“Huh,” I say.
“Oh, but there’s this. You’ll be happy to know I got the carpets cleaned in the waiting room. Looks nice. A guy came in and said he could clean the whole office for fifty dollars, and I didn’t know if that was a good deal or not, but I don’t think the building management has cleaned the carpets in the entire time I’ve been there. Did you notice how soiled they were?”
“I’m afraid I didn’t,” I tell him.
“Well, they’re awful. I thought you would have noticed.”
“But sounds like they’re clean now,” I say.
“Yes. Oh, yes.”
I let a beat of silence go by and then say, “Hey, guess what! I got a job.”
“You got a job? In Brooklyn? Why would you do that?”
“Because—because I think it’d be good for me to be out around people more, and this woman in a florist shop asked me if I wanted to work there because I was sort of talking to some customers there, and she—”
I stop talking because I realize he’s been trying to interrupt me the entire time.
“No, I realize what a job will be like,” he says. “But what I’m wondering is—why are you embedding yourself in this community if you’re going to leave soon?”
“Well, it’s three months. I can work for three months, can’t I?”
“I don’t know. I thought you’d be busy getting the house ready to sell or something. Not going out and working in—what? A shop of some kind?”
“For a florist.”
“Yeah. A florist. You do realize I’m counting on you coming back, don’t you?” He laughs, a stiff little chuckle that rings completely false.
“I told the woman that I’m only here until the end of the year,” I tell him. “Don’t worry. I’m coming back.”
“Well,” he says and pretends to growl. “See that you do. Because there’s somebody on this call who’s getting very, very lonely without his girlfriend around.”
I toy with the idea of dropping my phone in the storm drain.
After that, it takes a little bit to put this conversation back on solid ground again. He tells me the weather is still hot, that he hopes to go see Natalie and Brian tonight, that he thinks Amelia looks like me. And then he says brightly, “Oh! I told my mom about our engagement. I know, I know. We agreed not to tell everybody until later on, but she was so down the other night that I wanted to cheer her up. And it did! She was thrilled. Over the moon.”
“Oh, you know what? I’ve just gotten to work!” I say. “Gotta go! Have a good one!”
I click the button, and jam the phone back in my bag. I’m nowhere near Best Buds, but I can’t take any more.
What I want to know is what happened to the old snarky boy from high school, my old misfit friend, the one who could make me crack up with his constant sarcastic little asides? More and more I’m aware that that guy went through some kind of unfortunate cleansing or deprogramming situation.
I’m going to have to figure a way to bring him back.
In the flower shop that day, I help a woman pick out a bouquet for a man she loved who left her when they couldn’t have children, and then he married someone else and now that other woman has just had a baby, and—well, she wants them to know that she is happy for them, that she is genuinely, tragically, fully, and confusedly happy for them. After I make up the bouquet she requests, I make up one for her, too, and pay for it myself. I think she needs it more than the couple, frankly.
There’s a guy who comes in and tells me proudly that he just proposed marriage to his girlfriend of nine years, and also today happens to be the day she gave birth to their triplets, and now he wants to send her three bouquets of pink roses. He disappears while I’m making the bouquets, and I find him sitting on the floor, his head in his hands, sobbing. “How do I deserve this?” he says to me over and over again.
And an old woman in a baggy dress and sweater who comes in for one red carnation and pays for it with coins. She buys one every week, which is all she can afford, she tells me. It’s to remember her son who got shot. She tells me about his life, and how when he was five he told her that he was going to take care of her always, when he grew up.
A man with laughing eyes orders daisies for his girlfriend and writes: “I’m going to be with you forever—or at least until I get deported.”
I feel leveled by every story I hear.
One afternoon I’m at home, talking on the phone with my mom, who is telling me about the progress in her lifelong argument with my father over which way to hang the toilet paper—she goes with under—when the doorbell rings.
When I go to answer it, there’s an older, smiling man with deep-blue eyes standing on the stoop. He’s holding a brown paper bag that seems to be thrashing around in his hand. He takes his other hand to steady it, and I think I hear him talking to the bag.
“Hello?” I say.
“Oh! Hi. I was just trying to calm the boys down a little bit here.”
“The boys?” This may be why a person shouldn’t open the door without getting a background check on whoever is standing there.
“Sorry,” he says. “I’m Harry. I’d shake your hand but I better hold on to this bag instead. Anyway, I was friends with Houndy, and I don’t know why, but I went to his traps today, and found these beauties, and I just thought—well, I knew you were living here now, and I thought maybe . . . you know . . . you like lobster, and since these were Houndy’s really, I’d, uh, bring them over and see if you might want them.”
“Oh!” I say. This is a relief. “Lobsters! How wonderful!”
“Yeah. Well, they’re for you. I feel like Blix . . . and Houndy . . . they woulda wanted you to have them.” He has that expression that everyone else here has when mentioning Blix and Houndy: sad yet smiling. Remembering something.
I ask him in for a cup of tea, but he says he can’t. He points to a pickup running at the curb. A woman waves to me from the passenger seat. So I thank him and take the bag of wiggling lobsters upstairs and wrestle the bag into the refrigerator and slam it shut.
I think I can hear them in there disrupting the eggs and the milk.
I text Patrick.
Refrigerator is possessed by an alarmingly active bag of sea creatures with claws and tails. A gift from Houndy’s friend. Please help!
What nature of help do you wish? Pro tip: I hear that some people like them with drawn butter and lemon.
May I . . . could we . . . I need help with all aspects of this project. Chasing, cooking, eating.
Ah, well. In the interest of being a good neighbor, I invite you to bring your sea creatures down. Also I believe Blix has some rather formidable lobster pots. We can take care of this problem.
It turns out that there are four actual living beasts in the bag when I finally get it down to Patrick’s kitchen, and they are not interested in hanging out quietly while we prepare to boil them on the stove.
Neither one of us has ever cooked a lobster before, so we call up a YouTube video on how you do it, and we drink a glass of wine to fortify ourselves while we watch it. Apparently someone has to boil water and then pick up this thing, this animal, and plunk it in the boiling water. It might make a noise when that happens.
I take a deep sip of wine. “Okay, I’ll go back upstairs and make a salad while you plunge the lobsters, and then I’ll come down when they’re done.”
He says, “I don’t want to plunge the lobsters.”
“Well, somebody has to.”
We sit there, staring at the computer monitor. There’s a crash from the kitchen, and we turn to each other.
“They’re taking over,” he whispers. “They’re going to try to put us in the boiling water.”
“We’ve got to go see.”
“Don’t let them lure you into the pot. That’s the important thing.”
We go to the kitchen in time to see all four lobsters scuttling along the floor, waving their claws at us.