Page 10 of Not My Problem

“What do you mean?”

“You busted me breaking into my grandmother’s house less than twenty-four hours ago and now I’m staying at your house and napping on your couch and you’re offering to teach me weight lifting and I… I feel like a total freeloader.”

She waved her hands as she got animated, which was kind of cute. “I’m an interloper on your weekend and I’m not even totally sure if my grandmother wants to see me anyway but I’m kind of stuck here…”

She paused, then let out another deep exhale. “Anyway, I’m grateful, truly I am. But I want to pull my weight. Tell me what I can do while I’m here.”

“Why don’t we wait and see what Jan says?” I suggested. “I expect we’ll hear from her soon, and that will tell us what our next steps are. But in the meantime, I need to get some food. I’m starving.”

I walked around her and her hand shot out, touching my arm. I stared at it, wondering if she felt the same buzzing where our skin connected.

“Thank you Gretchen, I appreciate everything.”

I turned my head, catching her earnest expression, and it took everything in me not to grab her head and pull her down for a kiss.

“No problem, really. Let’s get some food.”

We headed upstairs and I made some sandwiches to go with the deli macaroni salad and potato chips that I’d picked up at the grocery store.

“I watched a bunch of YouTube videos on dyslexia, and I think that’s definitely what I have,” Zoe said over lunch. “The videos were really helpful. Thanks for the suggestion.”

“I’m glad.”

I wanted to add more, say that once she got settled somewhere she could work with someone to learn more and help her with tools to understand how her brain worked, but I reminded myself it wasn’t my place to fix her life. I’d heard this before, from friends and people I dated, that I jumped in and tried to fix things, always be helpful, and sometimes people found it annoying.

“I’m going to do some yardwork after lunch,” I said. “The weeds in the back yard are getting out of control and it’s a nice day to work outside.”

She brightened. “I’ll help you. There’s not a lot of yards or green space where I come from. My neighborhood’s mostly concrete.”

“Sure,” I agreed. “I could use some help.”

“You keep busy, don’t you?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You’ve already been shopping, then you worked out, and now you’re doing yardwork. You haven’t sat down at all except to eat.”

“What do you do on your days off?” I asked.

“Mostly chill. Watch TV. Sleep. Sometimes I meet a friend for coffee.”

I heard my mother’s voice in my head saying that old adage about idle hands being the devil’s playground, but it was more than that.

“Spending all those years in foster care, I learned to be useful. The kids who helped around the house, who made their foster parents’ lives easier, those are the kids they wanted to keep around.”

Zoe

Gretchen’s words made me sad. I’d learned a different way of handling things. Keeping quiet, not disturbing anyone, not asking for anything, that was the key to staying out of trouble with my mother and her assortment of boyfriends. I spent a lot of time holed up in my room watching TV and staying under the radar.

Mom was fine -- when she was sober. Things got complicated when she wasn’t. I mostly learned to fend for myself.

“So what do we need to do here?” I asked as we headed onto the raised deck that led to Gretchen’s backyard.

The yard was larger than I expected, with a six-foot tall wooden fence surrounding the space and tall trees lined up along the back of the property. There was a vegetable garden on the one side, a concrete patio on the other, and an expanse of grass in the middle. I popped up on my tiptoes and looked over the fence at my grandmother’s yard. I hadn’t looked around too much when I was there last night, focused on finding a key when I realized my grandmother wasn’t home. Her yard had two huge trees and several rose bushes, but no garden. She did, however, have a very comfortable looking hammock strung up between the trees.

“You want to weed or mow the grass?” Gretchen asked.

“I’ll mow.”