“Yeah.”

Awkward silence descends upon us again and I sip my coffee, trying to figure out why I keep dunking on him like this. I want to have a conversation, but I’m annoyed at literally everything this perfectly nice and normal man is saying.

Marcus’s voice pops into my head. “You’re just too difficult. Why would anyone put up with it?”

“So,” Theo says. “What do you do for work?”

“I work at an elementary school.” There. I was able to respond without snapping, finally.

“A teacher? I should have known.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Because you like sharing knowledge and you enjoy disciplining people,” he says.

“No I don’t. I’m actually very nice to most people.”

“Okay. Then you just like disciplining me. Even better.” He grins, then keeps it pushing before I can object. “Also explains why you haven’t been working for the last couple of months. I thought maybe you’d gotten laid off, too.”

I glance at him out of the corner of my eye. How did he know I haven’t been working? Though I’ve been all up in his window like it was prime reality TV, so I have no right to be weirded out.

“I work in a school office. Admin stuff. My mom knows a lot of people there, and she got me a job after I moved back here.”

What am I gonna say next week when school starts? I wonder. What am I gonna say when I get back and people start asking harder questions than “How’s she doing?”

“Your mom?”

When I sip my coffee and fall back into silence, he quickly gets the point.

“Why’d you move back?” His choice of subject startles me—I didn’t even realize I’d told him that but, yeah, I did. He’s maybe a little too observant for his own good. Or for mine.

I stop and lean back to look down my nose at him. “Why are you all in my business?”

He brushes some of the sweaty hair sticking to his forehead away.

“Because I’m curious about you. Breakup?” He bites his lower lip, studying me, then nods once. “Breakup.”

“I look like the dumpable type or something?” I turn and start walking faster, like I can escape the shame of his accurate guess. The reminder of what I’d put up with and how I hadn’t even been the one to put an end to it.

He catches up to me in a couple of long strides. “You don’t look dumpable, whatever that means. You have the eyes of someone who’s been treated worse than they should’ve been, that’s all.”

Okay, yes. He’s way too observant.

“It was a divorce,” I say.

“Divorce isn’t the end of the world, you know. I’m not judging you. In fact—”

“Drop it, Theo.”

“Dropped.”

I look down at the cracked sidewalk, up at the bottom of the LIRR tracks on the bridge that runs along Atlantic Avenue, at the short squat houses, and postwar tenements, and brown-brick projects with inspirational murals curling along their foundations.

Anywhere but at this man who apparently can tell I’m hurting with a look into my eyes. I’m not into that shit and I forgot to bring sunglasses.

He starts talking about painting a mural at one of his high schools, even though he’s a terrible artist. How he’d been in charge of painting a wolverine, the school’s mascot, and how it’d come out looking like a zombie cat creature. I nod my response, and he segues into a story about how he once lived in a town with a coyote problem. He’s not trying to force interaction, I realize; he’s giving me background noise so I don’t have to talk if I don’t feel like it.

By the time we reach the center, an incongruous glass-and-metal structure, we’re both soaked in sweat. Theo’s breathing a little heavy and the one-sided conversation has tapered off; we make a mutual sound of pleasure as we enter the air-conditioned welcome area, then laugh.

I glance at him, and he’s looking at me like he always does, with that wide-eyed interest. No pity. No scheming to use my obvious loneliness against me.

I tilt my head to the reception desk and then walk toward the woman sitting at it, while Theo heads over to the huge glass windows lining the other side of the lobby, looking out at an open field.

“Hi, how can I help you?” the young woman at the desk says just as Theo calls out, “There are tiny houses out there!”

The woman grins in response to his excitement, her smile scrunching up the freckles on her light brown cheeks. “Those houses have been here since the 1820s. They were regular-sized back then. We give tours of them, but our tour guide is on summer break so those restart next week.”

I wilt a little with disappointment. This is what I get for putting things off for months instead of walking a few blocks to do my research. “Oh. That’s . . . fine.”

“Sorry.” She actually looks like she means it. “You can explore outside around the houses if you want. And our exhibits are open if you want to check those out. We have three pretty great ones right now.”

“That works for me,” Theo says, walking over with a wad of cash. “I’ll pay the entry fee. And how much are those T-shirts?”

HALF AN HOUR later Theo is decked out in an olive-green T-shirt with the old houses screen-printed onto it in black, courtesy of the gift shop. We’ve gone through the exhibitions, which actually were useful.

The first exhibition room we entered was an overview of how Weeksville had been founded—by Black men buying property during the Panic of 1837 so that they could be afforded the right to vote. It also talked about laws that hampered the Black community in Brooklyn, like an eighteenth-century law preventing Black people who managed to buy property from passing it on to their descendants.

I’d taken pictures of useful stuff, like a map of the old neighborhood and information about some of the historical figures who had been part of it.

The next exhibition was an overview of historic race riots in New York, starting with the slave uprisings of 1712. Apparently, fires kept breaking out in Manhattan, and instead of dealing with the reality that a town made of wood structures was gonna have some fires, someone decided they were being set by enslaved people fomenting rebellion—leading to death and dismemberment for dozens of Black New Yorkers, free and enslaved. I’d immediately thought of Kim threatening to call the police on me because I didn’t let her cut me in line, and wondered if all those people died because of the historical equivalent of a Bodega Becky.

The final part of the exhibition talked about the Draft Riots of 1864, where the Irish began hunting Black people through the streets of New York, killing indiscriminately and burning down an orphanage. The people of Weeksville had taken in and protected Black New Yorkers who’d made it across the East River.

Theo’s face had been pale during that exhibit, and we had split apart at one point, the awkward historical fact that white people really seemed to enjoy hunting Black people whenever the whim struck them making chitchat just a bit strained.

We’d reunited at the last exhibition; it featured photographs of people from the Weeksville neighborhood over the course of its history. Black families posing in front of fireplaces. Black teachers teaching at the African school. Barbershops and restaurants and a whole thriving nineteenth-century neighborhood, and it had just . . . disappeared.

Now I sit on a bench while Theo snaps photos of the old houses outside, and I scroll for answers to a nagging question that none of the exhibitions answered.

“Where did the people of Weeksville go?” I ask. “They’d worked hard to buy property and gain the right to vote. They’d spent decades building a community, only to pick up and leave?”

“Maybe there were better opportunities someplace else?” Theo guesses, turning his camera on me and fiddling with the focus on his lens.

“Some people would leave because of that, but not everyone. It’s not like it was easy for them to just move. They weren’t welcome most places and had a hard enough time holding on to what they already had,” I say, trying to keep the snap out of my tone, because it’s not him I’m frustrated with. “You don’t just give away everything you busted your ass for.”

I’m scrolling blindly now, trying to maintain my cool.

“But, look at our neighborhood—”

“I’m gonna go sit in the AC.” I head back toward the reception area, fighting against the sudden pressure at my tear ducts.