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“I sure did. Unfortunately, I didn’t pattern myself after them.”

“Why?” I asked. “What did you do instead?”

“You sound like Gramps,” he answered. “What about your family? You wandered around with your mother for years, but where was your father?”

“I’m not exactly sure,” I said. “My mom wasn’t clear about that either. She had assumed that my father was going to be a guy named Daisuke, because they were together during the time of my conception. They’ve been on again, off again for decades.”

“Not him, though?”

“Well, I’m not half Japanese,” I said. “So I don’t think so. I’ve thought about doing DNA tests to see if I have any relatives out there, but I’m also afraid of finding out terrible stuff. She didn’t have great taste in men. Daisuke was actually a drug dealer and no one else she got involved with has ever been any better.”

“No good examples,” he said, and I nodded in agreement.

“Her friends were always doing terrible stuff, too. They cheated on their partners all the time, and the men were always going after my mom. She’s really pretty,” I explained.

“What about you?”

“No, I was too young. My mom made poor decisions but she was always careful about the guys around me. The only time I ever saw her get mad, actually furious, was when one of her friends tried to grab my butt. She slapped him and threw him out.”

“I’m glad she did that. I was actually asking if you also made stupid choices with relationships, but now I realize that I sound just like my grandfather. It’s none of my business.”

I was glad that I didn’t have to answer, since that would have meant explaining that I’d had no relationships with which to make stupid choices. I had made the conscious decision to be like the bird in the book, that robin or whatever it had been, so that I was on my own. I always had been, too.

Oliver wasn’t going to ask me questions but I definitely had some for him. Why had he and his wife gotten divorced? Why had they gotten married in the first place? Was it because he loved her so much that he truly thought they would spend the rest of their lives together? Did he still love her like that? Was that why he didn’t smile very often and why the piano he’d left in California was such a sore subject, because he couldn’t get over that woman?

But I kept my mouth shut, figuring it was a fair trade-off for my lips also remaining sealed about my own issues. “Can I see some of the houses you looked at?” I requested, and at the next red light, he passed over his phone with the listings open.

Apparently, freelance hydrogeologists did quite well. These houses were beautiful—not huge and ostentatious, but each was a good size and they all looked like they were in good condition. Having lived in places that were not, I had things to say about that.

“No broken windows,” I noted. “No obvious roof damage, like missing shingles or holes. The landscaping has been maintained. This one even has an intact driveway.”

“I’m not going to look at a house with holes in the roof,” he pointed out.

“Right, you don’t know how to do maintenance.” I remembered our conversation about that, when I’d said that I was staying in my apartment forever.

“I can learn.” He sounded a little offended.

“I’m sure you can. According to your grandfather, you can do anything!”

“He may exaggerate,” Oliver answered, but now he sounded amused. “You seemed very interested in his crock pot.”

That remark led us to discuss cooking, which was something he had already mastered to some extent. “When I moved back here from California, I didn’t even open the boxes of kitchen stuff, though,” he told me. “I didn’t do much in that room for a few months.”

“Did you eat, though?”

He didn’t answer for a moment and then he said, “Why do you ask?”

“Because when I was sad, very sad, I didn’t. I didn’t care enough to put food in my mouth.”

There was another silence before he responded, “No. No, I didn’t eat a lot, either. When I showed up in Detroit and moved into my apartment, I didn’t want to get out of bed. My grandfather got me going again.”

“I’m glad he did.”

He nodded. “I need to give him a break and stop getting pissed off about his questions. He loves me and that’s why he’s asking.”

I nodded back, because it was distinctly obvious that his gramps was crazy about him.

“When were you that depressed, Kat?”