by Trixie More
“Well, I know that. You’ve been working your tail off at that place for months.”
Allison couldn’t have been more shocked if she actually won the jackpot on a scratch-off ticket, or if she was picked to be on a reality cooking show. “You know that, Dad?”
“Of course I know it.” He glanced to the side as he said it, quickly looking away from her, then catching her eye and smiling. “I know how hard you work. You always work hard.”
“Do you know why I’m staying with you?”
“Because you love me?”
She got up and came around to his side of the table, kneeling on the chair next to him and snagging her coffee cup, then sitting correctly, giving him a hug. “Absolutely.”
“And because I’m getting confused.”
Allison sat back, stunned again. “Yes,” she agreed. Was her father really going to talk about this? Should they talk about this? He was an adult. If he understood, she wanted to know, desperately.
“I’m sorry, Allie Girl.”
“Dad, it’s not your fault.” She patted his hand. “I didn’t know you knew.”
“I know that things don’t always make sense,” he grimaced. “Today I know I’m here, in the house we bought after the fire. I know that you have a business and you should be there today. Do you want to tell me why you aren’t?”
Allison’s heart fluttered. This was her one chance to talk to him and understand his wishes. She didn’t want to miss it. At the oak table, in his kitchen, while the sun counted off the time they had left together, Allison told her father everything. She’d tried to build something from nothing, taking his money to do it, found the man who was her one and only, and left him behind, keeping the feeling wrapped up tight inside her. The wager placed was vast, and Allison had lost the game. This painful love was all she had left. Love and debt. She pulled her chair next to his and laid her head on his shoulder, one hand pressed flat against his button-down shirt, feeling the beat of his heart. Her father put his arm around her and cradled her to him, as he’d done in this kitchen so many times back when all the pain was still new.
“I never thought this would happen to me, Allie Girl.” He rocked her, stroking gently. “All this wild hair.” She heard the smile in his voice. “How many times after the fire I had that nightmare.”
This was new. “What nightmare?”
“Hmm? Oh, the one where you’re dragging that old bitty out of her apartment and an ember falls into all this wild hair of yours. I’d sit straight up in bed, have to check on you before I could fall asleep again.” He patted her shoulder. “Putting in that alarm system was the best thing we ever did. I finally got a good night’s sleep.”
She smiled against his shirt.
“What do you want, Dad? What do you want me to do for you when you can’t answer the question for yourself?”
“Allie Girl, I want you to do what you need to.”
“What does that mean, Dad?” Anxiety churned in her. What if he had to go into a facility for care? What about the money she’d stolen from him? “I need specifics.”
“It means that if you need to put me in a home, I understand.”
“Dad! That still leaves it to me. What does it mean, if I need to? How will I know?”
Her father stopped stroking her hair. “You’re right. It doesn’t mean anything does it?”
Her breath sighed out of her.
“Here’s what I want, Allie Girl, and I understand if you can’t give it to me.” Allison’s heart clenched in fear. Whether she could give it to him or not, she’d have to spend the rest of his life trying, once she heard the words. For one, wild moment, she considered pressing her hands to her ears and running.
Too late. Allison’s father was already speaking.
“I want to turn back time and take you out to see your mother when you’re still young, when I might still fix things between you.” Allison wanted to smack herself, a great big palm-to-her-forehead mash-up. Then she wished she could take the heel of her hand to the back of her father’s head too. This is not what she needed to hear. He was relentless though. She’d asked him what he wanted, and she was going to find out.
“If that can’t happen, then I want you to take a week and go see her.”
Go see her mother.
“She left us, Dad.” Allison watched the sad smile emerge on his face, his morning stubble already erased by his routines. She hesitated. One chance. “Why didn’t we go to Buffalo?”
His mouth folded in on itself and he nodded his head. “I wondered if you heard us fighting.”
“Hard not to, Dad.”
“It probably felt like a long time to you.” Allison waited, and her father continued. “The towers fell. I couldn’t leave.”
It was an answer a long time coming; she remained still.
The elderly man beside her looked away, at something she couldn’t see. “It wasn’t very long. If she’d waited, maybe I would have gone.”
Frustrated, she pressed. “What wasn’t long?”
“The first couple of weeks after, that’s when all the Buffalo business came up. It didn’t matter if I said we could work toward it. We had a house, a child, we couldn’t leave everything and run. Every dime was in the house and who was selling homes in Brooklyn the week after the towers fell? The month after? By then, Buffalo wasn’t far enough. By then, she was sure she needed the entire Mississippi between us and the East Coast.” He bowed his head just slightly. “By then, she thought she needed a different man to put between her and the world.”
Allison put her hand on his arm. “And a different child?”
“No, Allie Girl, not that. It was between her and I. It wasn’t all her, you know.” He looked at Allison then, her breath shallow in the face of his firm gaze. She was looking at him as an equal and seeing him as she imagined her mother might have. There wasn’t as much softness there as she’d thought. His voice took on an angry tone. “I couldn’t leave.” He brought his palm to the table top and the deep thunk it made reverberated in the sunlight. “I. Could not. I would not.” The grooves around his mouth were harsh. “Nobody was going to push me from my house. Especially not them.”
Allison was stunned. “You let her go?”
“We split up, Allison. She wanted to be safe, and we had different views on what that meant. I don’t think giving terrorists what they ask for makes us safe.” He sat back and closed his eyes. “I’m just an accountant, not a firefighter. I wasn’t there, running up the stairs in the burning towers but I was strong enough not to undo all that by running away afterward.” He took a deep breath and came back to himself, or back to his role as a father. “Allie Girl, I indulged myself. I let you blame her when I should have insisted you blame us both.” He pushed his coffee away. “I want you to take a week and go see her. You’re a lot like her, and she should get to see that.”
She was like her mother? Allison thought of how she’d left Derrick while she crept out the back of the shop. Not her finest moment. Hot shame flooded her. As for visiting her mother, the shop, her debt and the responsibility for her father, all tied her to New York as surely as her father’s beliefs had tied him.
“Dad, I can’t go anywhere. How can I?”
He pushed back from her a bit and caught her eye, surprised. “Why not?”
“Money? Leaving you alone?”
Now her father looked stunned. “You have plenty of money, and I’m fine.”
“Ahhg. You’re not fine, Dad. You get confused. I can’t leave you alone.”
“Oh, my girl.” Her father laughed and pulled her back to him. “Every penny that’s mine is yours. Sell the house, sell the car, whatever.” He pressed himself up from the table. Panic spread through her, the fear that when he moved, the lucidity would flee.
“Wait! Dad, I need to know. I know you want to stay in this house as long as possible. But if you’re confused all the time, Dad, I need to know …”
He didn’t make her say it, didn’t make he
r ask, and that might have been the greatest gift he gave her that day. “Allie, you might have pulled that old Russian woman from a fire, but you can’t save me from this disease, and I don’t expect you to. I expect what I’ve always expected, what I’ve always wanted. What I worked my damn fingers off for, keeping up with all those twisted tax laws. What do you think I was working insane hours all through tax season for? I want my brave, beautiful daughter to have a better life than I did. Of course!”
She was crying now, stupid woman that she was.
“Allie Girl, to give me what I want, you have to fall in love, you have to have a child more brilliant and stunning than you are. You have to visit your mother, you have to see Rome and cook food and lose your business or make it great.” He tossed a hand in the air in frustration. “Honestly, you try my patience. You have to live, Allie Girl. You have to live. And you can’t do that, here in this house with me.”
Allison was stunned. “You don’t want me to take care of you?”
“I didn’t say that. I just don’t want you to do it all the time. When the time comes …” her father gazed around vaguely. “I don’t know. Stick me in that same place where Mrs. Petrov went. That’s a fine enough place. Do that.” He straightened up fully and nudged her. “Get up, Allie. I want to show you where all the papers are kept. And remember, no one messes with my daughter.”
“Want pizza?” Derrick dropped the box on the counter, bent down and got a beer out of the low fridge. They’d paid a fortune for it, and every time he had to bend down to use it, he called himself an idiot. The cat appeared and wrapped himself around Derrick’s ankle. Ben appeared in his hallway, running his hand across his skull, the other hand down his sweats, having a scratch. “Wash your hands first.”
Ben left off, looking at his own palm as if he’d never seen it. Derrick took his food to the living room.
“Get your own beer. I’m tired of bending over.”
Ben snorted.
Derrick flopped into his recliner. Sophia’s words were still rolling around in his head.
“Where do you see us in five years?” Derrick asked.
Ben’s face looked serious. He carried his beer and pizza to the couch. “Not here.”
The words shocked Derrick. He’d never considered anything other than being here, living with Ben.
“No?”
Ben put his feet up on the coffee table. “I’ve been trying to think of a way to tell you.”
The pizza in his hand didn’t smell as good as it had. “Yeah?”
The food before his friend remained uneaten. “Derrick, I’m going to find a woman. Sooner or later, I’m going to find one, and I’m going to have a family. I want to get off the steel and maybe work for the union.”
If Derrick’s eyes could have boosted free of his head, they would have. “You mean work for the union? Not be a steel monkey?”
“Right. I want a family. I want to be around a long time. I could kick George’s ass for fucking things up for Debra and the kids. I’ve been so fucking angry, Der.” He shook his head. “I’m pissed because he has what I want and he just … you both just …” He blew a breath out. “You, you could be making gajillions. Sitting in the air-conditioning, building important stuff, married to that cook, if you want, safe. With a family. And George …” He looked away. Derrick’s mind filled with images of being married to that cook, waking up in her magic bed. Would a child wander in?
“Fuck, George had it all and just, just lost it,” Ben said. Derrick jerked his attention back to his friend. “And I’m just sittin’ here, watching it all go away and eatin’ my heart out. It’s no way to live, Der. I’m not going to stay like this.”
What was so bad about staying like this? Staying an ironworker?
You’re scared, Derry. That’s what his sister had said. Scared of putting those inventions out into the world. Scared of letting them go and just being an ironworker. The idea of making robots only, never standing on the decking, never being up in the sky again, it wasn’t him. He couldn’t imagine that. Never building a robot again and just working the steel? That was a big hell yeah. He wanted to be an ironworker. And what did that say about him? Big man like you, scared of standing up to Dad. Life-saving robots. Saving lives. His father saved lives. His brother saved lives. Hell, when Sophia became a prosecutor, she’d be saving lives, putting bad guys behind bars. If he gave up the robots, he’d be proving his father right. He was the lesser child. In some ways, he was already proving that ahead of time, by not going to school, by not taking those scholarships. By becoming an ironworker, wasn’t he just taking the judgment out of his father’s hands? How much of what he did was reaction and how much was what he wanted? He knew one thing he wanted. He wanted Allison. He knew another thing for sure too.
“I don’t want to make gajillions sitting in the air-conditioning,” Derrick said. “I want to be out on the steel, I want to be skywalking. Don’t you?”
“No. I don’t. I want a job that will support a woman, family, it doesn’t have to be steel.” A small smirk started on Ben’s face as he seemed to come to some inner decision. “It gets worse.”
Derrick’s gut clenched. How?
“I want the woman to be Sophia.”
Derrick froze. Ben wanted to marry Sophia? Ben was right. That was worse. For Ben.
“See? We can’t be sharing a place when that happens.”
Derrick cleared his throat. “Does Sophia know?”
“That I’m interested in her? I think so,” said Ben, a confident smile on his face. “I’m usually pretty good at communicating with women.”
Derrick thought that was a big hell no. “So, OK, just …” Derrick stopped. “Here’s the thing. I don’t want to know anything about it.”
“Yeah, so I’ve been holding back, you know, it’s going to be hard if she’s over here.” Ben was looking at him.
“Ben, if Sophia is over here and, and, you’re both happy …” he cleared his throat again, “then I’m happy.”
“So, no problem if she and I are hanging out and you catch me kissing your sister?”
He coughed. “I’ll close my eyes. Just don’t tell me about it.”
Ben laughed, and suddenly, things seemed right again. They were themselves again, two friends, just guys.
Derrick came to another conclusion. He wanted his damn hobby. He wanted to geek out, building robots and he really didn’t give a fuck if they were never used. He wasn’t building them for Ben, to get a better job or to prove anything to his dad. Well, maybe that last one was a stretch. But he liked doing it. He didn’t have to have any other reason for it.
“You know, I’ve been thinking,” Derrick said. “You’re always after me to take the bots to the union.”
“Right.”
“Well, I’m never going to do that.”
Ben started to speak, but Derrick held up his hand.
“You like to design robots. I like to build them. You want to work for the union. Why don’t you take the bots to the union? Why don’t you demonstrate them?”
Ben stared at Derrick.
“You and me, Ben, we know we can work together. We own this building together. We live together. Why don’t I build ’em and you try to sell ’em?”
“You want me to sell your robots for you?”
“No, I want you to sell our robots for us.”
“There is no us when it comes to the robots.”
Derrick ignored that. Who did Ben think was doing the sketches? “There can be. I’m never going to sell them. I’ll make nothing on them. I’ll keep building them, but I’ll never sell them. Plus, this way, all that save-a-life stuff is in your hands. I’ve decided I’m never going to save anyone’s life.”
Across from him, Ben started to eat. Derrick took that as a good sign.
“When did you decide that?” Ben asked.
“Four minutes ago.” Derrick smiled and continued. “Here’s how it should go. Sell the robots, subtract the business costs, th
en you and I split whatever is left. What do you think?”
“I think,” Ben sat back on the sofa. “I think,” he crossed his arms over his chest. “I think I like it.”
May first, the best time of the year. When April’s fingers opened and let go of the northeast, and May stepped in, the city opened up, clean, green and in bloom. Allison moved along the sidewalk, the tall buildings rising around her, built by men like Derrick. This part of the city was somehow more home to her than the neighborhood where her father lived. She turned onto the street where Allison’s Kitchen sat next to Mastrelo’s bar.
Her dad’s office had been a revelation. So many bills that hadn’t been paid and a stunning surprise. A brokerage account that’d been left alone for a decade. A long-term care policy that had lapsed when he’d started forgetting things. The good, the bad and the sublimely ironic. She’d have to sort through it all, but she wouldn’t have to do it all today. Today, the Greenbergs were back taking care of her father. Today, she was going to talk to Angelo. Today, she knew her father’s wishes. Tomorrow, maybe she’d find the courage to make her own come true.
Her feet slowed as she came to her shop. The first thing to catch Allison’s eye was the sign in the window. The “For Sale” sign had been turned around. Hand lettering on the back of the sign now showed in the window. Allison laughed in delight.
“On Vacation—be back in time for June Graduations! Get your orders ready!” Beneath that was a phone number, she didn’t recognize.
She passed by her shop and pushed open the door to the bar. The inside was dark and cool. Allison walked around but saw nobody. She pressed on the kitchen door, opening it a bit and surprising Rose and Angelo.
“Whoops! Sorry!” She felt herself blushing as she backed out. She hadn’t seen much but what she’d seen looked suspiciously like Rose sitting on Angelo’s lap, his arm around her back. Kitchen smooching seemed to run in the family.
“Cookie! Don’t go anywhere!” Rose’s voice trailed out from behind Allison. She snickered to herself and stepped behind the bar to draw her own black and tan. The Mastrelo’s were out of the kitchen before she’d had her second sip. She got up and gave Rose a big hug. When Angelo gave her his patented one-armed hug, she didn’t pretend the welling of love that rose in her wasn’t tied to her memories of the man’s grandson.