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I glanced up and saw Emmy running up to me, a giant smile spread over her face and a paper card in her hands.
She plopped down on the steps and handed me the card.
“This is for you,” she said, but before I get a chance to respond she was running off again to join a few other girls playing hopscotch.
“I can’t believe that’s the same child that wouldn’t speak word to anyone last fall,” Raven observed. “You really did a great job with her, Daisy.”
“Thanks,” I said absently, too distracted by the card in my lap to really hear or process what Raven said.
It was a piece of pink construction paper that has been folded in half. In Emmy’s shaky handwriting, spelled out in giant crayon letters, the front of the card read “THANK YOU.” Beneath the words, there was a stick figure drawing of a family, scrawled in the same shaky hand. There was a tall man with a blob of brown hair, and he was holding hands with a woman who bore a striking resemblance to Rapunzel, and she was holding hands with a little girl. A little girl with Macaroni-Orange curls and a pink princess dress. Underneath the three smiling figures, there was a round blue bowl full of squiggly brown lines, which I assumed represented Ramen noodles.
Raven leaned over, resting her chin on my shoulder to inspect the card.
“Holy shit,” she said under her breath.
“What?” I asked, automatically defensive of Emmy’s card. “It’s a sweet picture of the three of us. She probably liked that we all spent time together last night.”
“Is that what it is?” Raven asked skeptically. “Three people just hanging out? Or did she draw a family?”
I hadn’t thought about it like that, but now, when I glanced back down at the card, it’s all I could see, a family of three, holding hands, smiling.
Shit.
I opened the card and I was surprised to see that the message inside wasn’t written in Emmy’s jittery penmanship. Rather, the message inside was scrawled neatly in black pen ink. Somehow, I knew immediately that it was Caleb’s handwriting.
I instinctively pulled the card closer to my chest, trying to hide the message from Raven. The message was short and to-the-point, but it still took me about twenty attempts at reading and re-reading it before the words sink in:
“You turned what could have been the worst night in the world, into the best. I don’t know what I would have done without you. I hope you’ll let me thank you in person. Dinner?”
7
CALEB
I let go of the rubber hand grips, letting two-hundred pounds of weight drop slam back into the stack behind the weight machine. Then I leaned forward, and took a deep breath while stretching out my biceps to alleviate the hot burn that crept through my muscles.
“You’re just a little rusty because you haven’t been coming in enough,” Aaron said, chucking a fresh white towel in my direction. I caught it, even though it meant flexing the same muscle that were throbbing in my arms, and I used the towel to dust off the fresh glaze of sweat that had formed over my head and shoulders.
“The more you lift, the easier it gets my friend,” Aaron said, as he slapped me on the back and chucked his own towel into the hamper and strode across the gym to bench the pair of dumbbells he’s hoisted up.
Aaron Richie was one of the first neighbors I met here at The Camden, and he was probably my closest friend in the building. He had made his fortune young when he launched a tech startup out of his garage in Queens. The company spread like wildfire, and after a few years in business (and a billion in profits), he sold off his shares in the company and retired early.
Aaron still invested here and there, but his main passion in life was fitness. The Camden’s private gym was basically his kingdom, and I would almost always find him polishing off a set of bicep curls at the weigh rack or lecturing one of the new guys on the merits of high-intensity interval training at the treadmill.
Aaron was spending so much time at the gym that he finally decided to launch his own personal training business last year. He didn’t do it for the money. In fact, he didn’t even bother charging most of the guys here at The Camden. Aaron just did it because he loved working out.
I was his first client, and Aaron helped me create a fitness routine that fit in with my busy work schedule. Unfortunately, I hadn’t been the best about keeping my routine lately and now my stiff muscles were the price I had to pay.
“Talk to me, Caleb,” Aaron said, swinging around a chair and sitting down to face me.
“What?”
“Something’s on your mind. I can tell when someone isn’t focused.”
“It’s nothing,” I said dismissively. “Just the usual, family stuff, life stuff.”
“Ok,” Aaron said, refusing to give up. “Start with the family stuff.”
I let out a heavy breath and shifted around on the weight bench, stretching my arms out again.
