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The Milaflores Building didn’t have parking, Mrs. McGlothen had told me when I’d first taken my tour with her. “Who needs a car, anyway?” she’d asked, shrugging and shaking her head. “And if you do, then you can leave it in the garage down the street.”

That was where Oliver had left his vehicle and we walked there together. “Are you sure you don’t mind doing this?” I asked.

“No. I wouldn’t have suggested it if I didn’t want to do it.” He opened the door of a car that I would have described as regular, nothing fancy and nothing particularly huge. I was able to get in very easily and he closed the door behind me. “Yesterday, Vera Doyle told me that I was so much like my grandfather,” he said as he also got in. He was quiet for a moment and then added, “I didn’t love hearing that comparison.”

“He’s not congenial,” I agreed.

“I’ve been hearing from my dad that I have a poor attitude and that’s the same thing he says about his own father. Gramps is the original Oliver Marchand. He and my father love each other and hence, I got the name. But they don’t get along anymore.”

“That’s too bad.”

“You’ve met my grandfather. As you said, he’s not congenial,” he pointed out.

No, that wouldn’t have been the word to describe him but I thought of several others. Irascible. Obnoxious. Hostile. “My mom doesn’t get along with her parents, but it works as long as they’re not in the same state. Or the same part of the country,” I said.

He smiled, something that I hadn’t seen him do very often. Once, he had smiled when we’d been out for a run and he’d seen a little girl with an ice cream. He used to get cones at that same place, he’d said. He had smiled when he’d stepped out of the elevator and seen his grandfather the night before. Was this only the third time that he had worn this expression? Maybe so.

We had a nice time together that day, even if there wasn’t a lot of smiling. I bought two chairs, which fit in the back of his car because they came in flattish boxes, and a dining table in another large package. “You don’t have a table where you eat?” he had asked me several times, but I had not. And now I did, if I could assemble it. I got some delicious-looking food, which would serve well as appetizers, and some plates on which my guest and I could eat them. “You don’t have plates?” he had confirmed.

Now I did but before, I’d only had a large bowl for ramen and another for my cucumber slices. “I’m not used to having a lot of stuff,” I explained. “We moved too much for that and I didn’t want to carry a lot, anyway. Now I can start accumulating more, since I don’t plan to move again. Ever.”

“Never? You want to stay in the Milaflores Building for the rest of your life?” Oliver asked.

“Why not? Are you planning to go somewhere else?”

“Maybe.” He put his last bag of groceries into the back area of his car and we were ready to drive home, although now I was wondering how long he planned to call it that.

“Why would you want to move?” I asked. “It’s a great neighborhood. Mrs. McGlothen keeps everything up. You’re across the street from your grandfather and the two of you seem to get along. What’s wrong with it?”

“I always thought I’d be in a house of my own. I don’t want to be a renter forever.”

“I would have a problem with keeping up a house,” I said. “I don’t know how to fix things or how to mow a lawn.” I thought of the various plant-based businesses that I’d been involved in with my mom, all of which had failed. “I don’t think that I have a green thumb.”

“Neither do I, but I could learn. Couldn’t you? According to what you told me, you figured out eight years of school in one summer.”

“No, I didn’t,” I said, shaking my head. “I was very behind all the way through college. ‘Life lessons’ are no substitute for actual classes and books. I loved books but I—did you feel that?”

“What?” Oliver looked around the parking lot. “Do you mean the speed bump?”

“Ok, never mind.” I breathed a sigh of relief. “I know that Michigan is on good bedrock but the New Madrid faultline isn’t that far away.”

“Except for the time I lived in California, I’ve never been worried about earthquakes,” he said. “You had mentioned something about the…what was the place where you lived that had severe damage? La Nieta?”

“La Grieta,” I corrected. “I’m really surprised that you didn’t know about it. The downtown was almost wiped out.”

“Were you there when it happened?”

“I was in the library for storytime. That was a big deal because my mom didn’t like books and I got to listen to one about a pigeon…anyway, yes, I was there. A firefighter found me under a table.”

“They had to dig you out?”

I nodded. “Some debris had fallen on top of it. I was lucky that I went under there, and I only did it because the librarian yelled for everyone to duck and cover. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. That’s why I’ve been careful since to learn emergency procedures, like where the closest exit is and about potential weather and environmental hazards. I decided to always live on the ground floor or first floor of an apartment building so that I could escape more easily. Just in case.”

“That makes sense,” he said. I was glad to hear him agree with me.

I told him a little more about La Grieta and how it had been founded as a stop for the railroad as it cut across the country. “A lot of the other ones turned to ghost towns but it had survived. We were going to have an organic fern nursery.”

“This town is in the desert, the Mojave. Wasn’t water an issue for your nursery?”