Page 7 of Canadian Boyfriend

“Is there a pool here?” Olivia asked as Mike Martin cut the engine.

I twisted around to look at Olivia, whose eyes were wide with excitement in a way that made her look younger than her years, which in turn caused something in my heart to twinge. I had a thoroughly middling mother, but at least I had one. “There is.”

“You are solucky.”

“You can swim at home anytime, Liv,” Mike Martin said with fond amusement in his voice.

“Yeah, but a pool doesn’t havefishin it. It doesn’t haveseaweedin it.” There was an edge in her rebuke, and she held Mike Martin’s gaze with what seemed like defiance. I wondered if I’d imagined that, though, because when she turned back to me, she was rocking some serious puppy-dog eyes.

“Do you… want to come for a swim sometime?” Was it a conflict of interest to invite a student to swim at my apartment? Was it a conflict of interest to invite the daughter of the man who might or might not be my imaginary Canadian Boyfriend made flesh to swim at my apartment?

“Yes!” Olivia said, with an urgency that made me worry she thought I meantright now.

“Olivia,” Mike Martin said. “You can’t just invite yourself over to someone’s house.”

“Ididn’t,” she said indignantly. “She invited me.”

“Yes, but—”

“She. Invited. Me.” Indignation had crystalized into something closer to anger. This was not a version of Olivia I saw inclass. Mike Martin put his hands on the steering wheel. He closed his eyes. I wondered if, when he opened them, they’d be flat.

“The pool is closed for cleaning right now,” I lied, trying to steer us out of this logjam. “So you’re out of luck, but maybe another time?” When I looked back at Mike Martin, he was no longer gripping the steering wheel, and his eyes were open—and not flat. I turned back to Olivia. “I’m glad you’re back in class.”

“Do you think I’m going to be behind?” she asked, her tone shifting with whiplash-inducing speed from peevish to tentative.

“I do not.”

“I kept messing up today.”

“You’ll get your groove back.”

“But the session is almost over.”

“Summer sessions are short and informal, and we’re going to roll right over to fall, and that always brings with it a few new faces, so everyone will be playing catch-up to some extent.” She looked only slightly placated. “Remember ‘Miss Miller’s Morals’?” I said, citing Gretchen’s famous studio rules. “Dancing is supposed to be fun, right? Not stressful. You have nothing to worry about. I mean that sincerely.”

“OK, thanks, Miss Rory.”

I turned to Mike Martin, who’d been silently watching our exchange. “Thanks for the ride. I hope it wasn’t too far out of your way.”

“Well,” Mike Martin said, “what else were we going to do?”

The next Tuesday, Mike Martin offered me a ride home again. He cornered me after class right there in front of Gretchen andthe Minnetonka Moms™ and said, “Aurora, can we give you a lift again?”

He smiled, and he had all his teeth. What? Had I hallucinated the missing one last week?

“‘Again’?” Gretchen, who was standing next to me behind the desk, said under her breath—sufficiently under, I hoped, that no one else heard. I avoided her gaze. I had not told Gretchen about the ride home last week, which was weird because I told Gretchen everything.

“But we’re getting ice cream first, remember?” Olivia said to Mike Martin. There was an ice-cream place in the same strip mall as the studio, and the kids were always lobbying their parents to visit it after class. I would have thought Olivia’s request a run-of-the-mill one. But after witnessing her tense exchange with Mike Martin last week in the parking lot at my building, I thought I detected a note of that same pique in her tone.

“Right.” He looked at me. “You want to join us, then we’ll run you home?”

The place went silent. I kept my attention on him, but I couldfeelGretchen—and everyone else—looking at me. My heart started beating rapidly.

Damn it.

The thing to know about me was that while I looked fine, I was not actually fine—or at least not all-the-way fine. I had my life mostly under control. I did the same things over and over, and I had become adept at doing them without incident. Job number one, job number two, hang out with Gretchen. I was still getting used to life without Ian, my ex-boyfriend, and to life alone in a too-big apartment empty of the furniture he had taken with him when he’d left a month ago, but I had mostly recalibrated. I mean, I needed a sofa, not to mention a newapartment—the rent was too much for me on my own—but I was basically fine.

My mother could throw a wrench in things, but we were good Midwestern citizens who had mastered the twin arts of emotional sublimation and Minnesota Nice.

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