3. What Eli Does on Sundays

She did not intend to learn anything about Eli's life. That was the plan. Parallel existence: polite, minimal, mutually convenient. The apartment was not large, but it was manageable, and she had gotten very good at managing small spaces. Then came the Sunday he fixed the futon. She was at the kitchen table with her macroeconomics textbook and a highlighter running low on ink when she heard the sounds from the living room: the particular sound of someone disassembling hardware with competence, which was different from the sound of someone doing the same thing without it. She did not look up for a while. Then she looked up. Eli was on the floor with the futon's metal frame spread around him in organized components. He was consulting something on his phone, doing the look-check-do sequence of someone working from a tutorial, and he had a small toolkit open beside him that looked more like an old fishing tackle box than anything sold at a hardware store. He was wearing a grey t-shirt and his hair was even less organized than usual and he had, she noted, actual calluses on his left hand in the specific distribution of someone who played guitar seriously over a long period of time. She returned to her textbook. Thirty-five minutes later, the futon was operational. She knew this because Eli sat on it experimentally, seemed satisfied, and said, presumably to Sofia's room: "Done." Sofia's door opened immediately. "Finally! How does it feel?" "Like a futon," Eli said. "Which is the best it was ever going to feel." "Wow. Inspiring." Sofia came into the kitchen, saw Nora, and dropped into the chair across from her. "Did you see him fix the futon? He's actually useful sometimes, it's a whole thing." "I noticed," Nora said. Eli appeared in the kitchen doorway. He looked at Nora's textbook and then at the highlighter, which had entirely given up the ghost and left the last sentence she'd marked in a faint pink ghost of its former purpose. "Top drawer by the sink," he said. "Sofia keeps backup highlighters there." Nora looked at him. "She loses them constantly," he said. "She started keeping backups." Nora opened the top drawer. There were, in fact, four highlighters in assorted colors. "Thank you," she said. "Sure." He opened the fridge, stood in front of it for the specific amount of time that indicated he was not actually looking for something and was instead using it as a moment of privacy, and then closed it and picked up his keys from the counter. "I'm heading out. You guys need anything?" "Coffee," Sofia said instantly. "I'm not getting you coffee." "Why not?" "Because you should come get your own coffee, it would be good for you to leave the building, the vitamin D alone —" "Eli." "Fine. What kind." "The oat milk latte from the corner place, you know the one." "You want anything?" Eli said. He was looking at Nora, and she had the slight disorienting sensation of being included in something she had been treating as not her business. "I'm fine," she said. "Thank you." He left. She heard the door close, and then the specific silence that followed him out, which was different from the silence that had been there before in a way she couldn't articulate but noticed. "He's not as much of a mess as he seems," Sofia said, with the cheerful neutrality of someone who had said this before and was saying it for general informational purposes rather than any particular agenda. "He just — he had a rough couple of years. Music stuff. And dad stuff. He's okay, he's just — recalibrating." "You don't have to explain him to me," Nora said. "I know. I just—" Sofia shrugged, a complicated shrug that contained a whole sibling history. "He's good at making people think he's fine with being left alone. It's a skill he developed and I kind of wish he hadn't." Nora looked at the kitchen doorway where he'd been standing. "He told me where you keep the highlighters," she said. "He pays attention," Sofia said simply. "That's the thing about Eli. He notices everything. He just never says so." Eli came back twenty-two minutes later with one oat milk latte and, Nora discovered when she went to the kitchen for water, a medium black coffee that he had left on the counter with a Post-it that said: in case you change your mind. She stood in the kitchen and looked at the coffee for a moment. It was still warm. She took it back to her desk and kept studying, and she told herself it was just coffee and she was just cold and it meant nothing about the five-year plan. But she drank the whole thing.