycheck went into an account over which he was co-signer. I couldn’t make a withdrawal over $50 without him getting a text alert. I also shared my one and only credit card with him—gone were the free-wheeling days of having my dad’s AmEx platinum. At first, I had chaffed under the restrictions that Stephen had set up for me, but I had gotten used to it. Just like the uncontrolled tremors in my left hand, the monetary constraints imposed by my brother were a result of the accident, which itself was a result of my own bad choices.

Personal responsibility was a big thing in my family. A 12-step thing, too. My dad’s mantra was that personal responsibility led to success, and my family had a long, long history of success. Sure, there had been a few losers scattered throughout the generations, but in general, my family hit everything out of the park. In fact, I even had a cousin who was an actual professional baseball player. He literally hit things out of the park.

Luckily, I had—my brother had—paid my fines to the Secretary of State long ago, I had completed my community service (no jail time), my license suspension was over, and the doctors had cleared me to drive. I left my condo in Royal Oak and drove downtown to Whitaker Enterprises’ new headquarters on Michigan Avenue in Detroit.

∞

“Steve.”

My brother looked up from behind his three monitors.

“Hey, Alex. ”

Steve stood up from behind his desk and stretched his arms out. He was an enormous guy and even though he was the head honcho, he still always looked out of place to me in his tie and dress shirt. He was much more comfortable wearing hunter orange or a fishing vest and happier doing the activities that accompanied that clothing. But it was tough to run a multi-million-dollar real estate development empire from the middle of a stream. No cell service in the woods in the UP either.

“I have a few things for you to do,” he told me. I caught him surreptitiously checking his watch. I was a half-hour late, and he was trying not to say anything. He handed me a file folder, and I nodded and took it. My play assignments, which I would take to my play office, and mess around with for the week.

“Ok.” I turned to go.

Steve cleared his throat. “Eight years ago, today.”

I looked back at him. “Yep.”

“Can we go out together tonight?”

“Why, to celebrate the accident?” I asked him. I thought of my toast to myself that morning.

“Eight years ago today was the worst day of my life.” Just for a minute, his bland expression slipped and I saw real anguish on his face. “I would rather celebrate the fact that you’re alive.”

I was being a dick. “Yeah, man, sounds good. What time are you going to be done here?”

He checked his monitors. “I have a call with Auckland at six. 7:30 ok?”

“Sure.” He was the one who put in the long hours, not me.

I spent the morning futzing around in my office with the busywork that Steve had prepped for me. I had a hard time reading for any length of time—I still got headaches, eight years in, and he had included some documents for me to review. He was still trying to teach me something about the business. After a few hours I rubbed my temples and decided to take a break.

Cecili a

He was back again.

The tall guy, the drawer. The artist, I guess I should have called him.

Except he didn’t look like the artists I had known as a kid, with long hair and scarves and earrings. Like, hippies. Arty. This guy didn’t have any of that. First off, he dressed kind of preppy. Kind of office-y. Expensive looking clothes, and definitely no scarves. A successful artist, maybe? The ones I had known had all been dirt poor. Really, they were not very good at art, and worse with keeping track of their money, but no one we had known in those days had bothered about that.

He was too thin for his height, I thought. When you were only an inch and a half—the half was significant to me—over five feet, everyone looked pretty tall, but he actually was. And definitely no long hair. His was blonde, and cropped close to his head. He had an interesting scar on his temple, reaching back into his hair a little and going down the side of his face, and his ’do did nothing to hide it.

I didn’t know what color his eyes were. When he ordered, he kept his eyes down. Sitting at the tables, he was always looking down at whatever he was drawing, even when I bussed his dishes. He would say thank you, but he never looked up. He was so engrossed in what he was creating, that he never even noticed me practically hanging over his shoulder to study it.

But there was another weird thing. He never drew on paper. Like, pieces of paper, or a sketchbook or something. He drew on napkins, sugar packets (the tiny ones!), the cardboard sleeves meant for take-out cups, the bags that we put muffins in. And when he was done with his coffee, he would just throw his art away!

That was the moment I would wait for. He would toss it out, sometimes all crumpled up, but he never looked back at the garbage can. So I would stand over the can until he left and then fish his drawings out. Once, a lady had tried to throw away a sticky bag that had held a gooey jam-filled thing, and I was like, step back, this is off-limits for your trash. I was not going to let his beautiful art get ruined! She had been a little unhappy when I told her to find a different garbage can.

He was so talented. He drew all different things, but mostly scenes from nature, which was really not so prevalent in downtown Detroit, so clearly it was from memory. Leaves and flowers. Patterns of both. Fox, raccoons, birds, squirrels and chipmunks, a big one with horns (a moose?), deer. Lots of deer. If his medium was big enough (like once he had drawn across an old newspaper) it would be a whole scene of something: a bird flying above a forest, drawn from above, or a whole field filled with a herd of the big horned guys. I didn’t recognize everything he drew. I was not really a nature girl—well, not land animals, anyway. I was pretty good with aquatic life.

I would take his drawings, whatever they were on, and gently smooth them out, sometimes pressing them under books if he had crumpled them up. I had them all on a magnetic board next to my sleeping bag, and someday, I was going to frame them. They were that beautiful. Peaceful.

Today he was sitting at a table, with a cup of coffee to one side and a pen next to it, but he wasn’t drawing. I could see that his eyes were closed and he was rubbing his temples. He looked like he was in pain.

I could help with that. “You should try peppermint,” I mentioned as I bussed a table next to him, trying not to clink the dishes and make his head hurt more. “Or lavender.”

“Excuse me?”

Blue! His eyes were blue, like a bluey-grey.

“Essential oils. Peppermint or lavender. You can rub them into your temples to help with your headache. Not too much oil, though, a little goes a long way.”

“How did you know I had a headache?” he asked warily.

I mimicked him, rubbing my temples with my eyes scrunched and forehead creased in pain. “Some people take feverfew.”

He just kept looking at me. “You should try the oils first,” I commented. Then I quietly picked up my tub of dirty dishes and trotted it back to the kitchen. And when I got back out to wash my hands and take counter duty, he was gone. I hoped I hadn’t scared him away. If he had thrown out one of his pictures, I had missed it, but I thought he hadn’t been at the table long enough to draw.

I could have used some essential oils for myself, really. My skin was always getting so dry from all the hand washing I had to do. Funny, I had probably washed my hands more times in the four months of working at the coffee shop than I had in the first ten years of my life! My mom had never made me wash them—she thought that the germs would be good for me. I would have a really strong immune system that would protect me better than all the vaccines I would have gotten, if she had ever taken me to the doctor. Well, if dirt would make you healthy, then I must have been one super healthy kid, because she didn’t really enforce bathing, either!

I remembered when we had been in Antigua for a few months. Someone, I think Carol, one of my mom’s crazy friends (who was really a very nice person), had finagled my acceptance into a Catholic elementary school there. It was the first real school I had ever attended, and boy, was it rough at first! I’d had to wear a clean uniform, every day, and keep my nails and hair neat. The teachers had been shocked at the state of my person (and appalled by the gaps in my learning) and had done their best with me for the time I was there. I mean, they actually cut knots out of my thick hair (the underneath part was all matted from spending my life in the saltwater instead of using shampoo and conditioner in the shower or bath like the rest of the girls.) And they had taught me multiplication and division, which was very useful because my mom never bothered with mathematics. Under their tutelage I had looked pretty good, for a while, and if we had stayed longer I probably would have learned a lot! But then we weighed anchor, and I went back to my, well, feral state on the boat. Feral and free.

I picked up one of yesterday’s bagels and put it in the metal bowl outside of the front door. “Smokey is a go!” I called to Jason, my fellow coffee server. My coffee mate!

Thinking back to my time living on the boat with my mom had made me smile. She was such a nut! I missed her. It was getting on time for me to weigh anchor here, metaphorically speaking, and head out to find her in California.

I started to sing a little as I wiped down the counter. Today was the vernal equinox. It was officially a new season, which always made me happy. Jason, who was at the register, smiled at me and joined in the song. He had a beautiful voice, and when we were finished, a few customers clapped, and Jason bowed. That guy should have had a record deal by now! So talented.

I had seen my drawer, my artist, and talked to him, and on the equinox, too. If my mom’s friend Dasa were here she would tell me that it was a sign. Maybe she would have been right about that! I hummed under my breath as I organized the baked goods in the display case. What a wonderful way to start the spring. I picked up a cloth and spray and started to wipe down a tabletop.

Jason did some kind of dance, maybe the mambo, over to where I was cleaning. “Did you see him?” he asked.

“Who?”

“Don’t play that game,” he admonished me. “You know who. Did you make your move?”

“Maybe.” I grinned at him. Maybe. “Oh, there comes Smokey!” We watched as the grey and black dog came down the sidewalk, delicately plucked the bagel from the bowl, and escorted himself back home. We liked to provide him with his midday snack .

“Keri alert!” Jason suddenly hissed. I passed him my spray and we both started to assiduously scrub the counter.

“Jason, Cecilia! Does it take two of you to clean that?” a high voice whined behind us.

I turned and forced a smile, more like a grimace, at our manager, Keri. “It’s really dirty. Super gross, Keri. Could be fecal! I asked Jason to help me.”

She wrinkled her perfect nose. “Eeeewww! Both of you should have on gloves! Cecilia, wash your hands and then come to my office.”

I sighed inwardly. Keri was our manager because her father owned the coffee shop and the building that held it. She was also the manager because her fiancé, Harrison, worked in one of the nearby offices, and she wanted to keep an eye on him. I could have given her a binding spell to use on Harrison that I learned from my mom’s friend Andre, but really, I didn’t want to step into their mess!

I washed my hands (again!) then reluctantly followed her beautiful high heels into her office, a slightly oversized broom closet with a desk shoved in. As usual, her focus was 100% wedding, and she got right to the point. “I’m thinking about the bridesmaids’ gifts. I don’t want to spend too much, because there are twelve of them, but I really want to make Shanti ashamed for those trashy necklaces she gave to us at her wedding last year. She made us wear them with those ugly-ass dresses, and I swear the cheap gold dyed my neck green. I, like, ripped it off and threw it away after the ceremony! Did I tell you about that? She and her husband rode in on horses, it was so overdone.” Calculation lit her eyes. “Although, with my long veil that could look really dramatic. ”

Ugh, this made me tired. “I don’t think gold can dye your skin. I don’t think those necklaces were real gold.”

“Are you serious?” She whirled on me in rage. “Then I’m cutting her out of my bridal party!” Keri picked up her phone and jabbed wildly at it for a while. “There, I just sent that bargain basement bitch a text and she is out!” She paused. “Wait a minute, then we’d have to cut a groomsman. Hang on.” She typed more on her phone. “She’s back in. I told her it I got auto-corrected.”

I could feel that my eyes were bugging out and tried to retract them. “Um, I should get back to work at the counter and help Jason…”

“Hang on! What do you think of this?” She showed me a picture of a stunning necklace, a simple chain with a diamond solitaire. How could someone with such a bad attitude have such beautiful taste?

“I think it’s lovely,” I said honestly. “I would love a necklace like that.”

Keri considered it. “Maybe. Maybe rose gold. Ok, go back to work.”

A lex

Lavender essential oil. I thought about that as I popped the top off the pill bottle and downed two aspirin with a glass of water. That tiny girl in the coffee shop had imitated me with my headache. If I truly looked that miserable, no wonder everyone at the office steered clear of me. That, and the whole thing about hating my nepotistic ass. I didn’t blame them in the least .

Steve came in to check on me, as he usually did, around lunchtime. “Did you eat?” he asked, checking my desk for signs of lunch. Or of booze, probably. I caught him secretly sniffing me, sometimes.

“I’m good, man. Did you?”

“Danny brought me something when he got his lunch.” He looked around again. I slid the aspirin back in my desk and flipped over the paper I had been drawing on when his eyes were elsewhere. “Is it dark in here?” Steve finally asked. “I’ve been trying to figure out why this room is so depressing.”

“Because I’m in it? No, I have the lights dimmed a little. You can turn them up.”

He did, then walked quickly to me, looking in my eyes. Checking my pupils.

“I have a headache,” I told him. “I’m not on something.”

Steve looked ashamed. “Sorry. Do you want to go home?”

“How many other employees would you let leave if they had a headache?”

“You’re not an employee here,” he said quickly. “You’re a partner.”

“Stephen, please. I know exactly what I am here.”

He looked at me again, and repeated, “Did you eat?”

My lunch had been liquid. Coffee. “I’m good,” I said again.

“You look too thin to me,” he fretted.

“Not all of us can have your He-Man physique,” I told him. I had taken after my father, the Whitaker side of the family. We were tall and lean. My brother looked more like my mom’s side, which tended toward the tall, but also big and husky. This was why my stick-thin mother did not allow a calorie to pass between her lips, except of the liquid variety (I didn’t mean coffee). “Steve, will you lay off me? You’re not my mother.”

That made both of us laugh. As if our mom had ever cared what either of us had eaten.

“Ok, I’ll stop the nanny routine. I’ll be in meetings for the rest of the day, and then I’ll meet you for dinner. I’ll have Danny email you the reservation.”

Danny, his assistant extraordinaire. “Sounds good.” We looked at each other. “Spill it, Steve. What do you want?”

“Did you make an appointment with Dr. Mavromatis?”

“Yep, I’m going today.” Yet another therapist. “Happy?”

He was clearly not happy, and I was sorry I had made him that way.

∞

Dr. Mavromatis’s office looked almost exactly the same as every other therapist’s office I had visited in the past eight years. Muted colors, boxes of tissue. A waiting room with people who would not meet your eyes.

“It’s nice to meet you, Alexander,” he told me, ushering me in. “Or do you go by a nickname?”

“Alex. ”

We sat down, and I kept myself from fidgeting. “What brings you here today?” he asked.

“I was in a car accident eight years ago. I have anxiety and depression as a result of the accident and the traumatic brain injury I received when my head hit the windshield. I am a recovering alcoholic. Eight years sober,” I added, before he asked. I had this speech down pat.

We went through the various medications that I was on. “You’ve been in treatment since the accident?” he asked.

I named all the therapists I had seen that I could remember. Psychiatric therapists, not the occupational, speech, and physical ones that had helped me pull myself back together. That list would go on forever.

His eyebrows went up. “You’ve named at least ten different doctors.”

“There were more, but I can’t remember them all.”

“And why do you think you’ve had so many?”

That was a good question. “Well, as an example, the last woman I went to asked me to stare at a card with a dot on it for five minutes. That was enough for me.”

“So you didn’t find their methods beneficial.”

I sighed. “Look, I’m not doctor shopping for opioids, ok? I’m not Matt Damon, I’m not going to have some kind of breakthrough if we talk about a baseball game. I’m actually a really shitty patient. All I want is refills on my existing prescriptions, for you to tell my brother that I showed up, and we’re good. Ok?”

He nodded slightly. “And why would I need to share information with your brother?”

“Well, I’m assuming he’ll contact you after my appointment. He likes to check up on me.”

“I want to assure you that anything that you tell me in our sessions is completely confidential,” he promised. Dr. Mavromatis glanced at his notes. “You’re twenty-nine years old, correct?”

“Yes.” My left hand started to shake and I clamped my right hand on top of it. But this guy didn’t miss it.

“After reading your medical history, I have to say, your recovery sounds almost miraculous.”

“Yes, apparently I wasn’t given much chance of a good outcome at the time of the accident. But here I am, just needing refills.” Hint, hint.

“Besides me writing prescriptions for you, how do you think I can help you here?”

I pretended to ponder that. “I’m not sure there’s much you can do for me.”

“Is there anything you would like us to work on together?”

I shook my head. “I think I’m good.”

We went back and forth for a while in the same vein, until my appointment was over and it was time for the next poor sap. He did, however, call in refills for me, so I was good to go.

I checked my phone repeatedly so I would be on time to meet Stephen for dinner, and in doing so arrived at the restaurant even before he did. He came in about five minutes later, tie loosened and top button popped open on his shirt. He looked tired, like the weight of the world was on his shoulders. But then after we ordered, he smiled. “Hey, I have good news! Luke’s wife is pregnant with a baby girl.”

I smiled too. Along with my brother, my cousin Luke had always been my hero. Steve and I had gone up to his wedding on the beach the previous summer. Luke’s wife, Emily, was like some kind of Viking goddess, tall and blonde and stunning. Smart, too. Of course he would marry someone like that. They had adopted her nephew, and he had been the best man, this little guy standing next to my big cousin. That had been funny, but almost everyone there had ended up bawling through the ceremony. The bride had apparently been through a lot, and Luke was looking at her like he was the luckiest guy on the face of the earth. Even I had cleared my throat a few times.

“That’s great news about the baby.” We clinked water glasses. “How’s Luke doing?”

Steve laughed. “He childproofed their house when Emily was two weeks along.”

I laughed a little too. Sounded like him, Mr. Conscientious. I looked at my brother, wondering. He would be a great dad. Look how he was with me. “Would you ever want that? A family?”

Steve got busy taking some pita bread. “I don’t know what’s in the cards for me. I don’t have any plans.”

Now that I thought about it, I couldn’t remember the last time that Steve had had a girlfriend. “You’re a catch, man. Why not?”

“What about you?” he asked me, and I was stunned .

“Steve, seriously? I’m barely able to take care of myself.”

He shook his head. “That’s not true. You’ve made unbelievable progress.”

That was undeniable. When I had first woken up, I hadn’t been able to talk. Steve had stood over me, babbling something and crying, and I couldn’t process it at all. That part I definitely remembered, but I remembered it like it was part of a TV show that I had seen about someone else, if that made sense. It was separate from me. “Progress, sure, but I’ll never be back to normal.”

“You go to the doctor today?”

“You didn’t email him?”

He had the grace to look embarrassed. “Dr. Mavromatis said it was inappropriate for me to be in contact with him about you. That you’re an adult and I should respect your boundaries.”

Maybe I liked that guy. “Yeah, you and I are not great with the boundary thing.” It was the understatement of the world. If Steve had his way, I would be living with him, we would be driving to Whitaker Enterprises together each day, probably working at the same desk.

“You got around a lot in high school and college,” he mentioned. “Are you seeing anyone now?”

I had been depressed for a long, long time after the accident, and that didn’t allow for many fun times with the ladies. I’d had, literally, zero sex drive. “No women in my life,” I responded. But then, for no reason at all, my mind flashed to that tiny girl at the coffee shop today, the busgirl. I had seen her there before, bopping around and singing under her breath. Sometimes she sang with the other guy who worked there, which should have really, really annoyed me, but which I somehow enjoyed. “No, I’m not seeing anyone.”

I changed the subject by asking him about going to Montana to fly fish. It was his one vacation of the year.

Steve talked enthusiastically about his trip for a while, and I pretended to be interested. Watching a string bob around in the water had never really been my thing. Gradually, he tapered off, then played with his fork a little. “Mom wants to see us,” he blurted out.

I made a disgusted noise. So this was the reason for the dinner. “Steve, I can’t be around her. I can’t do it.”

“I don’t want you to do anything that would jeopardize your sobriety,” he assured me. He had attended a few meetings himself, and picked up the lingo. “She called me today because she realized that it was the twentieth.”

“She really remembered?”

He nodded at me. “She said she misses you. That she wouldn’t drink around you.”

I shook my head. “I can be around people drinking. But I can’t be around her, if she’s drinking or not. I don’t know how to explain it to you, man, I just can’t. I’m sorry.” Being with my mom made me want to crawl into bed with a fifth of gin.

But Steve nodded again. “That’s what I told her, in so many words. It’s ok, I just promised her I would bring it up.”

I felt terribly, horrendously guilty. “I would if I could, I mean it. ”

Suddenly he reached across the table, but before he grabbed my hand, he made a fist. “Alex, please don’t apologize. She doesn’t deserve anything from you.”

A few therapists back I had gone over this. “It’s not about payback, ok? I understand that she has problems of her own.” But saying that really didn’t make me feel any better. “Can we talk about something else?”

We moved on.

Cecilia

The best part about my current sleeping situation was that the world was my oyster. I could live anywhere. I could go at a moment’s notice over the bridge to Canada if I wanted, a different country! I could drive to Chicago, or just out to one of the pretty suburbs around the city. Although that was a little tough. A ratty old van stood out like a sore thumb in some of those neighborhoods and the residents were pretty quick to call the cops.

A bad part was that sometimes I got a little afraid at night. And a little cold. There wasn’t much between me and the outside. Sometimes, Jason’s parents let me park in their driveway in front of their beautiful house on the West Side in the Rosedale Park neighborhood, but I hated to impose on them. My yellow van with the bubble window really didn’t go with their well-kept house!

The other hard part was bathing. It was a real adventure sometimes, but three months ago I had joined the YMCA and could swim some laps most mornings and take a shower. No matter what my mom believed, I had developed into a person who was huge supporter of being clean! I was on my way walking from my swim at the Y to the coffee shop when I saw my drawer. He was driving an old Jeep into the garage of one of the big office buildings. I couldn’t see any bumper stickers at all, but that was something I would need to clear up. So he was an office guy, as I had suspected! I stored that little tidbit away, and got my buns to work on time.

“Hey,” my other coworker, Neveah, called when I came in. I waved back at her. She was super nice but we had gotten off to a bad start when I’d overheard her making fun of my hair. It was a bit of a sore spot for me. But when she realized that I really didn’t know what to do with it—think forty pounds of curls on a short person’s body—she took me to her mom’s beauty salon and they helped me A LOT. Now I had a head of thick, shiny ringlets down my back, not a giant mass of frizz (that frizz actually had given me a little addition in the height department, so it wasn’t all bad). Her mom had banned me from using a brush, like entirely. No brushing! Who knew?

“Cecilia,” she called to me now, “come on over here and tell me what this says.” Neveah held up a piece of paper with some words written in Spanish on it. I had first picked up a little Spanish in the Dominican Republic when we were there during hurricane season to stay with my mom’s friend. Her special friend, if you got my drift.

“It’s just a grocery list,” I explained to her. “See? Leche, pan . Milk and bread. More food stuff, cereal, then it says dry cleaning, the part that’s underlined.”

“Damn, you’re good!” she told me admiringly.

I laughed. “It’s just a few words! I don’t think I could get by anymore all in Spanish. ”

“Tell me again how you learned it,” she demanded, and I launched into the story of my mom sending me out to make friends on the beach when we first arrived in the DR. I had ended up going home with a girl I had met and rejoined my mom three days later. In the meantime, the family I stayed with had a gigantic party for one of their older relatives, with a huge barbecue and tons of delicious food. They were a super nice family and it had been an awesome way to start to learn Spanish. I still wrote them letters sometimes.

Neveah always marveled at the part that I hadn’t come home for three days. “Seriously, your mom didn’t call the cops?”

“Nope,” I said, straightening up lids for the take-out cups. “Hand me the cleaning spray?”

She passed me the bottle. “Damn, my mom would have freaked out if I was gone for days when I was nine! I had to call her at the salon the minute I got off the school bus.”

I had been eight. “Well, she trusted me to come back, I guess, and my mom’s a little different. I was one of the original free-range kids.”

“And where’s your mom now?”

I smiled and shrugged. “California! San Francisco, I think. I’m going to save up a little more and then I’ll head out there and find her.” After I finished up my stuff in Detroit.

Neveah was impressed. “Driving all that way, all by yourself. You’ve got nerve, Cecilia! I don’t even like driving to the airport alone.”

“Well, I’m older than you are,” I told her. She was only 19, but I was 24. There was a world of difference once you got into your third decade. Also, we had been raised a little differently. Her mom and dad were kind of the opposite of free-range.

“What is she doing in California?”

“She writes poetry, sometimes. She meets her friends. She does yoga.”

Neveah stared at me. “Doesn’t she have a job?”

The idea of my mom holding down a job made me laugh out loud. “No! She’s never worked. Her parents set up a trust for her, and we always just lived off that.” My grandparents had owned a bunch of car dealerships in Connecticut, where my mom had grown up, and from what I had gathered, they had left her fairly well-off. Hard to know now, though, how much money was left. If I knew my mom, and I did pretty well after being her constant companion and best friend for the first fifteen years of my life, she had been tapping into the principle for a while.

“Where does she live in San Francisco?”

That was always the hard part. My mom was sometimes a little hard to run to ground. “I’m not exactly sure where she is, but I know her friends there. Once we stayed with one of them for months when the boat was dry-docked, getting repaired in Florida.” Going to California had been my first time on an airplane. My mom had blessed it with sage before we got on and had made the flight attendants nervous.

“You mean your mom didn’t tell you where she is?” Neveah’s eyes were huge. “Really?

My mom was hard to explain to those who didn’t know her. “She has a friend in New York, and we have this deal that if anything is really wrong, she’ll get in touch with him, and he’ll get in touch with me. She doesn’t have a cell phone, because of the energy fields they create, and she moves around a lot so she never has an address.” At least she was on land now, though, since our boat had finally met its end a few years ago. She was terrible at maintaining it when I wasn’t there to keep an eye on things.

Neveah was clearly entranced. “You have the coolest life, Cecilia! You’re so lucky that your mom doesn’t care what you do.”

Well, I would have to be honest. That gave me a little pang when she said that. “She cares, in her own way. Look, we have customers at the counter!”

A few hours later, at around ten, in he came again. He looked better than yesterday. The wrinkled-up pain face was gone.

Maybe it would be a good time to sweep around the tables at the door. I took the broom and worked my way over toward him, being careful to edge the bristles around all the table legs, moving the chairs. Not looking.

But then, when I got close to his table, he was looking at me!

“Hi,” said my artist.

“Hi.” I smiled at him, so happy to see him back again. “Is your headache gone?”

He reflexively touched his temple. “Yeah, all gone.”

“Did you try the oil?”

“Sorry to say, I just went with pills from the drug store. Maybe next time.”

I peered over the top of his coffee cup to see what he was drawing, and he moved his hands over it. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Cecilia.”

“I’m Alex. It’s nice to meet you.”

“Likewise,” I told him. Alex was a very nice name. If my mom’s friend Phillipe were there, he could have used numerology to determine if we were a love match. As it was, I was going to try my luck!

“I would offer to buy you a coffee, but it looks like you’re all set. Want a muffin?”

He looked so surprised, it was funny to see. “Uh, sure.”

I turned to go back to the counter. “I’m comping you,” I called back to him. “You’re like a coffee shop high roller.”

When I put the plate down on the table in next to his coffee, I sat down in the chair across from him. “Do you mind if I take my break here with you?”

“No, please.” He still looked a little shell shocked—maybe I was coming on a little strong. I tried to reel myself in.

“So, Alex, what do you like to do besides drink coffee? What are your interests?” Maybe he would talk about his drawings.

He considered. “I’m interested in collecting and identifying vermin found at rest stops.”

“Really?”

Alex started to laugh. “No, not really. Who would do that?”

“I’ll bet there’s somebody out there. There are a lot of people into a lot of weird shit!”

He looked at me. “If you don’t mind me asking, how old are you?”

“I’m twenty-four. How old did you think I was?”

He quirked his eyebrow. “I think answering that would be a losing proposition for me either way I went with it.”

I blew a curl back from my forehead. “Everyone thinks I’m young because I’m so damn short. Sometimes I feel like, if this guy pats me on the head, I’m going to bite him!”

The eyebrow shot up. “That would certainly prove your maturity.”

“How do you do that?” I held one of my eyebrows and tried to make the other go up on its own. In response, he moved his left eyebrow almost to his hairline, making me laugh. “How old are you?” I asked.

“I’m twenty-nine. Your elder.”

“Hmm. I would have guessed you were older than that. Not because you look old, just more mature, I guess.”

“Should I be insulted?”

“I meant it as a compliment! So what do you do around here? You come in for coffee a lot.”

Alex’s face lost its smile. “I work for Whitaker Enterprises. It’s a real estate development company.”

“Oooh, I love real estate.”

The smile was back. He had such a nice smile. “Really? What do you love about real estate?”

“Well, I’d love to own some. I never actually have, but it’s my dream to, someday.” A house of my own, with lots of land. And a vegetable garden, and a barn. And I would have pygmy goats and a horse. And a fence to keep the goats from the vegetables.

“You’re a renter?” Alex asked.

“Nope.”

“Live with your parents?”

“No, I live by myself. In my van,” I explained.

“You seriously live in a van?”

“Yes, seriously. A yellow van, the color of a highlighter. I call her Nina. I bought her a few years ago in Jacksonville. I’ve been working my way north. I’ve been in Detroit for four months.”

Alex was shaking his head. “You thought it was a good idea to spend the winter in a van in Detroit?”

“Sometimes things just work out how they work out,” I explained. I didn’t need to explain what I had been looking for in Detroit. “It’s just kismet. And I have a really great sleeping bag. It’s rated to zero degrees.”

“You live in a sleeping bag in a van,” he repeated. “You’re on your own, I’m guessing?”

“Just me. I can show you, if you want. It’s parked by the Riverwalk right now. Near Rivard Plaza, but I can’t stay there overnight. I like to walk around down there after I’m done here. ”

“Wait a minute. You live in a van, down by the river?” Alex started to crack up. Like laughing, really hard. I started laughing too because he looked so cute, it was contagious.

“Is that a TV show joke? I didn’t grow up with a TV,” I finally said when he calmed down. “Except one summer when I lived with my mom’s friend Carolina in Costa Rica, but I only watched telenovelas . I never get TV show references.”

“You grew up in Costa Rica?”

“Partly. It’s too long to explain—I have to get back to work.” I stood up, then remembered my question. “One thing. Do you have any bumper stickers?”

“What?”

“Stickers on your bumper, back of your car, you know, stuff on your car windows.”

He seemed perplexed. “I think I have one for my condo complex.”

“Just the one?” I confirmed.

“Why?”

“I have a theory that the more stickers a person has on his car, the more likely he is to be a serial killer.”

Eyebrow up. “No, I’m not a serial killer. If you don’t mind me asking, how many stickers do you have on Nina the yellow van?

“None,” I assured him. “But there’s a picture of the sunset painted all across the left side.”

“Cecilia, you are an unusual woman. ”

“Should I be insulted?” I asked, repeating what he had said to me.

Alex smiled. “I meant it as a compliment,” he copied my answer right back.