Never a Hero

that.”
    He smiled at me, and I had the uncomfortable feeling he knew exactly what I was thinking. “I’m not being charitable. I’m being rude. This way I can walk into your house rather than waiting for you to invite me in.” He balanced the box on his left hand and opened the door for me with his right. “After you.”
    Whether my annoyance was rational or not, he’d managed to derail it. I couldn’t be mad, which left me with nothing but nervous butterflies in my stomach.
    He followed me in, and without being asked, he began to take groceries out of the bags, setting them on the counter for me to put away. “I haven’t seen you,” he said.
    I was glad I didn’t have to face him. Instead, I could concentrate on picking up cans of soup and putting them in the cupboard.
    “I’ve been busy.”
    “Doing what?”
    “Working.”
    “Where do you work?”
    “I work for Here and Now. They’re a marketing company. Mostly I design brochures and newsletters and put together postcard advertising campaigns.”
    “You work from home?”
    “Yes.”
    The groceries were all laid out on the counter now. He leaned back against my table to watch while I sorted through them and put them away.
    “You have your groceries delivered.”
    It wasn’t a question. “Yes.”
    “I notice an awful lot of catalogs in your mailbox.”
    I stopped, staring down at the boxed entrée in my hand. Our mailboxes were side-by-side on the front porch, and not deep enough to hide anything as big as a magazine. It was something anybody might have noticed, but it felt like an intrusion.
    “So?”
    “So, I’m beginning to think you don’t get out much.”
    I slammed the cupboard door closed, harder than I’d intended, and turned to face him. I wanted to tell him to mind his own business, but I didn’t trust myself to speak. The last thing I wanted was to start stuttering.
    He stared back at me, completely unfazed by my discomfort. He pointed at the box in my hand. “That stuff’s crap, you know. Too much sodium. Tons of glutamates. No nutritional value whatsoever.”
    Too fast. Talking to him made my head spin. He was always jumping too quickly from one thing to another, from intimate to casual in the blink of an eye. I looked down at the chicken pot pie. “It’s kept me alive this long.”
    He laughed. “Still, I think we can do better. How about if I make you dinner instead?”
    He wanted to cook for me?
    I cleared my throat, tested the obedience of my tongue, and finally managed to say, “Sounds great.”

    I’d never been in the basement apartment, other than my first visit there with Nick, and even then, we’d gone in the back door, straight from the backyard into the kitchen. I hadn’t been able to see much of the living space. I’d always imagined white carpets, sleek black furniture, and warm afternoon light falling through the windows onto Regina’s piano.
    The reality was quite different. The floors were covered with a mottled brown berber, and the walls sported wood paneling straight out of the seventies. Nick’s furniture looked soft and cushy, but was all hidden beneath blankets.
    “The dogs aren’t supposed to get on the couches, but they do anyway,” he told me. “The minute I walk out the door.”
    Betty, Bert, and Bonny were jumping exuberantly around his feet, all of them trying to nose their way to the front. I wandered through the living room into the dining room where I found Regina’s piano with two unpacked boxes and a pile of mail on top. I sat down on the bench and lifted the hinged overlay covering the keys. I ran my fingers over them, not playing any notes, but feeling the smoothness of the keys. I imagined how it must feel to be able to tease art from such a mundane object.
    Nick went past me into the kitchen and came back out with a bottle of mineral water and an open beer. He placed the latter on the piano in front of me. I stared at it for a moment, seeing the brown glass and the condensation already forming on the outside. “You should use a coaster.”
    “Ha!” he laughed. “Wow. Do I look like the kind of guy who even owns coasters?”
    I felt myself blush. “I wouldn’t want her piano to get messed up.”
    He regarded me for a moment, looking puzzled. “She left it, you know,” he said at last. “It must not have meant that much to her.”
    I looked down at my lap, suddenly worried we weren’t talking about the piano anymore. That maybe he knew my secret, the way I’d