“I’m sorry,” she said. Then, after a long pause: “I shouldn’t try to press you. You’re in — you’re in a transitional moment right now, and I should respect that.”

I nodded. The air in the house felt heavy.

“I should probably go to bed,” I said. “I had a long day today.”

She nodded. I went out the back door.

♒

By the end of the summer, the person in the guesthouse mirror looked strong and lithe. Still rail-thin but not junkie-thin, corded arms and a four-pack and legs suddenly lineated with fresh definition in unexpected places. Small, barely-there breasts, longer hair, eyes that were slightly less sunken into their sockets.

I tried some names on in the mirror. Kiera, Katie, Kathy. I didn’t want a big change, just a couple phonemes nudged around. I decided that I didn’t have to decide now.

When she wasn’t jabbering with my dad about the construc-tion details, Irvine was pretty quiet. She played all sorts of music while we worked, and never seemed annoyed when I always asked her what it was, but that was never the pretense for a conversation, just information she gave me, like what kind of screw to use for a bracket.

After we finished building the porch and put the sign up, the city inspector came by — a stern-looking Black guy with a clipboard loaded with papers. While he went inside, we all sat in lawn chairs and drank iced coffee.

“This was all just the three of you?” he said when he emerged from the house. We all stood up.

“Yes sir,” Dad said.

“Huh,” he said. “Well, I have some notes, and I’m gonna write up a report. But the short answer is, you passed.”

Irvine smiled. I hadn’t seen her do that too often.

After he left, Dad took the truck on one of his interminable errands, and Irvine and I were left to our own devices. It was the middle of a hot, humid day. She leaned against the side of the house and fixed me with the same amused look she had on our walks.

“Hanin and Steph want to see you, by the way,” she said once the truck was out of sight. “They told me no one knew where you were for a while.”

“Yeah, I was sort of AWOL,” I said.

She gave me a weird look, then it faded and she continued: “If you’re not doing anything right now, I think they’re both at Frog Island Park in Ypsilanti. I bet we could go meet them there.”

“I think I can’t,” I said.

“Laaaaame. What else were you gonna do? C’mon, come see your old friends.”