Hello Stranger(31)
“Yeah?”
“He’s kind of like that, but with croissants.”
* * *
I WANTED TO just stay in the waiting room of the vet clinic all day and all night, forever—but hunger and exhaustion forced me, not long before dinnertime, to leave Peanut in Dr. Addison’s sexy but capable hands and go home.
I also wanted to take that lab coat with me, but I left it—walking home instead in my baby-doll pj’s and bunny slippers, feeling extra naked and alone, and fully expecting to run into some humiliating stranger. A former boss. A premed professor. My dad.
But the person I ran into was Mr. Kim.
I knew him, of course, because he always wore dress shoes, suit pants, a button-down Oxford shirt, and suspenders. He’d been dressing like that Sue’s entire life. No matter what he was doing.
And I was so glad it was him, of all people. He’d seen Sue and me—lots of times—in much crazier getups than bunny slippers.
This evening, he was tinkering with the mechanics of the elevator doors, but when he saw me, he abandoned that project. “Come see me,” he said, gesturing me toward him.
“What about the elevator?” I asked.
But he waved me off. “We’ve got stairs.”
He led me around to a quiet corner, and then he cut right to the chase. “I hear that you’re not just using the rooftop as a studio—you’re living there.”
Mr. Kim smiled a lot. Maybe he wasn’t always smiling—but he was often smiling.
But I couldn’t sense him smiling now.
My heart dropped. Was I getting kicked out?
Was I really—right here, in my pj’s and bunny slippers, with Peanut in the ICU, at the brokest and sickest and most disoriented I’d ever been in my life—getting kicked out of my apartment by the closest thing to a father figure I had?
His voice was pretty serious. “That won’t work,” he said, shaking his head with a vibe like he was truly sorry.
I nodded. Of course. I never should have snuck around behind the Kims’ back to begin with.
“It’s not an apartment,” he said next. “Renting it as a studio is one thing. But it’s not fit to live in. I really”—and here he shook his head—“can’t rent that place as living quarters.”
I nodded harder. “I get it. You’re right. I’m so sorry.”
Oh god, I was so screwed.
But then Mr. Kim let out a chuckle that he couldn’t suppress any longer. “So I guess,” he said, clapping his hand on my shoulder, “you’ll just have to stay there for free.”
Nine
SUE WAS SUPPOSED to come over the next day for week two of our doomed portrait sessions. But I called her when I got back from the clinic and postponed.
“I’m not in a good place,” I told her after giving the lowdown on Peanut.
“But painting makes you feel better.”
“Not anymore.”
“I refuse to believe that.”
“I painted a hundred faces the other night, and it was pure torture.”
Sue took that in. “Okay. If that’s how it is right now.”
“That’s how it is right now.”
“Take some you time, then. Binge-watch something.”
“I can’t watch TV anymore,” I said.
Sue was aghast. “Why not?”
“Because of the face blindness.”
“I keep forgetting about that.”
“I can’t tell the characters apart.”
“Wow,” Sue said, “what a nightmare.”
“It’s been a nightmare this whole time!”
“But now I really get it.”
“That’s what made you get it?”
“That,” Sue conceded, “and those images you texted me of upside-down faces. I, like, couldn’t recognize any of those people. Not one. And then you sent the right-side-up version, and I was like, ‘Oh! There’s Michelle Obama! And Julie Andrews! And Liam Hemsworth!’”
“Are you telling me,” I said, “that if Liam Hemsworth walked past you with his face upside down, you wouldn’t even know?”
“I’d have no idea.”
“Welcome to my life. I pass a hundred Liam Hemsworths a day.”
Sue sighed like she was really getting it. Then she said, “It’s his loss, though. Never forget that.”
* * *
SO THAT’S HOW I spent my me time for the next few days: trying to shrink the edema in my fusiform face gyrus through sheer force of will and delivering meals of international delicacies to my beloved dog several times a day as he fought for his life in the ICU.
I confess that, after that first day, I always got a little gussied up before heading to the vet clinic. “It’s for Peanut,” I told Sue on the phone. “He wouldn’t want to see me looking dowdy.”
But, in truth, I had to redeem those baby-doll pajamas.
In general, I made it a rule to never not be okay in front of anyone. Especially not future husbands. All I could do was hope that Dr. Addison had been far too fixated on Peanut that first morning to really notice the falling-apart me.
I mean, he probably hadn’t missed the copious sobbing. But maybe he saw that all the time anyway.