Page 54

“Is he the meth dealer who ended up in prison?”

“Yes,” I said. I patted his arm and he showed me his watch, but I had meant it in appreciation of his memory. “I think something is really wrong with her.”

“Maybe she needs your help and that’s why she came. Or, she could have been thinking, ‘I’m getting older and I made mistakes with Kat. It’s Christmas!’” He had made his voice higher and done a pretty good imitation of how my mother spoke, complete with the breathiness and the fluttering hands.

“I don’t think so. She never did much for the holidays, with or without me.”

“It might be nice for you to have her there,” he suggested, although there didn’t seem to be much conviction behind his words. “It’s hard to be alone when there’s so much togetherness all around you.”

“Like how you were worried about Gramps,” I said, nodding. “We can run again.”

We did and went for another block before he spoke. “When my marriage was breaking up, I stayed in our former apartment on Christmas and watched people through the window. There was a bar a few blocks away and I used to see them go together and walk out together. Once, I saw a big bunch of guys walking down the street singing ‘Happy Birthday.’ That was probably the loneliest I ever felt and I decided that day to move home to Michigan. I left the next morning. I was done.”

“Oh, really?”

“Why do you sound so surprised?” Oliver asked.

“I had assumed that—don’t take this the wrong way,” I cautioned. “But I had assumed that you were so unhappy about your divorce because your wife had been the one to walk away.”

“No, I was the one who actually did the walking. It was closer to running when I got out the door.”

Maybe that was why his ex had moved to Toledo and then to Detroit: she didn’t want him to let him go. And why would she have? He was a cutie-patootie, for one thing. He was gainfully employed at something legal, for another. As Mrs. McGlothen had told me so many months ago, he wasn’t the type to step out on you while he did that job, either.

More importantly, he was a nice person. He was the kind of guy who would bring you clothes for exercising when you weren’t dressed appropriately for the weather, and then he’d make up an excuse about it. This rain jacket was great and he had forgotten to take the tags off—it hadn’t been his sister’s.

“I guess I didn’t need to move out of the Milaflores Building, though,” he said.

“Oh. Yes, things have changed. I saw you notice the decrease of music in my sink.”

“You sound sorry,” he noted, “but it’s for the best. Whatever was happening, it was unnatural and disconcerting.”

“I know you felt that way,” I said. “You left to get away and now it’s disappearing.”

“It’s for the best,” he repeated.

I still wasn’t sure that I agreed but normalcy was what I should have been aiming for in my own life too. There had been enough weirdness, right? There had been enough things shaking me off-balance. It was better to be in my apartment with no strange, unexplained, possibly magical events.

We ditched the run since he and I were both soaked and I was freezing, and we went back together to see what my mom and Maël were up to. I found out that they had moved all the parts of the bed that I hadn’t assembled into the living room.

“It makes more space for us. Maël needs so much breathing room that even being in a city is hard for him,” my mom explained. She smiled at Oliver and swirled her hands in front of his chest. “You’re a Pisces. I know it!”

“No, I don’t think so. What is this?” he asked me, looking at the boards and hardware.

“It’s a bed that I’m going to put together, someday,” I answered. “I had bought mattresses, too.” But now, I probably wouldn’t want to use those. I hadn’t been looking at the figures sleeping on them when I’d gotten my workout clothes this morning, but I had managed to notice that they hadn’t put on the sheets that I’d offered.

They had stacked all the plastic-y pieces around the Christmas tree, fencing it in. With the tree, those parts, the table, my desk, the chairs I’d borrowed from Gramps, and the four of us, this place felt very, very crowded.

Oliver must have felt that, too. “I need to get going,” he said. He tried to walk directly to the door but several of my mom’s bags were in the way, since I hadn’t gotten them into the bedroom the night before. He ended up climbing a little. “See you tomorrow morning?”

“Sure,” I agreed. “Thank you for bringing this raincoat.”

“Sure,” he said back, but then stopped. “If you wanted to work elsewhere for the time being, I have plenty of room in the office that I rented.”

“That would be wonderful for Maël,” my mom interjected. “He does need a lot of space for his routine.”

“What routine?” I wondered.

“Gymnastics, of course! He’s so strong and manly,” she answered.