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Yes, we were. I had Carmen’s number and she had mine. She had invited me over to hang out with her and her friends later that week when they played mahjong, which she also said they would teach me.

He hesitated for another moment before he recited the digits and then I heard his phone make a small sound when I texted it. At least he hadn’t tried to give me a fake number, which I’d heard about girls doing in college. My roommate freshman year had thought that was mean of them. “Just tell him that you don’t like him, nicely,” she had counseled her friends.

But I wasn’t trying to go after Oliver in that way. I liked him because he was my neighbor, as he’d just said, and because we did non-enjoyable things like running together. He had also helped me by driving me to do errands and then by carrying three extremely heavy boxes of unassembled furniture, which he’d promised weren’t so heavy.

I tried to think of how to tell him that I wasn’t interested in him, nicely, like my former roommate had advised. I settled on something that I’d heard my mom say to plenty of her male friends. She was so pretty that they were always falling in love with her.

“I’m happy in my relationships,” she had said. “I have the omnipresent spirit and I have Hekate. I’m not looking for anything else.”

Hekate had been me, Kat. Now I was Katherine, though.

“I’m happy in my life the way it is, with no relationships,” I said to Oliver. “I’m not looking for something else.”

“Oh.” He sounded surprised. “That’s great.”

“I mean, I’m trying to say, I’m not—I wasn’t asking for your phone number,” I said. The words weren’t flowing and eloquent but they got the point across, because he looked relieved when I saw his face in the glow of the streetlights.

“Of course,” he answered. “We’re, uh, running partners.”

“Neighbors,” I filled in. “We’re also neighbors.”

I didn’t know if he would wait for me the next morning to go for the run we’d planned, but he was outside the building and messing with his watch when I came down. It was freezing and I had on some more of the new exercise clothes that I’d bought, and maybe it was too cold to talk very much. Maybe that was why we didn’t converse a lot even though we went farther than we had in the past.

“Good run. See you later,” Oliver said as he went quickly toward the stairs.

“Bye,” I called. The door was already closing but I could still hear his feet as he raced up to the second floor. I stood there for a while, then took the elevator up one flight.

“What’s the matter with you?” Mr. Marchand called later as I walked toward his hearse car. He already had the hood open, since that was where we were starting today, and I was ten minutes early for the appointment.

“Nothing’s the matter. I’ve been working,” I answered. I had thrown myself into the projects that I’d been neglecting, the ones for which I got paid, the ones that were part of the business that I was trying to develop. It was a real business, too, not one which I would drop in the middle of the night because I’d had a dream about frogs, so we were moving to Tennessee to become breeders.

He tossed a pair of gloves at me and I pulled them on. “What’s your business?” he asked. I explained, in between him telling me about the various parts of the engine. As we went to get the jack out of the trunk so he could teach me how to change a tire, he stopped.

“Rent at the Milaflores isn’t that low. How the hell much do you get paid? A hundred bucks a word?”

“No, not so well. I make rent,” I informed him. I knelt down and started to put the jack under the car, as I had seen in a movie one time and on several more occasions when we’d passed people in distress on the side of the road. Sometimes, my mom had stopped to help, but she didn’t know anything about cars and the most she was able to offer was a blessing from nature.

Mr. Marchand seemed somewhat unconvinced by what I said about my rent and extremely unconvinced about my skills as a jack user. “What the hell are you doing? You’re going to damage the frame if you put it there.” Slowly, he also knelt down and explained where it was supposed to go to support the car. Before we cranked it up, we removed the hubcap and loosened the lug nuts. Then he pointed out an obvious problem.

“I don’t think that you can pick up a tire. There have to be work-arounds but for now, I’ll tell you what I told my wife. Give me a call and I’ll come to help you. She would have had to walk to a payphone to do it, but you carry your device everywhere.”

“So do you. Thank you,” I said. “I bet I can use your tire iron as a lever and do it.”

“Show me.”

I jacked up the car and then I took off the tire. It was dirty and heavy, but I did it. I grinned when I finished and he applauded. “Hot damn, job well done,” he said. “Let’s put it back on and we’ll go for a drive.”

“First, we should wash our hands.”

After that, we headed to a factory that had closed but had a great parking lot, he told me, with no lights on poles that could get in the way and no other cars that I could crash into. He drove us there and, as usual, his conversation returned to his favorite topic.

“Oliver said that you went out with him this morning.”

“For a run,” I corrected. “We went out for a run.”

He waved that away. “I’m glad to hear it.”

“Are you worried about his cardiovascular health?”