Page 52 of ClickBack

“He must be very busy.”

“You have no idea.”

Her page is public. There are birthday dinners, Zion in a uniform, Rae holding something up for the camera while Giselle’s thumb covers a corner of the picture. A woman is laughing beneath a theater marquee. Giselle has a life on here that looks like it belongs to her. I leave the follow button alone.

“People watch who I follow,” I tell her. “I don’t want to send them to your pictures without asking.”

“I appreciate that.”

A notification appears. She has followed me.

“I see you.”

“I assumed you would. It sends an announcement.”

“You’d been looking already.”

“Your coats have an impressive social life.”

I look at my most recent posts. Two events, a sponsor shoot, a coat Maya insisted I keep on for a photograph even though we were inside.

“Maya handles most of that.”

“Tell her the brown one was worth the trouble.”

“I’ll wear it next time.”

“In June? Please don’t pass out trying to impress me.”

I take off my shoes. The sound of her laugh is back, but I don’t treat it like permission to forget why she wasn’t laughing when she answered.

“How was your week?”

“Which part?”

“The part you would have told me on Tuesday.”

She exhales, then tells me Zion came down with a fever and spent two nights on her couch while Rae worked. He kept interrupting the shows she put on to ask how old they were.

“He asked me whether people really dressed like that.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“That some of us were magnificent.”

I laugh. “Did you show him pictures?”

“Absolutely not. That child has a phone and no discretion.”

By Thursday he had recovered enough to lobby for baseball. Coach Leo required him to be fever-free before coming back, which Zion apparently took as the opening of negotiations. While she tells me how he tried to get Jeremy to overrule both of them, I picture the boy from Saturday, serious about whatever outcome he has selected for himself.

“Rae doing all right?”

“A few weeks from finishing school. She’s counting assignments now. Yesterday she called to tell me she turned one in, and I could hear Zion in the background asking whether that meant she could play a game.”

“Did it?”

“She said one. I called back later. They were on their third.”