“I talk to myself all the time. That’s not strange,” I say.
“Well, I wouldn’t use you as my barometer for normal,” he quips. “Anyway, it’s not the talking to myself part I’m worried about. It’s the fact that I’m starting to talk back!”
I laugh and settle into the couch beside him. “What are you reading?”
“A letter from the great-grandson.” He shakes his head sadly. “Sweet boy, but I don’t know how he’s going to make it through school with that name.Eustace.”
“Maybe he’ll go by a nickname,” I offer, but Ernie isn’t going for it.
“What sort of nickname? Eu? Stace?” He folds the letter and gingerly sets it on the coffee table in front of him. “Ah, well. His mother says she labored with him for two and a half days, so he deserves it.”
I smile. “When do I get to meet them all? Over the holidays?”
Ernie shakes his head. “I’m hoping we’ll both be out of here by then. Especially you.”
I know he’s mostly joking, but my heart sinks.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he says. “Girls your age ...boysyour age ... the things we got up to. Youth is wasted on the young.”
“I get up to things,” I say defiantly.
“Like what?” he asks, his eyes gleaming with genuine interest.
“I went to a party over the weekend. I went for a run. I work at a day camp on weekdays before I come here.”
Ernie looks disappointed. “Sounds like a riot. You could live next door to me in one of these units with everything you have going on.”
“That would be lovely. You’d be a great neighbor.”
“I think so too, but Clarisse says that when my snoring isn’t keeping her up, my pounding around is.”
“Your pounding?” I repeat. “That’s ... weird. Do you walk around a lot at night?”
“Not so much walking, but there is a tennis ball I like to throw at that wall,” he says, pointing to the wall that divides Ernie’s unit from his neighbor’s. “Physio says it’s good for the bum shoulder.”
I sigh, and Ernie does a villain laugh.
“I’m taking that tennis ball when I go.”
“If you promise not to come back, you can have all six of them.”
My stomach tightens. I’ve laughed off most of his comments over the eight months I’ve been coming here, but I’m starting to get worried. “Are you ... tired of me coming around?”
Even though I met him only late last year, he’s one of the few people I spend any time with these days and the thought that he might have had enough of me stings.
Ernie snorts at my question. “No, but we both save face if you stop coming before you get sick of me.”
I touch his arm, relieved. “I’m not going to get sick of you.”
“Oh, please,” he says. “My Mary did sixty-some years with me, so they made her a saint.”
“I think that was a different Mary.”
“That’s not what I heard,” he says with a chuckle. His face grows more serious now. “Look, my kids have their lives on the East Coast. I raised them to be independent—they’re only doing what I taught them to. Same with the grandkids. Great-grandkids ... well, one of them is named Eustace, the other Titus, so they have enough problems of their own. Sure, sometimes it gets lonely, but it was six years after my Mary left me before they moved me here, and I managed fine. Iwillmanage fine.”
“I know you will, Ernie, but Ilikecoming to see you.”
He stares at me skeptically for a few minutes and sighs. “Well, I suppose they pay you good to say that.”
