“Okay, then,” he said, turning back to me. He gestured up a set of concrete stairs. I followed like a bum, garbage bags slung over my shoulders, up to a courtyard full of plants I couldn’t name: pink flowers, towering fronds, sturdy fingers of green. Stalks of bamboo lined the stucco like wallpaper. “The garden is communal,” Abe told me. “You should use it whenever you want.”

The wooden benches were straight, their paint unchipped. They didn’t sag the way benches sag after enough people have sat on them. I couldn’t imagine sitting there alone.

Abe gestured to an open doorway off the courtyard: his place. We walked into a two-story living room that was almost completely empty. There was a plastic lawn chair propped in front of a flatscreen TV, and boxes stacked along the walls. I saw a kitchen made of steel and marble and a loft above it. There was a spiral staircase.

“Is that your room?” I asked. “Up there?”

He shook his head. “Afraid of heights. Always have been.”

I’d never known this. But I suppose it made sense that I hadn’t realized. I’d known him in a flat town, full of strip malls and single-story trailers, no heights for miles. I could remember something about his father forcing him onto the tallest roller coaster in Vegas, but I’d never been sure which part he’d been scared of. He’d cried just telling me about that shaking coaster, how the city lights went blurry from distance—he was so far up, like a terrible bird—and how his tears blurred everything even more. I thought he’d been afraid of the speed, or maybe of his father, who was never a cruel man, just had a lot of hopes and only one son to carry them.

Abe set down the box. “My room is back here,” he said, and took me to a small room behind the kitchen. It was bare and bright, with a swivel chair, no desk, and a mattress on the floor. A laptop sat on the floor with its plug trailing behind it, like a dog on a leash. There was a tie rack on the wall, draped with shimmering bands of blue and green. There was a book on the pillow and a half-eaten bar of chocolate stuck like a bookmark between its pages. I bent closer. The book was some kind of science fiction; I saw a red planet floating in the middle of licorice space. Even as a boy, Abe liked all that stuff. He got impatient when I mixed up aliens from different movies.

Behind me, he said, “It’s kind of a bedroom-slash-office. It’s not fixed up.”

“You don’t have an office at work?”

“I do.”

“But you needed another one.”

“I needed another one.”

He’d been living here for three years, I knew from the address on his checks, and it still looked like this—barely unpacked, just a bar of chocolate to mark his place.