That winter, she gave me a pair of green knitted socks so ugly I didn’t know whether to be thankful or offended.
“I made these for you,” she said, shoving them at my chest. “So your feet don’t freeze.”
“Don’t you have dreams?”
At the diner, Joe noticed me bolting out after shifts and started giving me grief.
“You got yourself a girlfriend now?” he asked one afternoon.
“I’m helping Mrs. Rhode.”
He nearly dropped a coffee pot laughing. “That tough old bird? Helping her with what?”
I told him the whole arrangement.
At the end of it, he nodded and said, “Well. That’s weird as heck. But she likes you. That’s not nothing.”
I shrugged like I didn’t care, but I thought about that all day. I had no idea what having family was like, but I imagined it was a little something like the relationship I had with Mrs. Rhode.
