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“Morning, Mr. Weaver!” Gemma called on cue to the man she considered the human form of Rex. They were both old, gray around the muzzle, and friendlier than most people.
“Morning, Gemma! Hi there, Rex.” He gave them a wave from his patchy front lawn.
He stood out in his front yard every morning to, from what Gemma could tell, monitor his uninspired grass. The whole neighborhood was on water restriction thanks to California’s never-ending drought. The difference between lawns on their street and the lush, emerald cushions stretching the yards over the hill in Bel Air and Brentwood was that here they actually followed the water conservation rules.
Mr. Weaver stroked his chin with a determined look onhis face like he might be able to will his lawn into a greener existence. He looked up at the cloudless sky advertising a zero percent chance of rain and dropped his arms with a shrug. “At least it’s another beautiful day. Sunny and seventy-five, can’t complain!”
Gemma was struck with an acute sense of déjà vu as his words echoed in her mind. She watched Mr. Weaver for a moment, puzzled, and feeling like she was trying to grab something slipping through her fingers. She could swear he had said those exact words in that exact way before, like notes repeated in a song she had heard many times.
“Need something there, Gemma?” he said when he caught her staring.
She shook her head to clear the webby thoughts clouding her mind. She convinced herself that she was groggy and still waking up, and that Mr. Weaverhadsaid those exact words before because it was sunny and seventy-five degrees in L.A. almost every day. This sunny, early-summer day was no exception.
She felt Rex tug on his leash and looked down to see that he had chosen the tree that dropped lime green pollen that occasionally made her sneeze for his morning mark.
“No,” she told Mr. Weaver. “We’re good. Have a nice day!”
“You too, Gemma. Bye, Rex!”
On her way back up the stairs, she pulled out her phone to check the weather to double convince herself that what Mr. Weaver had said wasn’t out of the ordinary and she wasn’t imagining things.
Sure enough, Los Angeles: sunny with a high of seventy-five degrees every day this week.
Still, his words felt familiar in a way beyond a casual and redundant statement about the weather.
She couldn’t shake the feeling, so she grounded herself in reality by texting her best friend.
Lila wouldn’t wake up for several hours yet, but at least she’d have a happy birthday text to greet her.
Gemma typed one out filled with every party emoji her keyboard had to offer. They were going to celebrate later with dinner and a night out on the Westside, and honestly, the thought of keeping up with Lila on a regular night exhausted Gemma, let alone on her birthday. Nevertheless, she would put on her party smile and positive attitude for her best friend.
Then, for good measure and to soothe the anxiety bubbling in her veins at the thought of her little brother miles in the sky on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic, she peeked at the last message he had sent her before boarding a flight out of Lagos. She had stopped trying to calculate all the time zone changes, but she knew he landed in New York that morning her time, and after a layover, he would arrive in L.A. in time for her to pick him up that afternoon. He would be a jet-lagged mess, starving because he hated airplane food, and insufferably grumpy. But she hadn’t seen him in half a year. His inevitable crankiness would not interfere with their reunion.
West Coast, best coast. Here I come!
She smiled at his message and couldn’t wait to wrap her arms around his lanky body, grown lean and tough from living in a tent for six months. He would return to L.A.,and she would fatten him up like a housecat with lunch dates and weekends at her complex’s pool before the cycle started over again in another six months.
The bug for global conscientiousness had bitten him hard after college. His work in wildlife conservation had taken him around the globe, from Greenland to Australia and now to Africa for the past few years. She wasn’t exactly sure what he did in Lagos, but he came back tan and down two pants sizes every time. She had hoarded all the homebody genes in the family while Patrick lived to roam free.
His message had come in during the middle of the night while she slept, and she couldn’t text him back because he never bought the in-flight Wi-Fi. She would have to be patient until he landed.
Rex’s morning walk always woke her enough to make it through her workout before needing coffee. Back inside, she unclipped his leash and dropped a scoop of kibble in his bowl before heading to her room to change. Once she was strapped into her shoes, sports bra, and Lycra, she left to go down to the building’s gym.
It was nothing to swoon over, but it got the job done. The oblong room with a view of the parking lot housed two treadmills; a pair of ellipticals; a wall of stretchy, bouncy resistance equipment; and a few racks of weights that Gemma avoided to the best of her ability. The cramped room sometimes grew muggy depending on who was in there punishing the equipment. The wall of thick air that hit her as soon as she opened the door informed her that her morning run would not take place in isolation, but she hadn’t expected it to.
The only other person she regularly ran into each morningwas hard at work on one of the treadmills, earning the title Lila had bestowed upon him: Hot Guy in 202.
Gemma did not know his real name, but she knew that he looked excellent in a tank top, had arms like a romance novel cover model, and ran five miles in an impressive forty minutes.
His feet hit the belt in a syncopated rhythm with his breathing. His focus was on whatever he was watching on his phone mounted on the treadmill. He wore earbuds and didn’t acknowledge Gemma when she climbed onto the treadmill beside him. Which was fine because she wouldn’t want someone interrupting to chat while she was running, and, despite Lila’s appeals, she did not want him to become anything more than Hot Guy in 202 to her.
Gemma’s last relationship had not ended well, and even with it having been a year, she was not looking to change her single status anytime soon.
She put in her own earbuds and jabbed the treadmill’s screen to program her usual workout.
The screen flashed an angry redERRORmessage that startled her as if someone had shouted at the same time it felt familiar.
She frowned and backed out to the main menu to reprogram her workout and got the sameERRORmessage.
