UNCLE ROGER'S BIGGEST SECRET

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

I stared at the text the whole walk from the driveway to the front door of my building, Drive safe. Roger., three words that shouldn't have meant anything and somehow sat heavier in my chest than they had any right to. I hadn't given him my number. I ran through every possibility, Zed must have shared it at some point, in some group chain, some family contact list, something completely unremarkable, and by the time I got inside I'd talked myself into believing that, mostly, enough to put my phone away and not answer it.

I didn't answer it. I want that on the record, even to myself. I read it four more times and didn't answer it.

Mia was waiting up when I got back to the apartment, curled on the couch in an oversized T-shirt with a bowl of cereal balanced on her knee, the television on but muted, which was her version of pretending she hadn't been waiting up.

"Well?" she said, before I'd even gotten my shoes off. "Report."

"It went well." I dropped onto the couch next to her and stole a spoonful of her cereal before she could stop me. "His mom's really sweet. His little sister is a menace but a funny one. His grandma told a fifteen minute story about Italy that had nothing to do with anything."

"Sounds like every white family dinner I've ever crashed."

"You'd have loved it. There was lasagna that took two days to make."

"Two days? For lasagna? What is she doing to it."

"I didn't ask. I was too busy eating it."

Mia pulled her knees up, angling toward me the way she did when she wanted the real story, not the highlight reel. "Okay but how'd you actually feel. Not the Yelp review. The truth."

I thought about it, actually thought about it, turning the evening over in my head, the warmth of the kitchen, Nora's genuine questions, Sofia's phone videos, Gigi's opinions. "Good," I said. "Really good, honestly. I was nervous for nothing. They liked me. I think they liked me."

"Of course they liked you. You're delightful. It's genuinely annoying." She ate another spoonful of cereal, watching me with the particular squint she got when she thought there was more to a story than I was telling her. "What about the uncle. The intense one. Zed said he was gonna be there."

"He was there."

"And?"

"And nothing. He's Zed's uncle. He was polite. Quiet, mostly." I shrugged, and it felt like a genuine shrug, not a performed one, because in that moment, sitting on my own couch in my own pajamas with cereal crumbs on my shirt, there really was nothing else to say about it. "His grandma made a comment about his divorce that made everyone uncomfortable. That's basically the whole Roger content of the evening."

"Divorced. Interesting."

"Why is that interesting."

"It's not, I just think divorced guys have main character energy at family events. Everyone's tiptoeing around them like they're a bomb that might go off." She grinned. "Was he broody? I feel like he was broody."

"He was quiet. That's not the same as broody."

"Genie. Quiet plus divorced plus construction company owner is like, the entire formula. You're describing a man in a flannel on the cover of a book."

I laughed and threw a couch pillow at her, and she caught it against her chest, laughing too, and the conversation slid easily into other things, her shift at the café tomorrow, a guy from her econ class who kept finding reasons to talk to her after lecture, whether we had enough groceries to make it through the week without another trip. It was an ordinary night, unremarkable in every way that mattered, and I went to bed not thinking about Roger Crawford at all, or at least not thinking about him any more than you'd think about anyone you'd met once for two hours and would probably see again at some point down the road, a fixture at the edge of a life that wasn't really about him.

The essay I'd turned in Friday came back Wednesday with a grade that was fine, not great, a comment in red ink from my professor about underdeveloped analysis in the third section that I already knew was true before she'd pointed it out. I sat with it in the campus coffee shop that wasn't the one I worked at, treating myself to a latte I hadn't made myself for once, and was halfway through rereading her comments when someone slid into the chair across from me without asking.

"That bad?" Caleb Ruiz nodded at the paper, upside down from his angle but apparently readable anyway from the amount of red on it.

"Not bad. Fine. Fine is somehow worse than bad, you know? Bad you can fix. Fine just sits there being mediocre at you."

"That's a very specific kind of despair."

"I contain multitudes."

Caleb was in two of my classes this semester, a guy with an easy laugh and the kind of effortless confidence that came from being genuinely good at the thing we were both studying, the sort of person who raised his hand in seminar not to show off but because he actually had something worth saying, which was rarer than professors liked to admit. We'd worked on a group project together last semester and stayed loosely, comfortably friendly since, the kind of friendship that existed almost entirely within the walls of the communications building and dissolved the second either of us walked out the door.

"You want help with the revision?" he asked. "I've got Professor Reyes for the same class. I could look at it before you resubmit."

"You'd do that?"

"I mean, selfishly, if you do better, it makes the curve worse for me, so really I'm sacrificing my own GPA out of pure generosity." He grinned, and it was a good grin, easy, unbothered. "But yeah. I don't mind."

"That's nice of you. Genuinely."

"I'm a nice guy. It's a whole thing I'm working on, being known for."

I laughed and closed my laptop halfway, giving him more of my attention than I'd been giving the paper, and we talked for another twenty minutes about nothing in particular, a professor we both found insufferable, his plans for an internship next semester, whether the coffee shop's oat milk was actually better or just more expensive, and it was easy in the specific, weightless way that talking to Caleb had always been easy, no history, no stakes, just two people who liked each other's company inside the small bubble of a shared major.

When he left, jogging off to a class across campus, I sat there for a second finishing my latte and thought, not for the first time, that if I'd met Caleb Ruiz before I met Zed, things might have gone differently. It wasn't a big thought. It wasn't even really about Caleb specifically, more about the abstract shape of a life where things had shuffled slightly differently, the way you sometimes think about the version of yourself who took the other job, moved to the other city, said yes instead of no. I loved Zed. Caleb was just a nice, easy, low stakes friendship that happened to remind me, gently, that other kinds of ease existed in the world too.

I texted Zed on my way to my next class, a photo of my paper with all its red ink, captioned "professor reyes has opinions about my third section", and he wrote back almost immediately, the way he always did, "ouch. want me to fight her", and I smiled at my phone walking across the quad, and thought, again, with the same easy confidence I'd had all week, that I was happy. That this was what happy looked like, ordinary and text messages and red pen and a boyfriend who offered to fight my professors on principle.

Zed picked me up from my shift Thursday night, waiting in the parking lot with his car running against the early evening chill, and when I climbed in he had a bag from the taco place we both liked sitting on the console between us, still warm.

"You didn't have to do that."

"I wanted to. You said you were closing tonight, figured you'd be starving." He pulled out of the lot, one hand on the wheel, the other reaching over to steal one of my fries before I'd even opened the bag properly. "How was work?"

"Fine. Busy. Some guy complained for ten minutes about oat milk being extra."

"People are insane about oat milk."

"People are insane about a lot of things, it turns out."

He laughed, and I settled into the seat, unwrapping my food, watching the familiar streets slide by, the particular comfort of a routine that had built itself around us without either of us really deciding to build it. "So," he said, after a minute, "my mom already texted me twice today asking when you're coming back over."

"It's been four days, Zed."

"I told you. She loves you. Sofia too, apparently, she said and I quote, Genie's cooler than you, which, rude, but also accurate."

"I like your family," I said, and meant it, the warmth of Sunday still sitting pleasantly in my memory, uncomplicated. "Your mom especially. She's exactly the kind of mom I'd have picked if you got to pick."

"Don't tell my actual mom you said that, she'll frame it."

"Frame it. I stand by it."

"Speaking of, she's doing a barbecue this weekend before it gets too cold. Whole family, backyard, the works. You free Saturday?"

"I'll check my shifts, but probably. I liked them too much to say no."

He grinned over at me at a red light, reaching over to brush a strand of hair back from my face with a casual, familiar tenderness that still, six months in, made something in my chest go soft and warm, and I thought, watching him, that this was exactly what I wanted. A person who showed up with tacos because he knew I'd be hungry. A person whose family had folded me in without hesitation. A life that was building itself, brick by ordinary brick, into something solid.

I hadn't texted Roger back. I told myself that was the responsible thing, the obvious thing, the only thing a person with any sense would do, and mostly I believed it, right up until Thursday night, brushing my teeth before bed, when my phone lit up on the counter with a name I hadn't saved but recognized instantly.

Another text. Just one line this time.

Zed mentioned you're coming to the barbecue. Good. Wanted to finish a conversation.

I stood there with a toothbrush in my mouth, staring at my own phone like it had said something out loud, and there was no conversation to finish, nothing between us that qualified, a handshake and two sentences about buildings did not constitute a conversation with an ending anyone needed to chase down.

And yet my thumb hovered over the screen for a long time before I finally, carefully, typed back three words and hit send before I could think better of it.

I'll be there.