“Actually, Grandpa, our neighbor already checked all that stuff for us,” Jesse said. And because he knew his grandfather, he added, “I mean, not our neighbor, but her friend—a man.”
Markie leaned out of the sight of the laptop camera and lifted her brows with curiosity.
“One sec, Grandpa.” Jesse lowered the computer screen to take himself out of the frame. “Frédéric,” he whispered. “Before you got back from the store, Mrs. Saint told him to make sure everything was set right. Tighten the fuses or something, and the kitchen sink sometimes leaks, and she wanted him to make sure it was better. That’s why he brought his toolbox over.”
“How would she know about those things?” Markie asked.
He shrugged. “Maybe the last person who lived here complained to her or whatever.”
“I missed the dining room,” Lydia said, back now from fake-checking the fictional tea. “And your room, Jesse.”
“Here, I’ll show you again, Grandma.” Jesse jogged back through the kitchen toward the archway, Clayton laughing too heartily at the way the picture jumped on their end.
“Rough seas!” he called. Jesse laughed along, and Markie took the five-dollar bill off the counter and replaced it with a ten. Let the boy upgrade his lunch tomorrow—he could add chips and a soda.
A while later, he returned to the kitchen, no laptop in sight.
“Thanks for doing that,” she said. She pointed to the ten. “For you. For lunch tomorrow. Should be enough for a six-inch sub, chips, and a drink. You remember seeing the sandwich place when we drove in, right? A block that way, and then about one and a half to the right?” She pointed in the general direction.
He looked at the bill but didn’t take it. “You don’t have to.”
“I want to.”
“I don’t mind talking to them,” he said.
“I know, but still. I mean, I love them, you know I do. And they’ve helped out a lot recently, and I’m grateful. But . . . some family dynamics are difficult, that’s all.”
Jesse reached for the ten and shoved it in his front pocket. “I’ll skip the chips and pop and get a foot-long.” He smiled and gave her a gangly hug. “We can split it.”
Chapter Six
They had been in the bungalow for two weeks, and while all kinds of activity had been taking place on Mrs. Saint’s side of the low wooden fence, none of it had spilled over onto Markie’s property. Their elderly neighbor, true to her word, had been giving them space to settle in.
And settle in they had. The scattered shoes near the door, stacks of dishes on the counter, and the overflowing recycling bin in the corner made it look like they had lived there for months. They had only unpacked the things they would need for six months. In Jesse’s case, this meant he had upended all of the boxes marked J—BEDROOM onto his floor and tossed the empties into a corner of the basement, where they would wait until it was time to move again.
Markie had stacked her unloaded boxes in a tidy pile beside Jesse’s leaning tower of cardboard, and she’d filled another corner with all the still-packed boxes they had decided not to bother opening. Anything they wouldn’t need during the span of their half-year lease remained entombed: the artwork Frédéric was ready to hang on their first day; most of the kitchen tools Markie had collected over the years (none of which were required for zapping frozen meals in a microwave); the board games they used to play after dinner.
Jesse had begun ninth grade only a few days after they moved in. So far, he had nothing good to say about his new school. The teachers were “pretty terrible,” his classes “totally boring.” He had met a few friends, including a guy named Trevor who was “sort of cool.” The others were “not so bad, some of the time,” but they had all known one another “for like, ever,” so it had been hard for him to break in.
The walk home from school was “miles too long” and “way too hot.” Markie kept suggesting he take the bus, but he told her buses for high-schoolers weren’t a thing, which meant either that there weren’t any available or that there was no way he was about to take one. Either way, he was still walking.
She had offered him a ride that morning, as she had done every morning since school began, but he gave her a pained smile, which maybe meant rides from moms weren’t a thing, either, or maybe meant he couldn’t stand the idea of being in the car with her. She didn’t want to think about it for too long, so she smiled and laughed and waved and told him to have a great day, all in a way that made her seem more manic than motherly. She was certain that by the time he reached the end of their walk, he would be at least a little happy about school, if only because it would give him an eight-hour break from the crazy woman he lived with.
Since he left, she had been sipping her coffee on the patio while she gazed with forced serenity around the yard and told herself everything was fine, it would be this way even if he were back at Saint Mark’s, where he had attended from kindergarten through eighth grade. Teenagers never liked the start of the school year, whether they were surrounded by strangers or by the friends they had been with since they were learning to tie their shoes.
Markie walked inside, refilled her cup, and chose one of the many stacks of files covering the dining room table to carry back out to the patio, where she had been working most days. They were having an oppressively hot August, and she was trying to save money by running the air-conditioning only at night. The humidity was at an all-time high, but there was a breeze on the patio and shade from the umbrella, and she had been telling herself every day that those were fine working conditions. That it was comfortable on the patio, not stifling.
That reviewing claim file after claim file for Global Insurance Company was gripping work, not a mind-numbing, humiliating demotion from the high-profile position she had recently held as director of development for Saint Mark’s. That Jesse’s identity as Student No. 2432 at the overcrowded urban high school she had enrolled him in wasn’t a shattering fall from the ivy-covered, marble-staircased, khaki-and blazer-filled bubble of Saint Mark’s.
But she hadn’t fooled herself, and she hadn’t fooled her son. The reason the dining room table was available for her stacks of work files was that Jesse was still carrying his microwaved frozen dinners down to his bedroom every night to eat in front of his TV, his phone, or his gaming system. Or to stare at the wall, for all Markie knew, but in any case, he was still not interested in eating with her or in having the kind of dinnertime conversation they used to have.