“I should get going,” I say, giving Arnie one last belly rub and then springing up to my feet. “Olivia will be here soon.”
“How did you know she’s coming over?” Chris asks.
“It’s Thursday. She always comes over on Thursday nights.”
If he’s surprised at my newfound attention to days of the week, he doesn’t let on. “You don’t have to rush out,” Chris says. “Olivia knows you watch Arnold.”
“And how does she feel about that?” I ask.
“She doesn’t mind,” he says, faltering. “It’s my job to take care of Arnold now that Luke’s gone. I can choose who watches him.”
“Of course you can.” I get the feeling that Olivia has made the grievous mistake of referring to Arnie as “the dog” or perhaps even “our dog” in front of Chris, and that he hasn’t taken well to it. The prospect of trouble in paradise excites me more than it should. I really do want to be a decent friend but just don’t seem to have the right wiring.
There’s a knock at the door. “Doesn’t she have a key?” I whisper to Chris, so she won’t hear from the hallway.
He shakes his head as he walks to the door. “Not yet.”
Chris officially gave me back the original spare key when I started dogsitting again, and the knowledge that I have an (ethically obtained) key to his place and his own girlfriend doesn’t produces quite the thrill. That, plus the way we’re whispering to each other in secret.
I head out, passing Olivia on her way in. I feel her looking after me, throwing her glare like a freshly sharpened axe. But I’m too deep in my own delight to feel the cut. The blade just ricochets right off me. It makes me wonder if perhaps the strongest armor is no armor at all.
Chapter 25
My friendship with Chris is in such a good spot that I have no desire to tilt the balance and do something unruly. Or I guess I have every desire to do that; I have just enough self-restraint not to. Maybe you can’t fully lose someone if you never really have them, but you can lose them partway, the fractions shattering in a way that whole things don’t.
This means I make an effort not to make an effort with him. I spend more time back at Lone Wolf and the House of Yes, stirring up feelings for other people like a witch perched in front of a new cauldron when she knows her last batch was better, more potent.
Leaves drop from the sparse city trees onto the sidewalk, and cold weather surges into the battered Bushwick streets, clapping back at steaming manholes. There’s not much bliss on the home front. Hal is all angsty about how Astrid’s student visa is expiring at the end of the year.
“Her entrepreneurship visa got denied,” Hal moans one afternoon in early December. We’re eating s’mores that Tara has baked in the toaster oven to keep us warm. Blustery squalls batter the basement windows, testing the seal, searching for an in. It’s the first snowstorm of the season.
“Astrid’s role as cofounder of your stealth-mode start-up didn’tmake the cut?” I say, unable or maybe just unwilling to take the matter seriously.
“Cut it out, EJ,” Hal says. “This isn’t a joke. It’s my entire future crumbling before me.”
“Don’t blame me, blame the political system,” I say.
And so she does, ranting about all the quacks who are threatened by immigrants when all of the country’s best innovators have been foreign-born, and even the Founding Fathers were immigrants from Europe and the entirety of America is stolen land. “The hypocrisy is too preposterous to even analyze,” she fumes, then proceeds to dissect it nonstop.
“I’m on your side,” I assure her when she pauses long enough to stuff two charred marshmallows into her mouth, cheeks puffing like a chipmunk storing up for hibernation. “But I really don’t know why you’re so distraught. You couldn’t ask for a better excuse to break up than deportation. It’s all neat and tidy. Sounds like a dream to me.”
“I wouldn’t expectyouto understand,” Hal retorts, writhing around on the couch as if spiders are crawling inside her flannel pajamas. With a surge of practicality, she plucks herself from her spasm. “We’ll just have to house Astrid here at the Inn,” Hal goes on. “She’ll get a fake ID and evade the authorities until we can find her a permanent solution. What do you think, Tara?”
Of course she’d try to manipulate the situation and go for Tara first. I interject, “No thank you. We won’t be housing a criminal.” I’m thinking less about the trouble it could get us into, which is admittedly intriguing, and more about the way it would ruin the whole dynamic of the Inn. With Hal and Astrid living here as a couple, I’d feel like a third wheel in my own home.
“I askedTara.” Hal glowers.
“There’s no way Tara wants Astrid here either,” I say. “It’s putting all of us in danger.”
“Since when have you cared about danger?” Hal shoots back.
“Are you going to listen to what I have to say about it?” Tara asks.
Hal and I quiet down. I’m proud of how Tara is sticking up for herself. But the pride quickly mutates to dismay as Tara speaks.
“I could get behind the idea of Astrid staying here,” she says. “Sure, there’s some risk involved, but it would be walking the walk when it comes to our view on immigration policy. In the absence of governmental progress, we have to be the change ourselves.”
“Exactly,” Hal says, nodding vigorously as if Tara has seen the light. “That makes two against one. Sorry, EJ, you’re outnumbered.”
