“—anything at all in the world, it would be to have some family left.”
“We can’t go back in time.” I spoke reflexively; it was my standard answer for regrets, especially this one.
“I don’t have to,” he said softly, carefully, taking his hand away.
I stared at him while it registered—how different we suddenly were from each other. Yesterday, we were a pack of lone wolves. Today, we were nothing.
“At least let Josie stay here the night,” he said. “One night.”
“We have nowhere to hide her,” I said, feeling suddenly desperate. “Look around you.”
He complied, even though he didn’t have to; we could walk around Centennial blindfolded. His slow inspection started with the hall, where our room was the second door on the left. There were nine others just like it down there, all double-occupied except for the last, which Sharon was fixing to renovate for some new highfalutin, high-paying resident. Next, he looked to the living area, and beyond that, the TV room, which we shared with everyone, just like we did the dining hall, and the foyer, and the atrium. The glossy trifold brochure said the building was a retired bed-and-breakfast, but I likened it to an oversize wardrobe. And we shared it with two nurses on duty, one front desk manager, one life enhancement coordinator, one cook who doubled as the muscle when needed, and sixteen other senior citizens.
Hiding a girl here—especially a girl like Josie—would be about as easy as pissing up a rope.
Yet once Carl had looked at it all, he turned his gaze on me and said, “I’ll make it work.”
“You can’t do—”
“It’s what I want,” he said with some strength in his voice.
I opened my mouth to argue more, but Chef Anderson had come to fetch our plates. He slid them onto his tattooed forearm and stood there, waiting for me to harass him, because that’s how I usually spent the first thirty minutes after breakfast. Today, I kept my mouth shut and my head down.
He nudged my chair and said, “What’s up, chief?” in a deliberate way, like a challenge.
I didn’t answer.
Anderson set the plates down and squatted, so that his head was table-high and impossible to ignore. He’d recently had a haircut and shave, effectively carving out his square jaw and his round head. The only thing that offset his symmetry were his thick eyebrows, which never synced up—even now, as they pinched together in concern. “Is it the food? Because you know I wish Sharon would let me stock my own kitchen like I used to, but . . .”
I glanced at him. His chef’s shirt, rolled carelessly at the elbows, bore our last three years together in stains. Seemed wise to act like this was any other day, and the only thing that ever changed about our postbreakfast natter was what I bothered him about. If he got a new tattoo, I’d find something wrong with it. If he flexed, I’d wave my bingo wings in the air and tell him not to get too attached. If he talked about getting laid, I’d talk about the clap. He always came back for more too, like a stray cat to scraps, and I fed him because I liked the kid.
I said, “Anderson, who was the seventeenth president of the United States? We’re trying to remember.” Trivia was a staple in my ball-busting toolbox, because it allowed me to passively shame him into going back to college. In my humble opinion, he was a hard worker who was working hard on the wrong thing.
He studied me. “Weren’t you there for the inauguration?”
“Andrew Johnson,” Carl blurted, taking my lead.
I said, “Right, well, good. That’s settled. We can get on with our day now. Carl, should we head to exercise?”
I moved to stand, using the tabletop as a guide. Carl did too, while Anderson hopped up to place his walker in the best position. But before he’d angled it just right, he froze and stared past us at the front door, and then his big-eyed ogle tracked toward the welcome desk, prompting me to look with him.