Chapter 4

Istared at the scene in my driveway. Hadn’t I designated exactly where vehicles were supposed to go? Because there was a truck parked there that I didn’t recognize, and it was fully three feet away from where it should have been—I didn’t even have to measure, because I could see that with my naked eyes. We’d also discussed rules for visitors and I hadn’t specifically mentioned the kids from across the street, but it should have been obvious that they were included under the umbrella of guest regulations. So why were they sitting in beach chairs in my front yard, when all grassy/formerly grassy areas were off-limits except to the renter and homeowner?

I parked at the curb and got out of my car. The sun was starting to shine brighter but it was still the gentle, spring light that I’d always loved—not enough to cause anyone to get freckles, which could have happened no matter the level of sunscreen applied, but enough to give off warmth and promise. I didn’t notice it much, though, because today hadn’t been good. I’d had another interview that hadn’t gone well, again. And now there was…what was this, a party in my driveway? What was going on here?

“Hi, Nicola,” Jude called when he saw me. “You remember my boss, Cal.”

“I do,” I said, and Jail Ink Moses nodded to me. “What are you guys doing?” I asked them. “It’s early. Why aren’t you still at the woodshop?”

“It turns out that Cal has a friend who’s a scrapper, but he likes to keep metal that he thinks might have some future use,” my tenant explained.

“He also likes to keep shit for no reason at all,” Cal said, and the boy in the beach chair looked disapproving but the little girl giggled hard, the laughter spilling around her hands when she clasped them over her mouth. “Damn, I keep forgetting the tadpoles are here,” he mentioned.

“Yep, we’re watching our language,” his employee agreed. “Anyway, we went over to the guy’s yard and found some springs that I thought would fit in your garage set-up, and now Cal’s helping me fix it.”

“What?” I stared, not understanding. “You’re both fixing the garage door?”

“Despite my giant muscles, I wasn’t sure if I could handle the weight of all this,” he explained, and flexed ostentatiously. Then he and the kids laughed, and Cal made a noise that might have indicated humor but sounded more like a coyote barking. We’d heard them at my grandparents’ cottage up on Torch Lake, where we’d visited as kids and my sister Addie had been afraid of snapping turtles in the water. I was more afraid that she’d drown there because she was a terrible swimmer, so I’d kept an eye on her.

I used my eyes now to study what Jude and his boss were doing and yes, they were repairing my garage door. It was totally off its tracks and was propped against the side of the little building. They had ladders opened and tools, much more impressive than mine, spread across a moving blanket on the cracked cement pad.

“You needed an audience for this?” I asked, pointing to the kids, and Jude smiled at them.

“Tamara and Michael got off the bus and wondered what we were doing. They’re paying attention because their door is old, too.”

“My mom says we’re not allowed to touch it. We don’t keep the car in there,” the boy confirmed.

“I can look at yours when she gets home from work, if she wants,” Jude said, and that started a one-sided conversation between him and the little girl about what her mother’s job was, where it was, and how nobody liked it because it was better for her to be home where everybody wanted to eat the food she cooked, especially the waffles.

“I’m a big breakfast man myself,” Jude agreed when she paused for breath. He and Cal had been working steadily throughout her monologue and I had just stood there, staring at everyone and not getting this at all.

“I need to speak with you,” I told my tenant, and he nodded calmly and put down the screwdriver he was holding before he followed me up to the house.

“How was your interview?” he asked before I could say anything else.

“It was fine.”

“Was it?”

“Yes, it was—well, she asked some tricky questions about my employment at Detroit Saint Raphael, and she got a little snippy with me, but it was fine.”

“You think you’ll get an offer?” he asked.

“Why, am I in the house too much for you? I know I said I wouldn’t be around, and soon enough, I won’t be,” I told him. I hadn’t been partially unemployed for very long, but it was enough time for me to be so nervous about it that I was getting sick to my stomach.

“I don’t mind when we’re here together. We get along.”

We did seem to.

“Since I’ve moved in, I’ve noticed you don’t get up and scream at three AM like one of the guys at the halfway house did every few nights. You’ve never stolen my clothes, either, which I appreciate. So as far as I’m concerned, living here is an ideal situation.”

Good. “It is,” I said aloud.

“You don’t need to go back to work to keep yourself out of my way, if that’s even a consideration. It seems like it must have been hard on you to have two full-time jobs, though, so it would make sense to me if you’re reconsidering the idea.”

“You probably have the same hours now that I used to when I was at both hospitals,” I told him. “You’re at the woodshop building stuff for Cal, you stay after-hours to work on your own projects, and you do food deliveries. That’s more than full…that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about,” I said. “I want to discuss what you’re doing to my garage.”

“Fixing it?”

“You didn’t tell me that you were going to do repairs,” I said. “I can’t reduce your rent any further.”

“I’m not looking for a reduction. I saw you sweeping water out of there after it rained so hard the other day and I thought, that’s something I can do to make her life easier. Cal was ready to take off early on a Friday, anyway.”

“He wanted to take off early to work on my garage?” I asked doubtfully. I was extremely doubtful about all of this.

“He just wanted a change of scenery,” Jude explained. I frowned and looked over at the two children from across the street, who were still watching Cal work like it was some kind of video game. He followed my gaze. “Are you upset about the kids being over? I’ve been watching them, and I wouldn’t let them get into anything of yours or get hurt.”

“You don’t know how fast kids can start a whole lot of trouble. In about one second, my brother would be sitting on top of the refrigerator and if you yanked his feet, like Sophie wanted to do, it was way too far to fall. One time, Grace got into the dryer and Brenna was trying to turn it on. Thank goodness she was such a poor reader that she couldn’t tell what the different buttons meant.”

“Kids are idiots,” he agreed, but he had a funny smile.

“They are. You can never take your eyes off them.”

“I’m guessing a family of your own is not in your future,” he said, still with the expression I couldn’t pin down. Was it amusement? Chagrin, or sympathy?

I wasn’t interested in any of those things from him. “I’m going to change,” I announced. “I mean, I’m going to change my clothes.”

“You look nice in your interview stuff,” I heard him say as I shut the front door and I couldn’t keep my eyes from going to the mirror hanging there in the foyer. I looked ok, I supposed. Maybe slightly better, because without another job, I was sleeping a lot more. My hair seemed healthier, possibly. And the interview clothes I’d pulled out, the same ones I’d worn eight years before when I’d looked for my first nursing jobs and been hired in the ICU at the place that had recently fired me—those still fit, which was slightly gratifying. I was a little bit proud of that, actually.

But I did go take them off for safekeeping. Then I remade my bed because I was unhappy with how the comforter was wrinkled and then I saw a few more things to adjust, and by the time that I returned to the front yard, the garage door was back in place and closed and everyone was gone. Cal’s truck was out of the driveway and the chairs had been folded and leaned against the fence, where they had been for years. An old boyfriend had bought them for me because he kept wanting us to go to the beach together—I didn’t have time for things like that, but he tried to force the issue by providing me with the equipment. I wasn’t sorry when he was gone, because besides wasting money on things I’d never use, he’d also mouthed all the words while he read. Nothing was as annoying as watching him with a book, and I’d written extensively about that horrible habit in my journal.

I walked over to the garage and nearly jumped out of my skin when Jude spoke from inside it. “It works,” he called. “But stand back, just in case.” I heard the familiar clanking sound as the mechanism started and then to my shock, the door rose a whole lot faster than it ever had before, even faster than when I’d first moved in.

“What did you do?” I asked when it peeled open enough to reveal him standing there.

“We replaced the springs and oiled it up. Nothing much,” he said, and wiped off his hands on his jeans. He only had three pairs of pants and these were one of them; the other two were already dirty. Being home more, I’d come to notice what he was wearing. “It wasn’t as bad as I expected,” he said, and then looked thoughtful. “Now would be a good time to add some words of wisdom.”

“What would you suggest?”

“Maybe…” He considered. “Maybe, ‘If you face your problems head-on, they may not as big as you think they’ll be.’”

“They’re usually worse. Like when someone comes into the ER and says, ‘Hey, there’s something wrong with my toe,’ and the thing that’s wrong is that it’s detached from their foot.”

“Ok, Eeyore.” He smiled. “Want to have dinner?”

“Together?”

“I didn’t eat yet,” he explained. “Cal went off to see the sixty-year-old woman that he calls his ‘girl’ and Tamara and Michael went home. Yep, it would be only you and me.”

“I don’t cook for myself,” I said, and he nodded.

“I noticed. I’m still not sure what you eat. Your shelves in the refrigerator are almost bare except for some maraschino cherries.”

“Those were from my birthday,” I said. “My sister Addie came over and we made drinks.” I should have thrown those cherries away, but I had a hard time tossing things if they weren’t going bad. Also, they reminded me of that night, which had been fun. She’d convinced me to take a vacation day and we’d eaten popcorn and watched a terrible horror movie while having a few too many whiskey sours, complete with a fruit garnish which she said made them birthday ready. We’d put orange slices in them too, and of course I’d carefully washed the rind before I’d sliced into it. I thought about her birthday—I’d been working but I was sure that I’d texted. I must have.

“That sounds fun,” Jude was saying. “That’s what I mean when I say that I always wanted siblings, to have things like that. The story of finding the little one in the dryer…not so much.”

“I had to watch them like a hawk,” I reiterated.

“You must have done it well since they’re all fine now, right? Want to pull your car in?”

I got my keys and did that, feeling much more secure about my little vehicle now that it was safely behind a closed door. It wouldn’t have been much use to any one except for Cal’s friend the scrap metal dealer, but I didn’t want anyone to get at it.

“Do you cook?” I asked as we went inside. I’d seen that his shelves in the fridge held more than maraschino cherries, and there were often dishes drying in the rack. I’d smelled things too, good things, but I’d never come down to see what he was doing.

“I do cook, but only a little,” he answered. “Very utilitarian.”

“Did you learn from your mom?”

He laughed, but not in the normal way when he sounded so thoroughly happy. This definitely had a bitter tinge. “No, I certainly did not. I’m not sure that she knew that there was a kitchen in our house.”

“How did you get fed when you were a kid? Was your dad on top of it?” Mine had been for dinner. I had handled breakfasts, but I only did toast and peanut butter. Sophie and I used to slap together lunches for everyone who wasn’t big enough to make their own, or if we were lucky, we got to buy it from the school cafeteria.

“My dad was also not interested in meal preparation. So I learned on my own, and I always thought I would like to take a cooking class.”

“Really?”

“It seems like food is filled with possibilities. I look at a tomato and I can only slice it and eat it, or bite it and eat it.”

“Really?” I asked again. “You eat tomatoes like I would eat an apple? That’s really strange.”

He ignored my remark. “Other people see tomatoes and imagine a hundred things they could make with them,” he continued. “Maybe a cooking class would open my eyes to those possibilities, too.”

“Maybe. Or maybe it would be full of people like my sister Brenna, who are only there for snob cred. She also goes to classes about wine and she did a beer-making thing, too. She does cheese tastings and she even went to a seminar about caviar. She spends a ton of money so she knows more fancy and esoteric stuff to talk about, and it only serves to make her snottier.”

Jude laughed. “I wasn’t talking about caviar seminars. I hate that shit, both the texture and the taste. It makes me sick.” He looked down at my shoes, as if he was remembering another time that he was sick.

“I’ve never eaten it,” I remarked, and he said that I wasn’t missing out. He ended up taking some non-caviar items from the cupboard and the refrigerator shelf that were designated as his to make something pretty simple for us. “I’ll pay you back,” I said.

“I don’t mind sharing,” he told me, and I remembered when I thought he’d taken one of the ketchup packets that I kept in the door next to the refrigerator shelf that was mine. I’d asked him about it and hadn’t believed him when he’d said no, he hadn’t touched it.

It had turned out that the slippery little packet had fallen out of the door and slid under the fridge when I’d angrily jerked on the handle after my first interview at the Presbyterian Hospital of Detroit. I’d been upset because I thought that it had been a disaster. After eight years of employment, I had been out of practice with spinning words and talking myself up. I probably hadn’t ever been good at that, because I tended to say what I thought. Whatever my sister Sophie believed about it, honesty wasn’t only an excuse to be rude.

But it had been dumb to get so worked up about a fast food ketchup packet. “I’m sorry about getting mad,” I announced.

He turned his head away from the pot he’d been studying on the stove, full of boiling water and noodles that he was keeping careful track of. “Do you mean when you thought I’d taken too long in the shower? Or when I folded my towel in the way you didn’t like and you left a post-it on my door with a diagram to explain the correct way?”

“No…”

“Oh, when you left another note about how I was stomping in my room rather than walking normally? Or just now, when we were out at the garage? Or when—”

“I meant that I was sorry about accusing you of taking my ketchup, but I’m sorry about those other things, too,” I interrupted.

“Apology accepted.”

“Really?” I asked skeptically. “Is that because of your twelve step program? You have to accept apologies?”

“I don’t have to accept them, and no, it isn’t anything to do with my steps. I believed that you were being sincere and you were also telling me that you would try not to get mad about those things again. That was why I accepted your apology.”

“I’m not mad about you fixing my garage. Thank you for doing that.” I thought of how I’d nudged my siblings into good manners but I had forgotten them myself. “I was startled,” I explained. “I didn’t expect to see Body Art Gandalf and the kids in my driveway.”

He started to laugh. “I’m calling Cal that from now on. I’ll call him that from a distance, because I may be thirty years younger but he knows how to fight. Sergio told me about some young guys breaking into the shop a few years ago, and Cal kicked all their asses.”

“Really?” I asked, so he filled me in as he filled our bowls. I got involved in the story of Cal defending his territory and of the bruises he’d proudly sported around the neighborhood, letting everyone else know not to try anything ever again. It led to me talking about the injuries I’d seen in patients after street brawls in my time in the emergency department, and I realized that I was getting a little graphic with the gore.

“Are you going to get sick if I keep talking about this as we eat?” I asked.

He seemed surprised. “I don’t think so. Blood and guts don’t bother me much.”

“My sister JuJu gets faint at the sight of blood,” I explained. “I can’t even say the word around her.”

“JuJu?”

“Juliet,” I expanded. “Patrick is her twin and he couldn’t pronounce her name when he was little. We all call her that. We also call Brenna ‘the Brat’ but not to her face, because she would go crazy.”

“You don’t seem like the kind of person to run from a fight,” he pointed out.

“She’s exhausting,” I said. “That’s why she always gets what she wants, because she wears us all down. Addie’s the softest. She’s like talc.” I ended up talking even more about my sisters, something I rarely did.

“So when am I going to meet them?” he asked, and immediately followed that with another question. “Are you done?”

“Are you going to eat what’s left on my plate? Holy Mary, that’s a terrible idea,” I said. “Do you know what’s in my saliva?”

“Are you saying that I also shouldn’t be using your toothbrush?”

I stared and he stared back. We sat like that for fully a minute.

Then he started to laugh so hard that after another minute, he had to wipe his eyes because tears poured down his cheeks.

“Were you kidding?” I demanded. “Was that some kind of joke?”

But he couldn’t answer, because he was holding his stomach in pain.

“Are you using my toothbrush? Is this related to saliva? Why are you doing this?” I asked, but then I felt myself start to smile. It was so ridiculous! He was a grown man, howling like a monkey and crying more than my brother Patrick when he’d gotten caught joyriding in my grandpa’s old Cadillac. It was so ridiculous that I found myself start smiling too, and then I was also laughing.

I recovered first and got Jude a glass of water, which he drank quickly and led to him hiccupping. “Thanks,” he said, and then jerked with the contraction of his diaphragm. “I’m not really using your toothbrush. I wouldn’t, especially not after living in that halfway house where people seemed to consider all belongings as communal property. And I especially wouldn’t do that to you, because you really wouldn’t like it.”

“No, I really wouldn’t.”

“Is that because you grew up with so many other people trying to get into your stuff?” he asked.

“None of my siblings dared to touch anything of mine. Why aren’t you more careful of personal space?”

“Who says I’m not?” he countered.

“You were about to eat food off my plate,” I pointed out. “You leave your bedroom door open all the time. I thought only children were selfish.”

“Thank you,” he said, but he smiled. “Anybody can be selfish no matter how many brothers or sisters they have.”

“I guess.” I looked down at my plate and then pushed it across the table.

“Thanks, Nicola. Now we’re even for the garage.” He ate the rest of my pasta—which was his, after all, and we weren’t even.

The next morning, I got up at my usual time, but Jude’s bedroom door was still closed. I’d heard him the night before, after I’d gone to bed. He’d walked up and down the stairs a few times as if maybe he couldn’t sleep, so he might have been making up for that now. But just because I’d been fired, it didn’t mean that I should have sat on my butt and been lazy. I went to the garage and tried the opener, which functioned again. It cranked and creaked up but it got there, and I got to work. I’d noticed the day before how dirty it was after the months of having the door open all the time, so I moved out my car and started to clean. It was part of my house, after all. There was no excuse to let things slide anywhere in your residence. I decided that I would go down to the basement next. I didn’t like the thought of that, but I would.

“Hello?Excuse me?”

I whipped around at the sound of a woman’s voice, one that I didn’t recognize but when I saw her face, I thought she looked familiar. She was young and pretty, and also tall. That meant this stranger could carry off curves better than someone who had stopped growing at age thirteen, no matter how many more inches she’d wished for.

“Yes?” I asked.

“I’m Shannon. I live across the street with my kids,” she said, and gestured over at the house which was definitely the worst on our block. Since I was aware that it was a rental, that made sense. She didn’t feel any responsibility for its upkeep and it definitely showed.

“Yes?” I repeated.

“Are you Nicole?”

“Nicola,” I corrected. Years of annoyance at people inadvertently switching the vowel at the end of my name made my voice sound sharp. “Can I help you with something?”

“I wanted to say hello and introduce myself. I heard that my kids were over here yesterday and I hope they weren’t bothering you.” She brushed some pieces of blue-streaked blonde hair from her face as she spoke and a spring wind whipped up. It made the leaves swirl in the dust on the garage floor, which was embarrassing.

That made my voice even sharper. “I wasn’t watching them yesterday. I hope you don’t think that they were being supervised by anyone in this household.”

“They don’t need supervision,” she answered, frowning. “They can be on their own.”

“Fortunately for many people, Michigan doesn’t have laws regulating a minimum age for children to be left alone. Of course, CPS can come at any time if they suspect neglect.”

Her nostrils pinched and turned white. “Are you threatening me?”

Why did everyone jump to that conclusion? My former nurse manager had thought the same thing when I’d said that she would be the next to go, but I was only stating facts. My neighbor flounced away, back across the street to where her kids (for once) weren’t out alone in the yard.

“I don’t care if they come over here,” I said suddenly, surprising myself with the words. But she might not have heard me, because I hadn’t said them very loud and she’d stomped pretty fast in her anger. It was better anyway; despite what I’d just told her, I didn’t want her kids hanging out here. I wasn’t going to be responsible for them, not in any way—but I also wasn’t going to call Child Protective Services and rat on her. I knew that most of the people I worked with would never have considered leaving their kids alone for those lengths of time, but some other people couldn’t help it. Anyway, I didn’t care enough about her and her life to intervene, so I went back to cleaning and the sun rose higher in the sky.

Jude was the next visitor. “Are you washing the floor of the garage? Your tires are going to go there, aren’t they?” he asked, and I squinted up at him.

“It doesn’t hurt to have a clean floor anywhere,” I pointed out. I imagined that my former roommate, Liv, would have argued with me about that, telling me that I didn’t need to scrub the old concrete and maybe I would want to take a break. But he only nodded thoughtfully.

“I swept my garage plenty of times, but I never considered scrubbing it with soap and water.” He picked up a broom. “This one would work.”

I looked around, noticing how much more area there was to wash. “Maybe I could sweep. I do have other things I could work on instead.” And he found another broom, too, so that it went much faster.

“What do you have to do?” he asked as we swept. “It’s Saturday, so you can’t have another interview. Are you going to the hospital?”

“No, I’m just doing weekly chores. How about you?”

“I was thinking of heading over to Sergio’s house.”

I leaned on the broom and remembered the idiot with the nail gun from the woodshop. The first night after Jude had moved into my house, he’d gone out, leaving while I was in the shower. He’d been away for a few hours. Had he been over at that guy’s place? He’d mentioned how much Sergio partied and he’d also shared some gossip about the massive, alcohol-fueled arguments between his co-worker and his girlfriend. I wondered if they were all drinking together. If Jude was doing that, it was none of my business, but I looked at him and hoped he wasn’t.

The garage looked a lot better after we swept and he eventually left, and a few minutes later, I did as well. Shannon and her two kids were out in their front yard. The little boy was picking up sticks and the girl was ineffectively moving a broom of her own across the sidewalk. She waved at me and I did back, but the other two just stared.

Anyway, none of them were my concern. I drove over to a house that was only ten minutes from where I lived but it was at a different level of crime and danger. I was careful when I got out of my car and I hurried up a path even more rutted than my own to the front porch.

“Eddie?” I called as I knocked, but he didn’t answer.

A man walked by on the sidewalk and eyed me, and I kept an eye on him in return to make sure that he moved away instead of moving in on me.

“Eddie!” I called a little louder, and I finally heard some noise from within the house. Slowly, the door creaked open and there he was.

“You again? Why the hell did you come back here?”

“I brought your groceries and we have bills to pay,” I said. “I’m cleaning your bathroom today and it’s time to clean yourself, too.” I had a long list of things that I needed to accomplish in this house.

“I just took a shower,” he informed me.

“Last week,” I agreed. “You need another one.”

“Go to hell,” he stated, but he did ease the wheelchair back enough for me to have room to enter. I closed the door and looked out through the peephole at the man who continued to loiter on the sidewalk.

“Has that guy been bothering you?” I asked. “He’s standing there like he was watching us.”

“You want to wipe my ass or not?” Eddie asked me instead of responding normally. First, I put away the food I’d brought and cleaned up his kitchen, scrubbing the counters with a bleach spray I’d made because he never listened to me about putting raw poultry on it, and washing the floor just as I’d started to do in my garage. Then I checked his prescriptions and nagged him about how he was taking them, looked at his emails, opened his paper bills, and paid everything that was due.

There were a lot of chores waiting for me here, as there always were. I also glanced at the front window a few times to see if the man who’d been loitering on the sidewalk was still there, but he’d moved on. There were enough problems inside that I didn’t need to dream up extras, like I was sure that the roof needed more work, and Eddie told me that the bus that was supposed to pick him up twice a week to take him out of here hadn’t come even once.

“Did you argue with the driver again?”

“Bossy old bitch,” he muttered.

Sugar, that meant he had. “I’ll call them on Monday and try to be diplomatic.”

“You?” he asked, and scoffed. “You’re a worse bossy bitch than the bus driver.”

“Maybe I’ll be able to force her to take your old butt back, then,” I said. “Do you want to look at the menu I wrote up for the week? I saw you ate all the dinners I made last Sunday.”

“That rice and beans was shit.”

“It was low-sodium, and I also saw the cupcake box you tried to hide in the trash.”

“It’s my goddamn house, Nicola! Worst mistake I ever made was to mess with a pushy nurse!” he yelled at me, but then he let me help him to take a shower in the special stall, and he sat in the kitchen as I prepared dinners for the rest of the week, putting a post-it with instructions for re-heating and dealing with leftovers on each dish. Before I left, I took out my journal and made another list of things that needed to be done in the house, like someone checking the roof, like painting the columns on the porch, like picking up in the yard as my neighbors, Shannon and the kids, had been doing.

“You’ve lived here for a long time,” I said, and he nodded.

“You know that this was my mother’s house. So the hell what?”

“Are you friends with any of your neighbors?” I wondered.

“Why would I want to mess with those trashy people? Bunch of ignorant fools.”

Well, we thought the same about that. I stayed until late in the day, and when I finally arrived at my own home, Jude was still gone. I was aware that I shouldn’t have done it, but I did go into his bedroom again. It showed me that he hadn’t been there since we’d both taken off that morning. I stood in his room for even longer, looking at a drawer that he hadn’t pushed in all the way, at the pillow that hadn’t been fluffed so it still showed the impression of where he’d rested his head, and at a t-shirt that poked out of the dirty clothes basket that I’d provided. I thought that I could do some laundry for him, to pay him back for fixing my garage and making dinner. I didn’t mind it at all, in fact, so I washed his stuff and folded everything the way I liked before I left it on his bed.

When I went to my bed, the house was still empty except for me. I imagined Eddie, resting his head on his pillow in his own empty house, and I wondered if he were lonely there. He must have been. I didn’t go to sleep myself until I heard my tenant get home.