It hadn’t escaped her notice, though, that Lenny’s was the only text she’d received all day. There had been nothing from Des, not a word since he’d left that morning. How could it escape her notice? It was all she’d been noticing. Her phone burned in her back pocket, mocking her anxiety. And she couldn’t text him—no, of course not. He’d been the one to leave. If he wanted to talk to her, he would.
Maybe he was freaking out, just like her. She wouldn’t blame him. They’d been clear about the rules of their little arrangement, and done so well sticking to them until she’d lostevery ounce of cool she had and pounced on him like a starving lion. Orgasms had made her stupid.
At least Holmes and his ability to get stiff gray hairs all over every inch of her would offer some distraction.
She unlocked Lenny’s front door with the key she’d been given nearly a year before and cracked the door open. When there was no sign of lunging animals, she ducked inside, and almost managed to get the door closed before she was shoved back against it by a battering ram of Great Dane. A giant wet tongue laved up her face and skirted toward her ear, and she pushed against the insistent Holmes, a combination groan and chuckle wheezing out of her.
“Get off me, you monster.”
Once he’d settled down, and she could move again, she marched into Lenny’s kitchen to feed him. He had a food bowl bigger than her head propped up on some kind of stand so he could eat without straining his neck. She mixed up kibble with a portion of leftover lasagna that Lenny had earmarked for him and stored in the fridge; the spoiled dog wouldn’t eat dinner if he didn’t have some people food mixed in. Then she fished a bottle of water out of Lenny’s fridge and returned to the living room to flop down on the sofa. She could get in an episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine before Holmes was ready for a walk.
She was almost right. She was eighteen minutes through a twenty-two minute episode, feet propped on Lenny’s coffee table and scrolling through Facebook, when Holmes barreled into the living room. He took a running leap at the couch and landed against it like it was a quarterback to be tackled, then shoved his upper half into Cami’s personal bubble before she had time to scramble away. Her phone went flying, clattering to the floor with a series of clunks that made her concerned for the state of its case.
“Holmes, relax!” she laughed, and he gave her a big slobbery grin as he sat on the other end of the sofa. Then, with a sigh and a smile, she climbed onto the floor to go phone hunting.
Lenny tried to keep the place clean, but tidying was not one of her strong suits. Holmes shed more than Cami would have expected, and his fur was hard to get out of the carpet even with several runs of the vacuum, so crawling on her hands and knees presented her with an undesirable amount of dust and gray hair. Her phone was going to be covered in this. She sure as hell wasn’t going to wipe it on her jeans, so Lenny’s couch would have to do.
She spotted her phone after lowering further onto her elbows and peering under the loveseat adjacent to the full-size sofa. Her phone had landed a few inches under the couch, invisible to searching without getting close to the floor. Also invisible was some kind of book, pushed back toward the wall. It had been there some time, covered in dust and fluffs of dog hair. After shoving her phone into her pocket, she reached under the couch and waved, only just managing to catch the edge of the book with her fingertips. There was a scratch of thick nails against carpet as Holmes joined her on the floor to help her investigate, but he gave up, heaving himself onto the floor as she fished the book out and brought it into the light.
The cover was a simple, rich brown that came back to life when she swiped her palm through the layer of dust on it. It looked like leather, but upon turning it over in her hands, she realized it was just some kind of faux-leather material designed to look fancy. And it wasn’t a book, after all—it was a photo album.
“Huh.” She climbed onto the couch. In the time they’d known each other, Lenny had never come across as the type to keep photos or mementos of any kind. She was such a live-in-the-now person that Cami had never questioned it, even if she’d found it alittle sad. So the surprising part wasn’t that Lenny had forgotten a photo album under her sofa; it was that Lenny had a photo album at all.
The prospect of Baby Lenny photos was too good to pass up. She cracked the cover and turned to the first thick page. It was the kind of sticky photo mounting paper that was so popular in the days before digital photos, with the peel-back laminate that spread over the photos once they were added. The first photo was, indeed, of a baby, but the woman holding him was clearly Lenny. Younger, yes, and a bit thinner, with dirty blonde hair that came down to her ribcage, but definitely Lenny. She was perched on an ugly floral print sofa, clutching a pudgy baby wearing an unfortunate bonnet.
Cami sighed, a bit wistfully, as she leaned back into the corner of the couch. She’d known Lenny had had a son, and that he’d passed many years ago, but she didn’t talk about him much. Or at all, now that she thought about it. She sometimes mentioned her late husband, but generally speaking, the past wasn’t her favorite topic, and the last thing Cami wanted to do was pry. Guilt niggled at her, and she wondered if she should put the photo album back where she’d found it. Maybe it had been placed there on purpose, rather than kicked under the couch accidentally. But of the little Cami knew of Lenny’s past, she didn’t know why Lenny wouldn’t at least keep the album on a bookshelf or tucked away in a closet.
It didn’t make sense. It had to have been an accident. Maybe Lenny had even been looking for it and wondered where it had gone. In that case, she’d be ecstatic to have it back, safe and sound save a little dust.
As Cami mulled it over, she idly took the remaining pages in her hand and started letting them fall to the left, catching brief glimpses of the other entries as the pages passed. Lenny’s son aged through them like it was a flipbook, growing into a toddler,then a child, a preteen, and a high school student. There was an occasional inclusion of other papers—a handwritten Christmas list for Santa, a crayon Mother’s Day card, etc. Then, toward the last few pages, there was a photo she recognized.
She sat up, leaning over the book as she stared at it. The photo showed a teen boy and girl, dressed to the nines in their nineties best in front of a cardboard moon and stars suspended from obvious strings. They were tucked together like a couple should be at their senior prom, grinning and obviously happy. It was a photo Cami had seen before. Not even just once. That photo had been hanging on the wall of her grandmother’s home the entire time Cami had lived there. It was the only photo she’d ever seen of her mother and father together.
All at once, her brain turned to scrambled eggs. None of this made any sense. Her mother had gotten pregnant young, and, when her boyfriend, Cami’s father, had fled, she’d moved to Tennessee with her parents, where Cami had been born and raised. She remembered knocking on the door of this apartment building a year ago, the painted blue door pulling open to reveal a flustered Lenny trying to hold back an excited Holmes. She’d gotten the address after a significant amount of digging through old records featuring her father’s name. Lenny’s home had once been Steven Whitmore’s, Cami’s dad. She’d explained, flushed and embarrassed, how she came to be on Lenny’s stoop, and who she was looking for, and Lenny had only frowned thoughtfully and told her no one by that name lived there.
But if Lenny didn’t know her dad, then why did she have his prom photo in an album stashed under her couch?
Holmes tucked his head against her thigh, and Cami huffed a laugh that was just broken enough for her to realize she was crying.
Lenny had lied to her. This whole time, all the months since she’d given Cami a job and a place to live. She’d known exactlywhy Cami came to California, what she’d been looking for, and she’d had all the answers, and for whatever reason, decided Cami didn’t need them. Lenny was the only connection to her family Cami had. Lenny was her grandmother. And she’d known and never said anything.
She wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her T-shirt, blew out an exhale, and turned the page again.
There were several pages left, populated with a few photos of Lenny’s son—her dad—clutching a high school diploma, then at the graduation ceremony for some sort of military training, judging by the uniform. Then, a newspaper clipping, before two more empty pages. She flipped back to the cut-out, dark text on yellowed newsprint. It was an obituary: STEVEN H. WHITMORE, 1980 - 2006. Killed serving his country. Predeceased by father Joseph Whitmore. Survived by mother Lenore Seaver.
No mention of the girl he’d gotten pregnant or the daughter he’d abandoned.
He was dead. He’d been dead this whole time, and Lenny had said nothing. She’d let Cami sit up in her little apartment above the store, idly googling her father’s name every few weeks in the hopes that he’d be mentioned somewhere. Refreshing her Ancestry DNA account as though he’d magically appear. How had she missed the obituary in all her searching? Had the Santa Monica newspapers even published obituaries from the 2000s online?
It didn’t matter. Whether she’d missed it, or whether it had never been online for her to find, Lenny had known and chosen to keep it from her. Like Cami didn’t deserve to know if her father was alive or dead.
She couldn’t feel her hands or feet, but somehow she stood. She fumbled her phone out of her pocket, Holmes nosing aroundher toes as she swiped for Lenny’s number on the speed dial screen.
Before it started ringing, she disconnected.
She couldn’t talk to Lenny. What would she say? She’d only yell at her, cry and demand answers, and where would that get her?
It would go badly. And as much as she didn’t care, as much as she yearned to inflict on Lenny some fraction of the pain that was pulsing through her veins like septic blood, a tiny voice in the back of her head reminded her of one important fact: Lenny was her landlord and boss.
