“Hey, darlin’,” I murmur, moving my face away from her eager tongue. “Miss me today? I missed you.”
Vivi, my almost four-year-old Yorkshire terrier, barks her excitement at having me home at last. Like always, she met me at the door with demands to be picked up and cuddled. I complied, of course. What kind of monster would I be if I didn’t? It’s bad enough that I have to leave her alone most days. My neighbor who works from home has a key and stops by to play with her nearly every day, but it’s not the same as having full-time company.
By the time I make it to the kitchen and set her down, she’s settled enough not to get underfoot while I sort out her dinner. “Maybe I should look into daycare again,” I suggest. “It would be good for you to make some more dog friends.” She has a few we see at the dog park, but I worry that she’s not being socialized enough. One of my clients recommended a canine club, but thatwould requiremeto be social, too, and I feel like I get enough of polite chitchat in my job.
The one I looked up did seem nice, though. Kind of like a country club for dogs. My girl deserves to be spoiled like that.
I’ll think about it.
We make it through dinner, a walk, and an episode ofEmily in Paris—which makes some very questionable fashion choices—before Vivi’s second-favorite moment of the day comes. She’s been waiting for it, and when the phone finally rings, she goes nuts barking.
“Okay, settle down,” I chide, but I can’t help smiling at how excited she is. She goes quiet as soon as I grab my phone from the coffee table. “Hello?”
“Hi, Uncle Griff!” The piping voice is as familiar to me as my own. “Is Vivi there?”
I grunt and hold the handset toward Vivi. Carter won’t care that I didn’t use words—he doesn’t want to talk to me anyway.
Vivi barks once, as if saying hello. She’s the smartest dog I’ve ever met, as well as being the sweetest and prettiest.
“Hi, Vivi,” my nephew croons. “Are you ready? I learned a new song for us today.” Vivi barks again, and Carter launches into a frankly terrible rendition of a pop song that’s currently being overplayed on the radio. I love him, but there’s a reason nobody in our family ever considered a career in music, and he’s not an exception.
But ever since the day my sister rang me three years ago, at her wits’ end and almost in tears because work had been shit and her kid was being clingy, begging me to talk to him so she could have five minutes to go to the bathroom in peace, this has become our nightly routine. Back then, I told Carter he was talking to me and Vivi because I thought it might stop him from needingmeto reply if he’d accept the occasional bark instead.Then he had the bright idea of singing to her, and I made the mistake of saying she really liked it.
My fate was sealed.
Vivi does really like it, though. She’s only met Carter twice, once when I took her with me to Portland to visit and once when they came here, but she’d recognize his voice anywhere and looks forward to this every night.
They finish their bedtime song and chat, and then Vivi lies down beside me on the couch, her head on my thigh, while my sister takes the phone.
“Thank you, Griff,” she says, the way she does almost every night. As if it’s a burden for me to answer a call and not talk.
I grunt acknowledgement, but instead of hanging up like she usually does, she asks, “So, is anything new with you?”
I hit Pause—Emily was irritating me anyway—and focus. We do talk sometimes, but she doesn’t usually start out sounding so tentative. “Not really. Today I talked to a designer I haven’t worked with before.” If you can call it talking. I talked to Calla, anyway.
It didn’t strike me until this second that normally I hate when I have to be overly verbal, and today I’m mad because Phil Marchand wasn’t verbal enough for me. It’s different, though. I don’t think I’m better than people, I just… don’t like talking to people.
Pushing the complicated new thoughts out of my head—it really is different, even if I can’t explain how—I add, “Anything new with you?”
She hmms and makes other “not really” noises, then hits me with, “I’ve been seeing someone.”
My spine goes as stiff as a steel rod, and I immediately start a mental list of people I know who’d help me intimidate this guy if I need to. Penny’s most recent ex was an absolute wasteof space, and I celebrated hard when she told me she’d left him. Not where she could hear me, of course.
Please let this guy be better.
“That’s great” is what I say out loud. “Tell me about him.” Like his name, address, and social security number so I can get a friend to run a background check.
“I met him at work,” she starts. “He works in the IT department and helped me when my computer was doing weird shit. I, uh, maybe did some stuff to the computer so I’d have an excuse to keep going back for help.”
I laugh. “That’s so bad, little sis. I’m proud of you. And obviously, it worked.”
“Not really. He was completely oblivious, even when I ran out of stuff I could do without actually destroying company property and was asking him to ‘give it a preventative checkup.’”
That makes me laugh again—Vivi lifts her head to look at me, since twice in as many minutes is rare—and also sets my mind at ease. If the guy didn’t even realize he was being hit on, he’s not likely to be a predator like the ex was. “What’d you do?”
“For a while I thought I’d just have to give up. Like… maybe he wasn’t oblivious, just not interested, and I’d misread the signs. But on Carter’s birthday, he brought a present for me to give him, and… anyway, after I finished kissing him in the middle of the office, HR called us both in for a meeting, and the whole story came out. He was into me, just had no clue I wanted him too.”
He brought a present for her kid? I’m not sure if that’s sweet or something I need to worry about. “What’s his name?”
