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She did really want to tell Leo, though. And not over text. In person. Because the new idea she’d been workshopping, that she’d submitted for consideration for this residency, was a play on memory candles, which were staples at her and all her friends’ and classmates’ bar and bat mitzvahs back in the day. Basically, one of the b’nai mitzvah kid’s friends would swipe a glass from the venue, usually a fancy wineglass, and they’d gather with a group of other friends, usually the b’nai mitzvah kid’s closest ones, and fill the glass with mementos of the day: personalized ribbons, little toys, favors from the DJ, et cetera. Then the glass got filled with water. Somebody always brought crayons, and they’d melt the crayons using a stolen candle over the top, with the idea of creating an airtight seal so that the water couldn’t evaporate (it never worked—Shira’s had evaporated long ago). Then a candle was plopped in the middle of all the melted wax, and the whole weird, beautiful thing was presented to the b’nai mitzvah kid in front of everyone. They were supposed to burn the candle one year later, but Shira had never lit hers. She’d wanted to keep it forever.

Even though Leo hadn’t been part of her Hebrew-school/Jewish-youth-group crowd, who were usually the ones who made the candle, he’d taken part in making hers. She’d directed him to bring blue and green crayons so that the candle would fit with her bat mitzvah theme of Under the Sea, where each table didn’t get a number but a different species of fish. Shira had been seated at the Mermaid Table, of course.

She found herself standing outside Leo’s old house almost on instinct, squinting through the dark front window, poised to go barge inside the way she had when they were kids. Of course she didn’t. That was silly. And he might have sold the house, anyway. She knew he was working on it, and he’d mentioned talking to a Realtor.

“If you want to break in again, I recommend the back window.”

She jumped, cheeks heating as she turned around. “No challenge,” she said to Leo, who was standing on the driveway, one eyebrow quirked with amusement. “I’ve already broken in here before. Boring.”

“Got it. So you won’t mind me just unlocking the door.” He gestured her forward. She followed automatically. “I’m coming from the unveiling.”

“Ah,” she said. According to Jewish tradition, graves were not carved and permanent until a year after death, when the headstone would be unveiled. He was clearly dressed for the occasion—he wore a black button-down over dark jeans, and while she assumed he hadn’t cut his hair for the unveiling, the way it was cropped close to his head felt sober and serious. He’d also lost a bit of weight over the last year—not a lot, not enough that maybe anyone other than Shira would even notice, but enough to make his cheekbones jump out and his dark eyes look larger. “Just family, I assume?”

He nodded. “Just me and my aunt. It would’ve been difficult for my grandparents to make it up. Traveling is hard for them these days. I’m going to fly down and see them in the new year.” His key clicked in the lock. Shira regretted that his back was to her, that she couldn’t see his face. Because shouldn’t Emily have been there? Assuming they were still together? She’d posted a photo of them together just a month ago, and she wasn’t a big poster, so it wasn’t abnormal for her not to have posted anything more recently. Not that Shira made a habit out of analyzing Emily’s social media or anything. “Come in and nose around to your heart’s content.”

Most of the furniture was gone, was the first thing she noted. Just a few pieces remained: some nesting tables in the living room, a silver-framed painting of a stylized world map on the wall, a wooden bed frame in a guest room. “We held an estate sale a few months ago,” Leo said. Her parents had mentioned that. They’d purchased Leo’s dad’s unused ice cream maker, which would probably continue to sit unused in the Levinson kitchen. “When I could finally bring myself to do it. I took some things back with me to my apartment and put some more in storage. A few things got left behind. I have to figure out what to do with them.”

He’d clearly done work on the house, Shira couldn’t help but notice. The ratty carpet on the second floor had been ripped up and that flooring that looks like wood but isn’t actually wood laid down; the bathrooms on the first and second floors had been totally modernized. “Wow, it looks great,” she said. “Who’d you have do the work?”

He shrugged a little self-consciously, or at least that’s how it looked from the back as he showed how the primary bedroom closet had been expanded out into the hallway, swallowing up one for linens. “I did it myself.”

“No way!” she exclaimed. “For real?”

He nodded, turning while leaning against the wall. She couldn’t help noticing how his biceps flexed with the movement, more prominent than it had ever been before. The buttons of his shirt were tight against his chest, and his thighs really filled out his jeans. “That’s why the house hasn’t been up for sale yet,” he said. “I’ve been kind of practicing with it. The more I do, the better I get. I started mostly with YouTube, honestly, and one of the guys I knew at the warehouse got into contracting, so he helped me out with some of the more technical things and sent me some guys who didn’t mind me following them around. I still can’t do wiring or anything like that by myself, it’s dangerous. I have to call an electrician for that. But the hall bathroom upstairs I did entirely by myself. Had to rip up the tile a couple times and redo it, but I think it turned out good in the end.”

“You know, when I was looking at that bathroom, I was thinking about how straight and even the tiling was,” Shira said. “It must take a lot of your time.” Time you should be spending with Emily?

He shrugged. “I actually left Tiny Elephant this year. I have a lot of savings to keep me afloat while I figure out what to do next.”

“You left Tiny Elephant?” Shira had seen the announcement for the sequel to Washing Dishes at the End of the World recently—Mopping Up After the End of the World. She’d thought it sounded fun, and of course it always flattered her to see her thoughts in the text. “You don’t want to work on Mopping Up?”

He shrugged again. “A lot of the work on Mopping Up is already done. They wanted to talk another sequel, and honestly, I’d already moved on mentally to the newest thing. I’ve been working on a new game on the side. It’s about grief—you start off fighting all these grief monsters, and fighting and fighting, but they get overwhelming, and eventually you have to learn that you can’t kill them. You have to figure out other ways to work past them. By the end you’re walking side by side with them, like they’re your friends or your pets or both, though sometimes they’ll still jump on you and try to rip you to pieces. You just know better how to handle them by that point.”

That sounded so profound. And yet…Shira couldn’t stop thinking how he was crazy for giving up a job heading his own work at a major game studio. Though wasn’t that what people had thought about her, too, when she left the art gallery? Sometimes dream jobs weren’t dream jobs once you started doing them. Sometimes you didn’t have to dream of labor, per James Baldwin. Sometimes it was enough to lead an unassuming life that was happy and fulfilling in ways other than how you made money.

“Anyway, I’ve really enjoyed working with my hands,” said Leo. “And having the freedom to set my own schedule. I think that was one of the things I hated about being at the studio—I enjoyed making the game a lot, when I could do it on my own time on my own schedule, but liked it less when I was bound to a desk. I’m thinking maybe of trying to do this full-time. Work on houses, I mean.”

“Like flipping them?” Shira asked.

Leo was shaking his head before she’d even finished speaking. “I wouldn’t want to call myself a flipper, because they often do such shoddy jobs. They go in and add white subway tile to the bathrooms and paint everything gray and put in air-conditioning and hike the price a few hundred thousand dollars while hiding old wiring and plumbing problems. I’d want to do a good job. Like, really make the houses places where people would want to live. Preserve the character of the current house—no tearing out glorious 1950s bathrooms to put in cheap white sterility, or removing crown molding to make everything look the same.”

“That sounds great,” Shira said. And it did. But he wasn’t speaking like he’d found a passion, something that lit up his life and made him want to wake up every morning. He sounded excited about his work, like it was something he enjoyed doing and found challenging and was proud of, but not like it shaped his life.

She didn’t know where else to go from there. She just knew it was what she wanted, too. To spend her workdays doing something she liked and found fulfilling, but to live her life in the other hours of the day. For her job to give her that space to work on her art without the stress and pressure of her art having to support her.

“Yeah,” he said. He ran a hand along the hallway wall, which Shira was pretty sure had once been covered by striped paper and was now painted a neutral matte eggshell. “I just have to put this guy on the market, and then I’ll have capital to start. I was thinking of finishing like I began and handling the sale myself.”

“Is that allowed?” she asked. She didn’t know much about buying and selling houses—hell, she’d probably never be able to afford one—but from what she understood, real estate agents had their claws deep into the industry.

“Of course it’s allowed,” he said. “Is it wise? I don’t know.” He chewed on his lower lip. “I was thinking about going to some open houses today to get an idea of where the market is so I know how to price it.”

She perked up. “Ooh, can I come?” One of the traits she’d inherited from her mother: irredeemable nosiness. She hadn’t been to an open house in a while, but she used to like going in LA, especially to ones in relatively fancy neighborhoods, since the REALLY fancy neighborhoods didn’t have open houses. Walking through those big airy homes with in-ground pools and six-burner stoves while she imagined what it would be like to live there in that life was both fun and a little depressing. She didn’t think she’d ever been to open houses around here, though.

“Really?” he said, sounding a tiny bit surprised. “You don’t have anything else to do?”

She had plenty she could do. But nothing, she realized now, that she wanted to do nearly as much as tour houses with her old friend. “Let’s do it.”

“Okay,” he said. “But just so you know, I’ve been to some of these open houses before, and the brokers don’t like it if you’re there to compare features. The first time I went, I asked the agent for tips on how to sell my own house, and you’d think I tried to burn the place down.”