Free Love and Other Foreign Words by Erin McCahan

face, and I quietly exhale, and he says, “Cool question. Okay, ask it again.”
    I do. He repeats it. Emmy steps between us with a curt hello to us both and hurries me off to track practice, and Stefan and I say
see ya
to each other.
    â€œYou’re so cute, you’re sickening,” Emmy says.
    â€œSo are you with your hair like this,” I say as I remove several strands from her gooey pink lips.
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    Tonight, Stefan calls me at home with his well-reasoned answer. He would keep giving up his seat, but if he ever met the boyfriend, he’d tell what he knew.
    â€œYou can’t stay quiet in the face of a lie,” he says.
    â€œEven if it causes a more disturbing scene than Emmy and Nick?”
    â€œOh, yeah. I mean, you know what they say. I’m just the messenger. What would you do?”
    â€œI’d say something immediately and let her stand for all eternity.”
    â€œCool.”
    â€œAnd even though I’d just be the messenger, I’d be prepared to get shot.”
    â€œYeah, that’s it! Don’t shoot the messenger,” he says.
    â€œNo one likes to be told bad news,” I say.
    â€œYeah, but sometimes you have to, right? And I think most people understand eventually, so that’s cool. And the ones who don’t, hell with them, you know.”
    â€œI guess,” I say, giving it some thought.
    â€œHey, you want to go to breakfast tomorrow?” He names a popular diner just outside Bexley.
    â€œI can’t,” I say.
    â€œSunday?”
    â€œI can’t Sunday, either,” I say, and before I have a chance to explain, he says, “Well, that’s cool. We’ll do it some other time maybe.”
    Cool,
I’m discovering, has many different meanings in Stefan, a language I think I like learning. But like all languages, fluency takes a very long time.
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    On Saturday mornings, I volunteer at Sutton Court Assisted Living Center, a formal redbrick manor sitting on three acres of land in New Albany, an entire community of formal, redbrick homes about twelve miles outside of Bexley. Schools, churches, synagogues, even shopping centers create a sea of Georgian and slightly corrupted Georgian architecture that is surprisingly beautiful in its redbrick uniformity, not at all monotonous.
    My dad drives. He volunteers his therapeutic skills there, while I volunteer my literacy, conversation, and knowledge of roughly three dozen card games, courtesy of Mrs. Easterday. My dad sings, in his perfect baritone voice, with the radio during the drive out. If he has had a troubling session, he stays quiet on the drive home. Lately, he tells me it will be a relief when I finally get my temporary driver’s license this summer so that I can drive us home and he can lose himself in thought.
    He drives the way I run.
    I’ve been volunteering at Sutton Court every Saturday morning for over a year now, having first come out with Mrs. Easterday to visit her sister, who lived there only temporarily following a hip replacement. The Schmader sisters—their maiden name—are sturdy women who, Mrs. Easterday often says, come from good, hardworking, long-lived German stock.
    â€œOur husbands knew before they married us that we’d have healthy babies,” she said to me once. “No one thinks of that anymore, but they should.”
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    Breakfast out on weekends is impossible. Sutton Court Saturday, church and youth group Sunday. Between that, track meets, homework, baking cookies with Mrs. Easterday, and keeping a piece of my schedule open for Kate or Maggie, I don’t have much free time on weekends.
    Stefan calls Saturday afternoon, asks me over to his house tonight for pizza and a DVD, which I think should be called a movie since DVD is the vehicle by which we watch the movie and not the movie itself. But I am in the minority, so I translate movie to DVD,