REFLEXIVELY, I PICK up the blue tie from my meager collection and begin to loop it around my neck. I wear the blue tie on Thursdays.
I don’t have OCD or anything—I don’t freak out if I can’t find my blue tie on Thursdays. It’s just efficient—one less decision I have to make. Kind of like why Mark Zuckerberg wears a gray T-shirt every day. I’m the Mark Zuckerberg of accounting. I sometimes use this line at parties and it always gets a perfunctory laugh that pleases me.
I finish the half-Windsor knot and fold my collar down. Then I grab my watch from the bathroom counter and secure it on my wrist. As I walk down the hall toward the kitchen past Aja’s room, I hear him clacking away at his computer.
When he first came to live with me, I was alarmed at how much time he spent on the computer, considering he was only eight at the time. Ellie, of course, was addicted to hers too, but she was nearly five years older. At eight, she spent a lot of time riding her bike with a neighbor friend and choreographing dances and obsessing over Monster High dolls. I didn’t remember Dinesh mentioning that as one of the myriad things he was worried about when it came to Aja. So it was one of the first real conversations I had to have with him after he moved in and I had no idea what to say, since Stephanie had always handled most of those tough talks with Ellie. “You know there are people out there—on the Internet, I mean—that aren’t always nice. You know, to kids. Well, they start out being nice, but then they’re not.” I replayed what I had just said in my mind. It didn’t make sense even to me. “I mean not like bullies, but like . . .” I searched for words that wouldn’t come. How to explain this to an eight-year-old?
“Are you talking about sexual predators?” he said, enunciating each syllable in that formal way he has. My mouth dropped open. “I know all about that. I’m not stupid.”
I closed my mouth. “OK then,” I said. I went to pat his leg, but then I remembered Dinesh saying he didn’t really liked to be touched, so I awkwardly patted the bedspread beside his leg instead. “Good talk.”
Now I feel the need to continue my due diligence and call out as I walk past his open door: “You’re not talking to any sexual predators in there, are you?”
His small voice responds: “I guess I wouldn’t know, would I?”
Good point.
Thank God Connie has agreed to watch him today. Not without some requisite grumbling from her: “I have a real job too, you know.”
And some placating from me: “I know. And you’re very good at it. Best and most underpaid lawyer this side of Passaic.”
Eventually, she acquiesced. “I’m only doing it because I love Aja,” she said. “And because I don’t want him to blow up your apartment.”
“Thank you.”
The doorbell rings just as I’m pouring my second cup of coffee.
“Aja,” I call. “Connie’s here.”
He doesn’t respond.
I check my watch—twenty minutes until the train I need to catch—and open the door. Connie walks past me and looks at my coffee cup.
“I thought you were cutting back.”
“It’s my first,” I lie, then I turn and call for Aja again.
“Where is the little troublemaker?” she asks, setting her purse on the lone chair in the dining room, which isn’t so much a “room” as it is an extra space adjacent to the living room/foyer/den. Such is apartment living. I’m only here for six months and I thought bringing both my small kitchen table and the dining room set from my house in New Hampshire might be overkill. It’s not like I’m throwing dinner parties every weekend. Or ever.
“In his room. On his computer.”
“Ah.”
“Aja!” I turn around and almost run smack into him. “There you are.”
“Whatcha doin’ in there, champ?” Connie asks.
“Talking to Iggy,” he says, without looking up.
“The rapper?” she says, chuckling at her own joke.
Aja just stares at her.
“You know, that Australian girl?” Connie says. “With the large bottom?”
“Iggy’s a boy,” he says, adjusting his glasses.
“Or a forty-five-year-old sexual predator,” I joke, even though a month ago, much to Aja’s embarrassment, I popped into his room while he was Skyping one evening to make sure Iggy was, in fact, a ten-year-old kid. “Guess we’ll never know, right, Aja?”
He fixes me with his serious look. “You do know. You saw him. Can I go back to my room now?”
“No,” I say. “I figured out your punishment. Today, you’ll be unpacking all of the boxes we have left until you find the rest of my coffee mugs.”
“OK,” he says. That’s the weird dichotomy about Aja—he’s surprisingly easygoing when he wants to be. Doesn’t throw tantrums or get sullen like most other kids his age.
“OK, then,” I say. I check my watch again. I have to leave. I can’t miss the train into the city and risk being late. “Thanks again, Con.”
“Go,” she says. “We’ll be fine.”
“Aja, be good.”
I grab my keys and wallet and start to head out the door.
“Eric?” Aja calls after me—and I know he’s going to say the same thing he’s said to me every morning for the past six weeks. “Don’t forget to look for a wheelchair!”
That damned wheelchair.
LATER THAT NIGHT—MUCH later, since the train stopped for an interminable fifty minutes between Secaucus and Newark, leaving me to believe, briefly, that I would never, ever make it home—I walk into the quiet apartment, lugging an adult-size wheelchair behind me. I finally found it at a Goodwill store in Harlem for $25, taking the entirety of my lunch break to call every secondhand store in the city before I found one. I felt a little guilty for buying it, possibly taking it away from someone who really needs it. But I promised myself I’d return it when Aja was done—and make a monetary donation to the nonprofit while I was at it.
Connie’s reading on the couch. She stands up when she sees me.
“How was work?” she asks.
The question stops me in my tracks. It’s been so long—at least the two years since the divorce and probably even many years before that—since someone asked me that at the end of the day. Since someone cared. I didn’t realize how much I missed it—not Stephanie, just someone—until this moment.
“Good,” I say. “Aja?”
“Asleep,” she says. “He’s a good kid.”
“I know.” I grin a little. He’s frustrating as all get-out. But there’s no denying that he is good. Genuinely better than most other humans. I lean the wheelchair up against the wall where he’ll see it first thing in the morning.
“We found the coffee mugs,” she says.
“You did?”
“Yep. In the box marked ‘board games, poker chips, and miscellaneous,’ of all places.”
I look at her. “I have poker chips?”
“You do.”
“Huh.” I toss my wallet and keys on the side table next to the couch. “Well, thanks,” I say. “I really mean it. Same time tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” she says, moving to gather her things. “Oh, and we found something else.”
“I hope it’s the cereal bowls,” I say. “I can’t find those either. Aja’s been eating his Rice Chex out of a ceramic tureen.”