“I don’t know,” Raymond said. But he agreed, silently within himself, that it was unlikely. “I’ll ask them.”
“I would very much appreciate that. And you’ll come tell me if they know anything?”
“Sure.”
Raymond turned away and walked back toward the stairs. Just as he reached for the bannister and lifted one foot to step up, he heard her voice again.
“You’re a thoughtful young man,” she said.
Raymond froze. Set his foot back down. Focused on the feeling her words created as they settled in him. It was very much the same feeling as in that brief moment when the cat chose him over food. Other than that, it felt strangely foreign. Welcome, but mostly unfamiliar.
“Thank you,” he said. “That’s a nice thing to say.”
Then he climbed the stairs again to his fourth-floor apartment.
“Pass the butter, please,” his stepfather said.
Raymond heard him, but only in a distant way. He didn’t think to connect much relevance to those words. He definitely didn’t realize the man was talking to him.
“Raymond,” his mother said. “What’s with you? You look like you’re sleeping with your eyes open like you used to when you were little.”
“Sorry,” Raymond said.
He picked up the butter dish, which was more or less in front of his plate, and passed it to the left. His ten-year-old sister, Rhonda, the oldest of his half sisters, took it from him without comment and passed it on. Raymond watched and waited to see if she was laughing at him on the inside. He couldn’t tell. He never could tell. Rhonda and the eight-year-old Wendy had been inscrutable to Raymond almost since they had learned to talk. They talked incessantly to each other, but rarely to him. Only the baby of the family, Clarissa, seemed to consistently notice Raymond, and care.
“How was school today?” his mother asked.
But Raymond didn’t want to assume she had asked it of him. There were quite a few people at that dinner table.
“Who, me?”
“Yes, honey. You.”
“Well. It was Andre’s last day.”
“Oh, that’s right,” she said. She ran a hand through her bleached-blonde hair, finger-combing it off her face. She did that when she was thinking.
Unlike Ed, she listened. But then she forgot.
“Well,” she said. “You have other friends.”
No. Not a one.
“Yeah.”
Only the cat.
“I’m sorry, though,” she added.
Raymond opened his mouth to say something. But he was still unclear on what the something would be. Part of him wanted to express what a big deal it was. Bigger than her words had tried to make it out to be. But it seemed unlikely that he would say a thing like that. He never had before.
“Do you know someone named Luis Velez?” he asked, looking first to his mother, then to Ed.
“Luis Velez,” she said. “That name sounds really familiar. I think I work with a guy named Luis Velez. Oh. Wait. No. That’s Luis Vasquez.”
“I know a guy named Jose Velez,” Ed said, which was surprisingly unhelpful. Or it would have been surprising from someone else. Ed tended toward the unhelpful.
Raymond expected them to ask why he wanted to know, or who this Luis Velez was to him. Something that showed an interest, or a connection. Then, a moment later, he wondered why he had expected it. After all these years.
“What about you, honey?” his mom said, turning her attention on Rhonda. “How was school?”
Rhonda only shrugged.
Raymond left the table in his head. Thought about finding a phone book or an online directory and seeing how many listings there were for Luis Velez. A couple? A couple dozen? A couple hundred? Then he wondered why the old lady hadn’t done the same. Her eyes, maybe? But there was still directory assistance.
He couldn’t get a bead on whether there was a logical reason why the old woman wasn’t able to solve this problem on her own.
Something she had said earlier came popping up into his brain.
For more than four years he came here to help me and check on me.
Which meant she needed help. And checking. And she had no one helping or checking on her now.
Chapter Two
* * *
Tea
He knocked on her door at just after eight thirty in the morning.
He expected her to be afraid to open the door. He thought she’d ask in a wary voice who was out there. Instead he heard the immediate—and strangely rapid for a woman her age—undoing of many locks.
She threw the door open wide.