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store-wrapped presents and a waxy crumpled to-go cup with the straw still in. My mom had put out the good plates, but my sisters and I cut slices of the warm coffee cake and just ate them off our hands.
    He gave my mom earrings. She put them on, and they looked pretty.
    I wondered, then, if she’d gotten anything from Eli. I hadn’t. You’d think from a guy who said he loved her children, the gift boxes would tower. No presents had arrived, though. I led my dad to see my new place and he climbed up with me. “Not too shabby,” he said, hands in his pockets as we stood looking out over the world. My dad was here just for a visit; he could leave anytime he wanted, any minute. We had what we’d had before, but less of it. And we never knew when it would end. Our family couldn’t reassemble; even I understood that whatever held people was fragileand, once broken, couldn’t be put together again. But we weren’t yet something else.
    A week later, rummaging in my mom’s drawer, I found a card with two names and long phone numbers, the handwriting tiny, like little spiders. These London tailors make bespoke men’s suits for women’s bodies. I want to take you and have them make one for yours . I compared it with the note in my Holmes book. It matched.
    She hadn’t said anything about London. I didn’t want her leaving the country. Where would we go? For a few weeks I made a point of checking that drawer for plane tickets. I never found anything until one day, a torn corner of graph paper.
    I guess I’m not good at love , it said in her handwriting.
    This is not bad luck was scrawled in those tiny black spider letters.
    O -kay , I thought. Maybe Eli was for her alone, without us. London.
    When I thought things like that, I just stopped. I could still stop my thinking then. But not for much longer.

13 • From the Roof
    A day in January, when carpool dropped me home, I found Eli crouching in the front yard wearing a catcher’s mitt. Boop Two was practicing that complicated round-the-world fast pitch they do in softball. My mom stepped out to watch. Eli had driven them to my sister’s piano competition three hours east and back. My dad could never do that. He was always working.
    IT’S NOT THAT I’M SO SMART, IT’S JUST THAT I STAY WITH PROBLEMS LONGER—A.E. was chalked on the ancient standing blackboard my mom and Sare, looking wind-tossed and pleased with their loot, had once hauled into the kitchen from a flea market.
    At the table, we told Eli the story of the not-swallowed StyrofoamFrito, the emergency room, and the horrible Christmas lights that kept shorting out.
    “I can put up lights for you next year,” he said, reaching for my mother’s wrist. I wanted to slap that hand.
    “Maybe you can help him, Miles,” she said.
    “Sure.” And with that a future was pledged: us on the roof with big staplers, bales of wired lights looped on our arms. The Mims and my sisters could watch from below as we lay on our bellies stringing lights on the edge. That was the first feeling I had for Eli. We could be men who did that shit. I liked the idea of putting up lights ourselves.
    After dinner he left. I didn’t wonder, as I should have, if I’d been old enough to care about other people when they turned the corner beyond visibility, if he flew back to DC or just stayed in some cheap hotel here, but the next night he turned up again to take my mom out. Hector was over, Simon and Charlie were coming, and we had our best babysitter, our cleaning woman, Esmeralda, who didn’t speak English and let us eat what we wanted. My mom emerged from her bedroom looking different.
    “What’s that stuff on your face?” I asked.
    Eli stood the same as always—the white shirt again and no socks. He looked my mom up and down and said, “Wow!” I’d read wow in the bubbles of comics, but I’d never heard anybody actually say it. I did a spit take. His lips opened, a bottom and top tooth just barely touching, as if he wanted