“Yeah, you really get around.” I rolled my eyes. “Fox, why are you always with all these women?”
He opened his mouth, then closed it. I was just starting down the stairs when he called after me, “Why do you care? Jealous or something?”
“Please,” I muttered. I just didn’t understand it, why he was always hunting around so desperately. And Fox was a fun guy, but I couldn’t understand why so many women were all throwing themselves at him. But that made me think a little about the girl Corrie, because I knew very well why she had gone home with him: she hadn’t had anywhere else to go. I wondered what she was doing and where she was sleeping when she wasn’t at my house. I rolled my neck against the crick. “Wait, what’s today?” I yelled up the stairs to Fox, who called back that it was Wednesday before he slammed the bedroom door. Someone in the living room hollered for us to be quiet because the people who lived there were trying to sleep.
But still, despite the waste of water and how annoying Fox was and a little bit of lingering worry about Corrie and the people in the living room who thought the house was theirs, I was pretty excited for the day. First, I was bringing my car into the shop, which was not really that thrilling except that I would meet Cooper’s friend. Second, I had my Japanese class that night. I had gone ahead and called and set up an appointment for my car, and I had left reminders taped everywhere for myself: “Brody’s Garage! Noon!!!” And I had told Karis to remind me at work, too. So at exactly 11:30, she came out of the little office that she and Reid shared, and trotted over to my desk. “Time to go,” she told me.
“I’ll talk to you later, Marat.” He had been messing with my computer, saying that something was wrong with it, so he had been hanging out at the reception with me for most of the day. Reid had followed Karis out of their office and he shot Marat a look that had him moving quickly back to his own desk.
I got the Gremlin started, which it hadn’t done very well that morning, and I drove it over to the garage. “Hi,” I told the lady at the front desk. She had a lovely, calming light about her. “I have an appointment. Today, I’m pretty sure.”
She looked at her screen for a while, long enough for me to think that I had gotten the wrong day again. “Just a second,” she told me. “I’m filling in for the woman who’s usually here and sometimes her system doesn’t make sense to me. Digger?” she called over her shoulder.
A man came out of the back, and sure, I didn’t like to focus on the external, but he was so handsome I felt my eyebrows go up. He bent over the woman at the desk, looking at the screen, but then he kind of nuzzled her hair and she smiled. “I know this one,” he said. “Lori didn’t write it in because I’m doing it at lunch.” He stood up and looked at me. “You’re Coop’s friend?”
I had used his name when I called, just like Cooper had suggested. “I am,” I said. “We’re school friends, you know, like we’re only friends there right now.”
“Ok, sure. Where’s your car?” The big, handsome guy kissed the woman at the desk on the head, making her smile again, and followed me outside. “This is your Gremlin?”
I nodded proudly. “I bought it for $777 dollars.” Seven was my lucky number, so it was obviously the car for me.
“I can see why you got it so cheap. You driving it around with that hole in the floor?”
“It was a little cold in the winter.”
“I bet it was.” He opened the hood and poked around the engine some, and then started it and drove it around the block while I waited, hugging the wall to stay in the shade. The heat moved off the pavement in waves. When the big guy came back, he was grimacing. “Do you want me to fix everything, or just make it safe?”
“It isn’t safe?”
“Not if you feel like brakes are an important part of driving, for one thing. There are at least five major issues I’d fix before I let my wife take out this car.” He studied the Gremlin. “Probably eight.”
“Well, I guess can you make it safe?”
“Sure, happy to help a school friend of Coop’s.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Digger Brody.”
I shook it. “Ione.”
“What’s Coop doing back in town?”
“He came back to take over his parents’ company. We met in Japanese class, where he’s trying to learn the language to get a contract to sell robots.”
“Huh. Yeah, last I heard he had a good job out west, but I haven’t seen him in a long time. Do you have his number? I’ll give him a call.”
I did have his number, and actually, I had memorized it, so I recited it for this guy, Digger.
“You two are friends?” he asked, and he looked at me, like he didn’t quite believe it.
“School friends,” I confirmed. Then I went and caught a bus back to work, because I had some Japanese homework to finish before my class that night. I got a very excited feeling, just thinking about it.
Chapter 3
“Cutie.” Cooper looked again at the board. “No, that’s not right. I meant ten o’clock, not nine o’clock.” He tried again. “Julie.”
Now that we were so proficient at numbers, for this class, Gin was having us talk about telling time. “Juji,” I repeated. “Really? That’s what time you go to bed? I can’t remember the last time I was asleep so early.” He did look a little tired to me. Maybe that was why he was going to bed when children did.
“I get up at five. What time do you go to bed?” he asked me.
“Like, last night?” I thought. “Maybe…ichiji? One, or maybe two. Or earlier or later, I wasn’t looking so much at the clock. I don’t get up at five, though. I have to set three alarms on my phone to make sure I’m not late for work.” Talking about staying up late reminded me of what I had been doing the night before. “I have something for you.” I took the roll of paper out of my purse. “Here.”
Cooper took it and spread out it on his desk. He stared at the paper. “This is a picture of me. You drew me?”
“I hope that’s ok. You didn’t seem to mind when I drew you before, so I did it again,” I explained. “It’s not a nude, since I haven’t seen you naked, not yet.”
His mouth fell open. “What?”
“Let’s talk about going to bed,” Gin told the class. He looked right at me and smiled but I looked away. We talked more about time, and about trains in Japan and how the schedules looked, and we started vocabulary about transportation and getting around. That was our homework, too, and I wrote it down carefully, but not on today’s date since it seemed like I had already used that page for something else.
This time, when class ended, Cooper stood next to my chair and waited for me. “Why did you give me this?” He held out the drawing, now neatly rolled up again. “Why were you drawing me?”
I shrugged. “I like to draw. Why not you? Some people don’t like to be put into art, but you didn’t seem to mind. You gave back the paper with my sketches on it when you wrote the name of your friend’s garage on it. I like your face, so I drew you again.” I tapped the picture. “It turned out pretty well, and as I said, you aren’t naked, because I do try to go for accuracy as much as I can and I know that’s a big deal to some people, being clothed. Unless you want to pose nude, or we get naked together, I’ll only be drawing you with clothes.”
Cooper’s mouth was back open, but he wasn’t speaking.
“Thanks for sending me to your friend’s garage,” I continued. “He’s going to fix my Gremlin.” We walked outside into the hot night.
He found his voice. “Yes, Digger called me. He said you gave him my phone number. How did you happen to have it?”
“You gave it to me. Remember when we learned numbers on Monday?”
“I thought you asked for my phone number so we could practice vocabulary. We were speaking Japanese. You were really asking for my number?” He shook his head as if he was clearing it.
“What do you mean?” I asked, kind of confused now myself. “I asked, ‘What’s your phone number?’ and you told me. I don
’t get what you’re saying.” By this point, we had arrived at the bus stop, and Cooper was still shaking his head. “Anyway, goodnight,” I told Cooper. “I’m taking the bus because my car is with your friend.” The street light was out and it looked a little dark on the corner.
I saw Cooper look above us at the broken light. “Can’t you get a ride share?” he asked me.
“I could, except I think I left my phone in my car with your friend. I haven’t been able to find it.” I had been late to work that morning because of getting up late without all the alarms going off.
Cooper looked up and down the street. “Where did you say you live? Hamtramck?”
I nodded. “My whole life.”
“I can drive you. Come on.” We turned and walked again, now over to where he had parked. Cooper’s car reminded me of him—it was very square and sensible. I told him that.
He frowned under the car’s dome light. “I’m square and sensible?”
I hadn’t meant to offend him. I got in and stretched out my legs, happy that there wasn’t any hole in the floor next to my feet. “I didn’t mean it in a bad way.” Because I also thought that he was very attractive. The more time I spent with him, in fact, the more attractive I thought he was. I loved his attitude about our class, how hard he worked and tried. I loved how he tilted the computer screen so I could see it, how when a lady’s purse had dumped out on the classroom floor, he had gotten down to help her pick it all back up. How he always called out, “Thank you,” to Gin the teacher at the end of class.
And as for the external, his face was just so serious all the time, his jaw so set and square. Like the car. I loved his grey eyes, like thunderclouds, and the sharp lines of his cheekbones. And even though I hadn’t drawn him naked, I had been watching his body under his clothes. He moved like he was athletic, and from the looks of his chest and arms, even beneath his starchy shirt, he had the form there. “Did you play sports?”
“What? Uh, yeah, in high school. Digger and I played football and baseball together. Basketball, too. Now I’m…why?” He looked at me suspiciously.
“I’m just curious about you. I didn’t play sports, because I was mostly doing art all the time. Now I go running with Karis and it’s pretty fun, I guess. Her boyfriend, I mean, her fiancé, Reid, he signed our whole office up for the gym in the building. The only thing is, you have to wear shoes, and I really like to run barefoot.”
“I always feel like I’m two steps behind our conversations. Who are these people you’re talking about?”
I explained to him about Karis, who had done most of my work as well as her own when we’d had our old jobs, and how we both were at Reid’s company now, and how she was going to marry him. And also how I had painted Karis in the nude a while ago without her permission, and she had been very upset, but now that painting hung on the back of the big sliding door of their bedroom in their loft. “And that’s how I learned a hard lesson about not putting people in my art unless they don’t mind, and definitely not naked. Would you mind?”
“You already drew me. Thank you for the picture, I should have said.”
I was talking about Cooper getting naked, but he didn’t seem to understand me yet.
“I’ll give it to my mom,” he continued. “She’ll be happy.”
I was still studying his face, which changed when he talked about his mother. “Is she all right?”
“How did you know something’s wrong with my mother?”
We pulled to a stop at a red light. “Well, your whole aura changed.”
“Seriously? My aura?”
I nodded. “Also this,” I said, and I put my hand on his on the gearshift, where his fingers were clenched around it. He looked down at my hand, but when the light changed, he put his own back on the steering wheel.
“She has MS. It was in remission for a long time, but now it isn’t,” he explained.
“I’m sorry to hear that. It’s hard to watch the people you love struggle. And suffer.”
Cooper didn’t answer, but his hand came back down and gripped the gearshift again.
“Can you tell me more about your robots?” I asked. “I’ve been really curious, ever since I started thinking about C3PO.”
“Nothing like that.” He explained about his company, which made interesting but not exactly Star Wars-type robots for use on assembly lines. He got a lot more animated than I had seen him before, telling me about the history of the company and the new things he was doing to try to revive it, while I gave him directions about where to exit and where to turn. It sounded like the new things for his company involved him being in the office from morning till night, which would explain why he looked so tired.
“I’m very impressed,” I told him. “You’re very dedicated. All that work, and you’re also learning Japanese.”
“I’m not learning Japanese. I’m terrible with languages. What the teacher says, what you say, it doesn’t sound very much like what I’m saying. I was the same way when I had to take Spanish in high school. I tried French to get over the language requirement at my college, and I couldn’t do that, either. Those words won’t come out right.” He put his fingers to his lips, as if his mouth was to blame, and I let my eyes rest there for a moment. His lips were full, not feminine, but full, and I liked the shape so much. I made little motions with my hand, sketching them in the air.
“Your notes are amazing,” I encouraged him. “But your pronunciation could use some work.” I thought back to class when Cooper had been trying to ask where the nearest train station was, and said something about chitty chitty bang bang and doughnuts. Even the teacher hadn’t understood him. “Ok, here’s my house.”
Cooper pulled to a stop in the driveway, behind the pile of branches, leaves, and trash that I hadn’t figured out how to deal with yet. A large number of people walked out the front door and left it open behind them.
He leaned over the wheel and looked at the house. “Why is it partially blue?”
“I couldn’t reach very high,” I explained. I looked at the house too, and it did stand out a little from the other houses on the street with the bright blue paint on most of the first floor. “I got the inspiration to paint it after looking at pictures of the houses in the Greek islands.”
“I thought those were white?”
“They are,” I agreed. “It was inspiration, not imitation.”
Cooper turned to stare at me, then again at the house as another batch of people left through the open front door. “Do you have a lot of roommates?”
“I used to, but now I’m down to only one permanent one, my friend Fox.” All the other people had moved out and no one else had taken up rent-paying residence.
“Are you having people over now? A party?”
“No, but people come to hang out here.” I saw my neighbor Sania open her front door, looking determined. “Uh oh. I have to go.”
“People come over when you’re not here?” He looked up and down the house again.
“You know what? You and I should get together to work on pronunciation. Outside of class.”
“Well—”
“Like Friday, after work.” I opened the door, keeping an eye on Sania moving quickly in my direction. “Give me your hand.” He looked at me strangely, so I took his hand off the wheel and wrote my full name and my phone number on it. He was a pretty big guy, with pretty big hands, but that information covered most of his palm. “Ione Szczupakiewicz,” I said out loud. “Bye!”
I heard Cooper saying, “Ione Scuzzy Packing List? Jesus H. Christ, that’s…” as I shut the car door and ran away from Sania. I bolted up the stairs and past Fox making out with yet another woman, right up to my studio. There was someone standing at the door.
“Corrie?”
She turned quickly. “Oh, hi. Ione. I was just looking for you.”
I took out the key that I kept on a silver chain around my neck so that I wouldn’t lose it, and opened the door. I heard Sania yelling at people in
my living room to be quiet and get out, so I tugged Corrie into the room and closed and locked the door behind me. “I’ve been thinking about you,” I said.
“You have?”
“I’ve been wondering where you’ve been hanging out,” I explained.
“Here and there.” Her eyes darted around the room. “This is where you live?”
“I live in the house,” I corrected her. “But, yes, I guess I do spend a lot of my time in here working.” It wasn’t really work, since I enjoyed it so much. “This was my grandparents’ bedroom. My old bedroom was the one you were in with Fox, the green room.”
She picked up some of my brushes and spun them. “I like that room. It feels like being in the ocean or something. It’s cool.”
“Thanks! I like it too.” I put down my bag. “Where are you really sleeping when you’re not here?”
Corrie still didn’t answer. She wandered around my studio, picking up things, looking at them. “I took an art class in high school. It was ok. I liked other stuff better but I liked to paint.”
“Art was all I really liked,” I told her. “I wasn’t very good at school but I got through it.” I watched her play with my pens. “You can come in here and paint with me, or draw, if you want. You know, you can also stay here in the green bedroom. Not with Fox, just on your own. He sleeps down the hall. It could be your room.”
She looked at me warily. “Why?”
“Why not? It would be fun. It’s only me and Fox right now, and, you know, everyone else who comes to hang out.”
“Why don’t you hang out with those people downstairs? I’ve been over here a few times and mostly you’re here in your room.”
I thought for a moment. “I really like to do my thing up here, you know? I come down when my friends are over.” I thought for a while more. I did seem to spend most of my time in my studio. “What do you think about staying here? Do you need to go somewhere get your stuff? I can go with you.”
Love in Many Languages Page 4