Page 6 of Life Out of Order

“Any kind. Tell me something that happened to you when you were a kid.”

“Ugh, I’m terrible at this,” I say, flustered. “My mind’s gone blank. You tell me something.”

“Give me a prompt.”

“The house you grew up in?”

“Ah. Okay. Have you ever been to Tulsa?”

“Nope.”

“There’s a neighborhood in Tulsa, it’s full of all these wonderful Craftsman and bungalow houses people built back in the day, and they were all derelict, nobody had lived in them for years. And my parents are both architects, and they fell in love with these houses, and started buying and restoring them one by one. They’d restore it, we’d move in, then they would buy another one and once that one was done they’d sell the one we were in and move into the next. Then the neighborhood caught on and my parents couldn’t afford to keep doing that, so we stayed in the last one until they split up this year. Now my mother lives downtown with my sisters and my dad still has the house.”

There’s something very calming about Zach, as though his low, resonant voice is creating a little island, just the two of us, a lava lamp, and the pile of coats.

“So it was disorienting,” he continues, “like those dreams where things are familiar but you’ve never seen them before, or you are looking for something and you never find it. You know?”

I do know; he’s describing time travel. Times and places layered and torn into strange configurations; the everyday and the unexpected juxtaposed. “Yes,” I say. “I understand.”

“It was hard to feel at home,” Zach says, matter-of-factly. “Home was us, my family. Now my sisters say they don’t live anywhere.”

“How old are they?”

“Seventeen and thirteen. RaeAnn and Suellen.” Zach fishes his phone out from the inside pocket of his suit, taps and swipes. “Here.” The photo shows Zach with two girls, standing together under a huge tree on a sunny day. “This was for her prom,” says Zach. “Taken right before the big bang, when we all ended up living apart.”

I hand him back his phone. His hand brushes my fingers as he takes it from me and I feel warm all over. Get a grip, Alba.

“What happened?” I ask him.

“The usual thing. Affairs. RaeAnn and I think there were always other people, but it was my mother who got caught, and now he’s gleefully trying to take everything and leave her with nothing. It’s all horrible.” Zach grimaces. “Anyway. Tell me about your family.”

“Yeah, um. I’m an only child. So, my dad died when I was five and my mom raised me.” I have such a habit of keeping secrets that I am uncomfortable telling anything to anyone. Most of my friends, like Nadia and Rosa, are people I’ve known since I was a baby. I’m glad Isadora isn’t here to catch me pretending I don’t have a sister.

Zach waits for me to continue. When he sees that I won’t, he says, “What happened to your dad?”

I don’t want to talk about this. “He got shot. On New Year’s Eve. It was 2006 turning into 2007. I think it was just after midnight.” I can see it in my mind’s eye, my dad on the living room rug, everyone at the party standing around us staring, the blood, so much blood; I remember my mother putting me in the bath that morning and the water going pink-tinged with his blood, it was in my hair . . .

“Oh. Sorry,” Zach says in a small voice. He looks uncomfortable. I wonder what Zach is imagining. A mugging? A drive-by? “What was he like?”

“Um, he was sweet. He was a librarian at the Newberry Library. He liked to cook. We have all his books. I’ve been reading through them. He wrote notes in the margins, so I feel as though he’s keeping me company while I read. He was into punk rock and poetry. He translated poems for practice. He used to stick CTA transfers in his books. When I find one I try to imagine where he was going that day. Mostly he was going to and from work, he was kind of a homebody.” I tear up and stop talking, embarrassed.

Zach offers me his hand, and I take it. “You miss him.”

“Yeah. Grief is weird; you think you’re okay and then it pounces on you out of nowhere.” He gives me his handkerchief but I shake my head; I don’t want to get mascara all over it. I blink back the tears.

“I know the feeling, sort of,” he says. “Maybe I shouldn’t have asked?”

“It’s okay,” I tell him. “I don’t mind.”

“So it was just you and your mom?”

“We have a group of friends that are like our family; it isn’t just us. I was never lonely at home. My mother is a sculptor; she makes huge birds out of paper. She would make little birds for me, and she used to draw me all the time. I always liked modeling for her, just to be there with her in the studio, having her look at me for a few hours.”

“You’re easy to look at.”

I laugh. “Don’t start.”

“Don’t start what?”