Page 28 of The Damage Man

Except when it comes to Joey.

After lunch they stroll to get frozen yogurt, as dictated by Joey’s feeding schedule. UCLA kids are out in force, trios of sorority girls sparkling with glitter lotion, mop-headed guys in torn T-shirts, scampering scholars with backpacks stuffed as full as a comms ruck on a field mission. A few homeless guys lounge on the benches, and a not-terrible busker is warbling out a ska version of “Brown Eyed Girl.”

“I feel like every Mexican girl in the world gets to dance to this song except me,” Joey says.

“True. Your green eyes are a disgrace to your heritage.”

“Embarrassing, really.”

“And hideously unattractive.”

There goes that dimple.

“X, if you didn’t get stuck with me, do you think…?”

He scans the rooflines. “What?”

“You think we’d be friends?”

“Is that what we are?”

“Uncle-dad-cousin-person. Don’t get all semantic to avoid the question.”

“No way,” Evan says. “I was taught never to trust a green-eyed Mexican.”

“I’m serious, güero!”

“Why are you asking?”

“I don’t know. With your—” She catches herself: “With Jacob Baridon”—hitting the syllables hard in a parody of strained obedience—“dying … it just seems weird. Us Orphans, I mean, kind of floating unattached in the world. Is that what we’d be if we hadn’t met? Just … floating?”

He considers for about a half block. “Probably,” he says.

“That’s so pathetic.”

They keep walking. Joey’s face is like a mood ring; her cheeks get heavy when she is sad.

She halts abruptly on the sidewalk. Pedestrians stream around them, buffeting them with shopping bags.

“What was it?” she demands. “The closure or resolution or whatever? What’d you learn from Baridon?”

“From him?” He imagines his father, aggressively untethered, his cowardice ossifying layer by layer over the years. A man who, in Jack’s parlance, never stood in front of a threat with his back to something—someone—he chose to protect. “Nothing. But I got…”

“What?”

He wants so badly to be able to explain. She is patient with him as he struggles to know what he wants to say. He is scanning faces and packages, too, as always, which doesn’t help because he has to keep dialing back the focus.

“There was nothing to get from him.”

“The situation, then. Or whatever.”

His cheek holds the memory of Gwendolyn’s palm.

He starts haltingly: “As a foster kid, in the Program, operationally … So much of the world never made sense.”

“Like: the normal stuff.”

“Yes. The normal stuff.”