Free All Our Names by Dinaw Mengestu Page B

made it a touch nicer. He stripped and repainted the exterior, added a large brass handle to the front door, new railings on the porch, and, finally, a hedge fence around what had been a barren front yard. Such attentions by a middle-aged single man didn’t go unnoticed. I knew the rumors, and David did as well. We joked occasionally about getting married.
    “My mother would be happy,” I said.
    “Mine would probably die from a heart attack. The relief would be too much for her.”
    “I’d have to quit my job.”
    David shook his head.
    “No, no, no,” he said. “You can keep the job. That way we don’t have to talk to each other at home, like a real married couple.”
    When I walked into David’s office, he was hanging up thephone. In his college photos, he was skinny to the point of looking malnourished. The job had filled him in. Since he became the director, he rarely had to leave the office anymore. “I get fatter every day I come in here,” he said, and now he barely fit comfortably behind his desk, all his girth gathered around his midsection like an inner tube that I imagined him someday slipping out of.
    “You wanted to see me,” I said.
    He shrugged his shoulders. “What gave you that impression?”
    I took the note he had taped to my desk and slapped it onto my forehead.
    “Just a hunch,” I said.
    He scratched his head. Looked up at the ceiling.
    “I remember now,” he said. “I wanted to ask you if you were ever going to come back to work.”
    “I’m here every day,” I said.
    He looked down at his tie.
    “I saw you sleeping in your car yesterday afternoon. You didn’t notice I was in my car when you left the office, so I followed you. I thought you were going to see your Dickens, but instead you just pulled onto the side of the road and fell asleep. I stayed parked behind you for over an hour. I was worried someone would rob you. That’s not the neighborhood for someone like you to fall asleep in.”
    I was too ashamed to be angry. I was on the verge of apologizing, and once I did I imagined I would confess the entire story of my relationship with Isaac. I just had one question to ask him before doing so:
    “Why did you follow me?”
    “I told you,” he said.
    “No. You said you thought I was going to see my Dickens. But that doesn’t explain why you followed me.”
    He finally looked up. I had caught him in something better than a lie.
    “Why I would follow you?”
    He repeated the question, although this time he was posing it only to himself. I saw a smirk pass over his face as he tried to answer it.
    “Why would I follow you? You of all people, Helen, should be able to guess an answer to that.”
    David and I had that conversation on a Friday. Before leaving, I told him that I would try not to disappear from the office again. He kissed me goodbye on the forehead.
    “Don’t try too hard,” he said.
    I didn’t see Isaac that evening or over the weekend. On Monday, I came into the office early and spent four hours on the phone, checking in on old clients, and the next three hours writing reports on the conversations I’d just had. I left the office an hour early. Before doing so, I knocked on David’s door.
    “Just in case you have any ideas in your head,” I told him, “I’m leaving early. I’m going to go have a talk with Mr. Dickens, if you want to follow me.”
    “That sounds better than watching you sleep in your car,” he said.
    I had a list of ultimatums and rules for Isaac, only one of which really mattered: we had to talk to each other and not just about small, petty things but a real conversation with depth and insight. Before I rang the doorbell, I told myself I was going to leave if we didn’t say something important. I rang the bell twice. I waited for several minutes before being convinced he wasn’t home. The same was true the next day. It took me one more dayto start worrying that he would never return. If that was true, as long as he wasn’t dead