Next To You by Sandra Antonelli

have to stomp about like a white elephant. She used to say, “Who wants a white elephant in their house?” She told me I should try to walk like Chingachgook from the Last of the Mohicans , which was my favorite book when I was ten. Periodically my mother tells me when she thinks I’m behaving like a white elephant. She still says, “I don’t care to have a white elephant in my house, William Terrance,” when I’m annoying her.’
    Caroline arched her brows. ‘Your mother said things like that to you when you were a child?’
    ‘Yes.’ William pulled a small toolbox from behind his back—she hadn’t seen it there—and put it beside the French door. He knelt and opened the box. Then he fished out a pair of blue-rimmed magnifying glasses, put them on, and lifted out the top tray to reveal a small drill, a collection of yellow-handled screwdrivers, and boxed set of drill bits at the bottom.
    She collected the screws that had tumbled outside. ‘Isn’t a white elephant something no one wants? You said when you were little—’
    ‘I was never what you’d call little , Caroline.’
    ‘Still, you said you had kids calling you names, and that the TV was your best friend. To have your mother say something like that sounds kind of cruel.’
    His head at an angle, his eyes magnified behind the lenses, he took a screw from her hand and began to try different bit sizes to fit, wiggling things until he found a match. ‘If you’re worried I was the family joke, well, I suppose copped a lot of ribbing. For a while I felt like the Doors wrote ‘People Are Strange’ about me. But families tease each other. My sister Rebecca used to tell her friends my mother picked me up at a White Elephant sale.’ He glanced at her. ‘I gave as good as I got. Trust me, Rebecca made out far worse than I did. I may have grown up in this skin, but she had to put up with being the Abominable Snowman’s older sister. She had one dating disaster after another and got into far more fights than I ever did. Plus she was the one who had braces.’ He paused to look at the drill bit. ‘This one should do the trick. Does it look right to you?’
    Caroline nodded.
    He twisted the bit into the drill, locked it in place, and held it up. ‘I’ll do it if you’d like me to,’ he said, ‘but it might be a challenge to my vision. I can’t guarantee it will sit straight, even with the method I use.’
    Caroline looked at him, the cordless drill in his hand. He seemed perfectly comfortable kneeling on the kitchen floor, getting dog and leftover cat hair all over what she knew was a thirty-seven-hundred dollar suit. She smiled. ‘I’ll hold the door for you if that would help. Since I didn’t have a drill, I was going to try the old-fashioned elbow grease way.’
    He pulled out a sheet of colored circular stickers. ‘If you did that you’d be here in your apartment screwing for days.’
    ‘Some people like doing it that way, don’t they?’
    ‘I suppose they do, but it’s usually more fun when there’s two of you because you have four elbows and a whole lot more grease.’
    Her chuckle was energetic. ‘For a man so seemingly reserved by all appearances, you come out with good ones, William.’
    ‘Well, you know what they say about the quiet ones.’
    ‘The quiet ones?’ Caroline climbed to her feet and looked at the bright blue stickers he’d placed over the red dots she’d made with a marker. ‘You’d know all about that.’ Before he started to zip a screw into the frame, she said, ‘You’re The Quiet Man . You ever see that movie? You’re just like the Duke. You’re both Irish, you’re tall, you’re big …’
    ‘I do not swagger like John Wayne.’
    ‘Only because your feet are so small. You have very small feet.’
    ‘I assure you that myth about foot size is totally false.’
    She shrugged. ‘Personally I find the L-Rule more applicable.’
    ‘The L-Rule?’
    Caroline held up her finger and thumb in the shape of an