It was still about fifteen minutes before the appointed lunchtime, so I left the room in search of Owen. His room turned out to be almost directly across the hall from mine, and I noticed that the hallway floorboards creaked loudly. I doubted it would be a factor in this visit, but any nighttime crossing of the hallway would require great caution. We had a similar squeaky spot in our house back home, so I was used to treading carefully.
Owen’s room looked less like a showplace out of a bed-and-breakfast in a travel magazine and more like a room someone had actually lived in. There was a twin bed shoved into a corner. Most of the walls in the room were covered in bookcases, some of them with trophies lined up on top of them. Several books were already scattered on the bed and on the floor by the bed. Sometimes I suspected books automatically jumped off the shelf whenever Owen entered a room.
Owen sat on the bed, looking at two of the books as though he was cross-referencing something. His overnight bag stood open on the floor in front of the closet, a shirt hanging halfway out of it, like he’d been sidetracked while unpacking.
I tapped lightly on the door frame, and his head snapped up guiltily. Then he saw me and relaxed. “Oh, I thought for a second you might be Gloria. I guess I’d better finish unpacking.”
He got up to get back to work, and I took his spot on the bed. I glanced at the books he’d been reading, but neither was in English. From inside the closet he said, “I’d tell you not to worry about Gloria because she’s not always this way, but it wouldn’t be true.”
I knew I should tell him that there had been nothing to worry about, but that wasn’t true, either. Instead I said, “It seemed like she gave you a bit of a shock.”
“A big shock. She may have kissed me one other time in my life, but I can’t think of a specific incident.” He came back out into the room, his face stark white. “Oh God, you don’t think she’s dying, do you?”
As old as Gloria seemed to be, that probably wasn’t entirely out of the question, but the idea here was to reassure him. “I’m sure it’s nothing. You said things were better at Thanksgiving.”
He sat heavily on the bed, a necktie hanging from one hand. “Maybe that’s when she got the diagnosis.”
“Or maybe it’s what I said after Thanksgiving, that she knows how to deal with you now that you’re an adult.”