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“Oh, you’re talking about Thanksgiving. Sweet potatoes are the least of the problems with that. The big one is that he also forbade my father from his house. His son. That’s why we’re not celebrating together.”

“I thought your parents were going away!” I said. “I didn’t know they would be here in Detroit.”

“They will be and my sister Frances is coming into town with her husband, too. We’ll eat with my parents and I’m glad that you’ll be with Gramps.”

“What happened between them? Why do they fight like this?” I asked. “Is it because your mom and dad wouldn’t let you become a musician?”

He put down his fork. “No matter what my grandfather has been telling you, there was no way that I was going to do that. Believe it or not, job prospects for a clarinetist aren’t great and I’m not good enough, anyway.”

“But you love to play.”

“It’s not enough,” he said. “I also loved to be on the rowing team of my high school, but I didn’t try to become a professional in that, either.”

“Is it actually a job? Never mind, tell me about why your family doesn’t get along.”

“My dad and my grandfather are very different. I think Dad is more like his mother, my grandma. I don’t remember much about her besides her flute, but she was apparently very, very easygoing and sweet-tempered. So is my father but he also has his limits, and one of them is about my mom. You may have noticed that my grandfather has a lot of opinions, like about my damn piano.”

“Like that I should get a new job so that I have to work with other people. He thinks that I’m alone too much,” I explained.

“He’s not one to talk. He’s alone in that shop all the time unless he gets customers, but then he’s so rude that he chases them out. I think he must have been rude to my mom, too, but she won’t say a word against him. My grandmother probably kept him under control but when she passed away, there was a lot of friction. And yes, he doesn’t like how my parents raised me and Frances. He thought they were too focused on academics over the arts, but my dad points out that Gramps didn’t make his living as an artist, either. Also, I like my job and my sister likes hers.”

“Is she musical, too?”

“Oboe and percussion,” he said briefly. “She also sings.”

“Do you?”

Oliver cleared his throat, almost like he was considering it. “I have, if forced.”

He had a very nice speaking voice, low but very clear, unlike the rasp I had that made Gramps compare me to a husky-toned male singer from Detroit named Bob Seger (we’d listened to his records). Gramps had also asked me numerous times if I was a smoker (no, I wasn’t).

“I thought that you’d be there with him for the holiday, too,” I said. “I was planning a dinner for the three of us.”

Oliver shook his head. “Frances and I will come over during the day to say hello.”

It wasn’t what I had pictured, though. I suddenly felt the same way that I had when I’d first noticed the music at my apartment. Hearing the song and thinking that I had rude neighbors had shaken my dream of living in the perfect place. Not having Oliver at the dinner meant that I wouldn’t be serving the Thanksgiving feast that I’d imagined, with everyone sitting around the table that was loaded with delicious, perfectly cooked dishes that didn’t include sweet potatoes.

“Maybe we won’t need a whole turkey for two people,” I said. “We’ll get a smaller bird.” As I had learned over the last few months, it was hard to cook for only one person. A whole Thanksgiving for only two was also kind of silly. “We definitely won’t need that extra casserole.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“Plans change,” I said. It was the same thing that I had often told myself when I was a kid, like when we’d had to move away from the condo my mom had found in Georgia, the one that was in the neighborhood where all the kids had played outside together. I had wanted to meet them and I had felt like I was making progress by standing at the end of the driveway, but then we’d had to go. No one was interested in my mom’s okra candy due to its unusual taste and sliminess.

“If your plan to stay in your apartment hasn’t changed—”

“It hasn’t,” I assured him.

“Then why don’t you do something to make it more livable?” he asked. “Vera Doyle was complaining to me that you have nowhere to sit besides some hard chairs and also that you don’t have a bed.”

“I do have a bed,” I corrected. “She just doesn’t like it.” She had said that people my age weren’t interested in comfort, but I was. She didn’t know what I liked or what I wanted. “Why was she telling you that, anyway?”

“It was just spontaneous. She burst out with it,” he answered. “I’m going to be buying furniture for my new house. You could come with me, if you want, and get a few things for yourself. Like a mattress that you don’t need to blow up. Vera also mentioned that you sleep on the floor like you’re camping.”

“If it doesn’t bother me, why should it bother her so much?” I asked angrily.

That night, as I got into my floor bed, I thought about what he’d said about my unfurnished apartment. Where were the bookshelves that I had wanted and had planned to fill with all the volumes that I was going to buy? Books were too heavy if you moved a lot but not if you were always going to stay in one place, forever. And I could have talked to Carmen Crusoe about how to safely attach the shelves to the walls for safety reasons, in case of earth movements. Where was the cozy bed where I had imagined that I would cuddle up on weekends…

In that dream, I hadn’t been alone in the cozy bed. I had pictured a guy there with me, although I hadn’t specified his face or any other identifying characteristics about him. The only clear attributes he had were that he was nice to me and, more importantly, he was also interested in me. My pretend boyfriend wanted me and loved to hang out on weekend mornings. You could do that because it was a lot less bright in the apartment now that I’d added thick layers of tape to the sides of the blinds I’d previously bought, in order to cover the gaps that they hadn’t covered. Come to think of it, Vera and Carmen hadn’t especially liked those, either.