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“I’m not treating you to dinner.” Then I realized that he was nearly crying with laughter again. “Is this a joke?”

“So far, I’m glad that you hired me.” He pointed out the sights as we went to a part of Detroit that I didn’t know (there were a lot of those, since I hadn’t spent much time exploring). We did go to what looked like a steakhouse, but it wasn’t fancy.

Still. “I’m not paying for your dinner. We have a working relationship,” I said. I knew what happened when these kinds of things were undefined, like between my mom with all her friends. People took advantage.

“Sure, just pay for your own,” he told me. He expertly parallel parked and we went inside, and the place must have felt like a second home to him. It was just as dark as his record store and car but, I hoped, was cleaner.

“Table for three,” he told the host.

He had just correctly shown me every single part of an automobile and then driven here perfectly, but I still wasn’t sure about his competency. I nudged him. “We’re a party of two,” I murmured.

He and the host ignored me and we got a table for three. “Is someone joining us?” I asked.

“Here he is,” Mr. Marchant said and a huge smile broke across his face, making him look similar to someone else—oh. There he was.

“Hello, Gramps,” Oliver said. He took the third chair. “I didn’t realize we’d have a guest. Hi, Kat.”

“Hi,” I answered. I had a feeling that I was wearing a huge smile, too.

“I was showing her how to drive. She’s not bad,” Gramps explained.

“That’s high praise,” Oliver told me. “Usually, he says that people drive like—”

“Watch your mouth,” his grandfather ordered, and Oliver stared at him in surprise.

“Really? You’re the one who taught me how to swear. You told me a special phrase to say to my band teacher because she’d like it. She did not like it,” he mentioned to me. “Neither did my mother.”

“Well, it got them to sit up and take notice. He was the most talented kid in his class and the damn school was blind to it.” Mr. Marchand frowned at the memory. “Second chair, my ass.”

“Why did you need another chair?” I asked Oliver.

“He means in the band. He’s still upset that I was the second-chair clarinetist and not the first, meaning the best. I deserved the second chair because I messed up when I tried to do a three-octave scale to show off.” He shook his head. “Also, it was fourth grade. We’ve all had time to work through it.”

“He’s an amazing musician. If he hadn’t gotten involved in that science crap, he could have had a real career,” Gramps told me.

“As a clarinet player?” I questioned.

Oliver opened his mouth but his grandfather talked over him. “He played trumpet, horn, saxophone. He also does fine on any low brass instrument and he’s a great percussionist. He’s probably best at piano, but the kid could make anything sound good.”

“That’s not true. I was adequate but I liked other things more,” Oliver said.

“Your father forced it out of you. It’s because when my own son was a kid, we pushed him too hard,” Mr. Marchand explained to me. “His mother and I were always trying to get him to play something, anything. But he has as much talent as you do at singing. He was terrible.”

“That’s not nice,” I said. “I’m not going to be the first-chair singer, but I’m not that bad!”

He started to speak again but this time, his grandson interrupted. “How was the concert with Carmen?” he asked me.

We talked about the group I had seen and that led to us discussing the Detroit music scene in general, because Gramps knew all about it. He had hung out at Motown when he was a teenager, watching big-name acts perform before anyone knew that they were going to be big. And plenty of famous people had come into his record shop, too, including a lot of British bands when they passed through the city. He didn’t name names but Oliver did and even I recognized some of them, as musically deficient as I was.

“He used to come get me out of school so I could meet them, too,” Oliver told me. “My parents loved it.”

“Do you still play?” I asked him. “I don’t mean one particular song, I’m not saying that,” I quickly added. “I mean instruments.”

“What’s she talking about, one song?” Gramps wondered.

“Nothing. No, I don’t play very often and all my instruments are in storage,” Oliver said. “I have a few guitars and my trumpet. My clarinet, my horn. It would be nice to have them accessible.”

“You left a beautiful piano in California.” Mr. Marchand made an angry noise. “There was no reason—”