by Ruthie Knox
Your mother doesn’t like to talk about it, he’d said, and she’d asked him, Who knows?
Me and you and Mom, he’d said. And him.
It was the summer she’d put together all the pieces. Who she was. Where her mother went. What her family really was, and why her parents stayed together.
Not for her—the daughter of infidelity, the lapse, the mistake.
For May.
She loved her sister just as much as her parents did. Maybe more. So she’d kept the secret, too, kept up appearances, and she’d never really thought about how heavy it was, the terrible weight of it, until she let it go and felt lighter.
Probably that just meant she wasn’t much good at carrying burdens, and needed more practice.
Winston touched her knee.
She wished he’d stop, just stop. She plucked up her hat off the chair back behind her and dropped it into her lap, slid bobby pins off the band and held them between tight lips, gathered her hair between her hands and began to twist it into a tight spiral.
She stabbed in the first pin. Crossed it with a second. Winston kept looking at her, steady and calm. “I know that man with your mother,” he said. “I’ve sat in this bar with him. He’s an associate of mine.”
Allie placed another pair of bobby pins.
“He’s an artist.”
“I know,” she mumbled around the remaining pins.
“Did you know he’s quite famous?”
“I Googled him.”
“Sorry?”
She removed the last two pins, shoved them into her hair, fixed her hat in place, and repeated, “I Googled him. Justice. But it doesn’t help, because nobody knows how to find him. He’s not listed anywhere—not as Justice, not as Justin Olejniczak. Believe me, I’ve tried.”
“You’re not the only one who’s tried. He’s made himself impossible to find. If I want a meeting, I have to contact his agent, in fact, and—”
“Wait, you can get a meeting with him? You can get me a meeting?”
“Well, that’s the thing. I don’t think I can.”
“But even if you just gave me a number—”
“I called him an ‘associate.’ I probably should have called him my ‘client.’ I work for the firm that manages his accounts, and even that is something I might be fired for telling you.”
“For-real fired?”
“Well, perhaps not fired. It’s my family’s firm. But reprimanded, fined, suspended? Most definitely. And that’s if I told a random stranger, or someone from the press. That’s not for telling my wealthy client’s unacknowledged illegitimate daughter how to find him. I’m afraid I can’t quite imagine what sort of trouble that would bring me.”
His forehead wrinkled when he worried. He looked so sorry for her. Sorry that she’d brought this dilemma to him, dropped the mess of her life in his lap. Sorry he was having to hand it back over, a pile of crap wrapped up in brown paper and tied with twine.
And she understood that perfectly well. She understood his response was the right one and all he could be was sorry, but she still wanted to grab him and shake him until more help fell out. They were chess pieces in some game the universe was playing with her life, and she wanted more from him—wanted him to have walked into this bar for the express purpose of connecting all the dots for her, clearing her path, and making this shit easy.
It was infuriating to have to be an adult about this of all things. Tonight of all nights.
“I want to help,” he said. “It’s complicated.”
Allie sighed. It was the kind of sigh that took everything with it, every last scrap of the energy she’d been burning through to get herself here, to fuel her crazy evening, and left her exhausted and aware of exactly how much she’d had to drink. “Don’t worry about it. You’ve done more than I ever could have expected. I think most guys would have tagged out somewhere around when I asked you to pretend to make out with me.”
“Most guys don’t know what they’re missing.”
“Yeah?” That made her smile, a little. “You’re all right, Winston Chamberlain.”
She stood, and he followed suit, brushing the knee of his trousers. She handed him his jacket and put on her own, belting her trench coat tightly.
Finally, she put on her sunglasses, dropping the room into shadows, making everything a little farther away and less important.
“You take the rest of the bottle, okay? I don’t think it’s a good look for a single girl in a trench to carry a half-empty bottle of whiskey through the streets. It doesn’t really say ‘chic French spy.’ It’s more like ‘wino,’ you know?”
He glanced at his phone. “It’s late to be walking the streets. Can I give you a lift somewhere?”
“Actually, I still have to figure out where I’m going. Have you got any hotel recommendations nearby?”
He frowned. “You don’t have a room?”
“Don’t look like that. I hoped I’d be done by now. Find my mom, wave a magic wand, shove her on the first plane home.”
“But you brought things with you. A toothbrush, change of clothes…?”
“Don’t worry, mailman. My bag’s behind the bar. I’ll grab it.”
Allie ducked through the crowd and retrieved her suitcase. The sunglasses helped. Everything seemed distant, her mother and Justice both pieces of a puzzle she couldn’t be expected to solve tonight.
Winston appeared behind her. “You’re upset with me,” he said. “You’ve every right to be.”
“I’m not upset with you.”
“You have to understand, from my position—”
She put her hand right in the middle of his chest. It shocked her how hot he felt, even through his shirt.
She tipped her head back to meet his eyes. “Thank you. You were great. Really super incredibly great. I’m just—I’m going to let you go now. Back to doing your Winston things.”
“It would help me a lot if you’d let me get you fixed for somewhere to stay tonight.”
“Why?”
“I feel like I should.”
She smiled. “Give me a good reason.”
“I have an apartment ten minutes’ walk from here.”
“I can’t stay in your apartment.”
“It’s not my apartment. I live uptown. This is an apartment, which I own. Furnished, but utterly empty. Nice-to-excellent view, depending on the weather. I’ll give you the key and the code for the security system. You can stay two nights, if you like. I’d invite you to stay longer, but my brother is coming into town Tuesday afternoon.”
She cocked her head, studying him. “You’re not kidding, are you?”
He reached into his pocket for his keys, selected one, and deftly wound it off the ring. “It’s just a few blocks.”
Allie reached for the key.
He moved it away. “I have a condition.”
“What’s that?”
“You let me walk you there.”
He wasn’t doing the Harrison Ford face, or the tight-mouth face, or even the post-almost-kissed face. His face was more like…well. Her dad’s, maybe. The one her dad would make when he would get up from the dinner table and say, Well, I’m just going to go out there and change your oil, Al. Save me the brownie corners.
Winston was probably a Good Guy. Which made her feel paradoxically uneasy, since after Matt, she was officially done with Good Guys, and possibly guys in general.
But then she remembered the Harrison Ford face, and the way he thunked that bottle of whiskey on the pinball machine.
Maybe, maybe, he was the other thing. The thing Elvira tried to tell her existed but seemed like a unicorn.
Maybe Winston was a Good Man.
The only way to find out was to make a decision and find out if it was a bad one later.
“You’re on.”
Chapter 4
They stepped up from the dark bar onto sidewalks scoured clean by the rain, the Village empty of tourists and daytime shoppers but populated by animat
ed knots of bargoers and determined singles making a beeline for the subway, their cab, their apartment.
Though Winston was ostensibly leading the way to the apartment, he trailed behind, towing her wheeled suitcase and enjoying the pleasant spectacle that was Allie, walking.
Her shoes clipped over the concrete. Her trench coat flapped open when the wind kicked up and she had to flatten her palm over her hat to keep it from blowing away. Her hips swayed from side to side, her purse banging against her upper thigh, her hands always moving as she talked, pointed, gestured, dynamic and alive when she swung around to ask him, “Didn’t we already pass that building?”
For a small woman, she took up so much space.
“Which building?”
She pointed. “The brick one.”
He studied it, but it looked like every other brick building to him. He had trouble differentiating architecture in America. Buildings that were supposedly old looked new to him, and they had little that seemed truly different, distinctive enough to remember. There were no Nelson’s Columns, no Arc de Triomphes, to help him navigate this city. Just skyscrapers and glass-front shops and indistinguishable brick churches.
“I don’t think so.”
“I could swear I saw that sign about the youth program already.”
He gestured ahead. “It’s just a few more blocks in this direction.”
“You sure? You’re not going to walk me into a blind alley and murder me?”
“I hadn’t planned to.”
“ ’Kay. Saving that for your creeper apartment, I guess.”
“What’s a creeper apartment?”
“You have two apartments—one to live in, and one for creeper activities, I can only assume. Tea drinking. Fetish things.”
“Nothing that sinister. Well, maybe I could be accused of tea drinking, but in the quite regular way, not the creeping way. I bought it for my daughter, Beatrice. But she doesn’t want to live there—she’s a student at NYU. She decided she’d rather live in a terrible five-flight walk-up with three other people, making noodle packets in a coffeemaker and painting murals in the stairwell.”
“You have a daughter. That opens up, like, a whole world of Winston I hadn’t imagined.”
“What had you imagined?”
“Actually, it makes complete sense that you have a daughter.”
“Do tell. It never makes very much sense to me.”
Allie dropped back to walk beside him and gifted him one of her open smiles. “This. Walking me home. Rolling my bag. Keeping reserve in the conversation, and looking more and more worried that you’re lost in your own neighborhood but can’t tell me because you’re supposed to be responsible. Though you must have been a kid yourself, if your daughter’s in college.”
“I didn’t think I was a child. I was properly out of university. Had an important job. Married.”
But when he’d last looked at his wedding portrait, framed on the desk in his London office, he’d been struck by Rosemary’s youth and by his own callow expression. They’d had no business making the kind of decisions they made in those years, one after the next. He’d been a father and a husband before he had his own daughter’s ability to know her mind.
He’d realized, one sleepless night after Rosemary left him, that their problems—his problems—had begun in those early days. The baby had come as a surprise, necessitating they marry in a rush, and he became convinced there were things they had to do to make a proper life for Beatrice. That he had to work for the bank, climb the ladder, demonstrate his fitness to take charge. That they had to buy a proper country home, no matter that it was difficult to make the money stretch to pay for it or it meant Rosemary would be stuck miles out in the middle of nowhere with a new baby to mind, renovating their crumbling pile of stone, turning it into a home whether she wanted to or not.
She hadn’t wanted to. He’d known that. But it seemed impossible to make it a consideration, because had to crowded out any possibility of conversation about want to.
He wished, now, that someone had told him to attend to what he’d loved about Rosemary—her big plans to climb mountains and write books—and cultivate that. He wished the birth of his daughter had seemed to him the beginning of an adventure rather than the first ritual necessitating decades of sacrifice to propriety.
Most of all, he wished he’d learned to pay attention to what he wanted—to ask questions about it, think about it as hard as he’d thought about what was expected of him. Perhaps if he had, he’d never have ended up in New York, unsure how to begin anew when it felt as though he’d wasted his best years on anxiety and error.
“Tell me where we’re going. I’ll put the address in my phone.”
“Don’t bother, I’ve just texted my driver.”
Allie laughed, and the past slipped pleasantly away from him, supplanted by the sound of her enjoyment. A breeze had kicked up, pleasant and dry, and her hair was escaping where she’d pinned it up earlier.
Most nights, by this time, he would have caught himself falling asleep in front of the third episode of something, resistant to getting up off the sofa and readying himself for bed because it would mean another day was over without his actually having lived it.
Today already had so much life in it.
Jean pulled alongside the curb, the black Lincoln Town Car obediently quiet and expensive. Winston had more in common with the car than with Allie, but he found himself hoping there would be just a bit more life in this day, with her.
“You know,” she said, “they say never to let them maneuver you into a car.”
“Them?”
“Murderers.”
“That does make sense.” Winston stepped aside to let Jean open the door for Allie and take her bag from him. To his relief, Allie slid into the car with a little smile.
“Where to?” Jean stowed the luggage in the trunk and opened Winston’s door. He very professionally behaved as though Winston escorted women about town on a regular schedule, though he did give Winston a look that said he expected the full story, later.
“Bea’s apartment.”
Unfortunately, Jean’s professional behavior only went so far, because he laughed, and kept laughing for the entire half-block ride.
“Well, yes. I knew the buildings were starting to look a bit familiar.”
Allie leaned over her forearms to ask Jean in the front seat, “Does he do this a lot?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.” Jean glanced at Winston in the rearview mirror. “But if I was, I could tell you some stories.”
“You are not. At liberty.” Winston jumped out to regain a little dignity by opening Allie’s door.
“Thanks for the save, Jean.” She gave him a jaunty wave and stepped out, already surveying the building and its surroundings. “I don’t know what your daughter’s problem is. This block really says ‘college’ to me.”
“You think so?” The doorman grabbed Allie’s bag and escorted them into the marble lobby.
“Absolutely. I remember my college days in Madison—that’s in Wisconsin—and their daily, tedious glamour of fresh flowers at the reception desk and uniformed doormen. Just to liven things up, we’d have competitions with our doormen. Make them do relay races. Mine and May’s won the Doorman Olympics two semesters in a row.”
“You’re teasing.” She was, and it was working, because he was hot under his bespoke collar as he pressed the brass elevator buttons and tried to ignore the mahogany paneling.
“No, not at all,” she said in the elevator. “I would never. Hey, Winston?”
“Yes?” He rolled her bag onto the private floor where Bea’s flat waited for her when she got tired of brushing her teeth over a flowerpot on the fire escape.
“Your daughter’s a lucky girl.”
He cleared his throat against the way that statement settled in his chest. “Yes, well. Here you have it.”
She stopped in front of the door while he looked for the key. He remembered that he�
��d given it to Allie only as she slid it into the lock. “You said before that you were married.”
“She asked for a divorce a few years ago. Rosemary. My wife.”
Allie had wandered across the main living area to the wall where he’d hung photographs from home—Bea and her mother on Hampstead Heath. The three of them with Bea in her equestrian costume on the day she’d taken first place for her age group.
“Here’s the thing. I’m still a little tipsy, but not at all tired. Maybe I’m still on Wisconsin time, or something. I bet there’s some tea things around here somewhere. Let me get cleaned up and change, and you make us some tea. After that—” Allie winked at him, and his heart completely stopped in his chest. It felt awful. “After that, you let me be your mailman.”
“The lav’s through there.”
She wheeled off down the hall, leaving him alone in the sterile kitchen to put the kettle on and sniff at herbal tea bags, unsure what she’d like. If she even liked tea, or if that was another thing she’d been teasing him about.
His heart had restarted in some unfamiliar rhythm. He rubbed his palm against it.
He could hear the water run. Allie unzipping her suitcase. She could emerge in anything from a floor-length kimono to a marabou-trimmed…something, and he wouldn’t be surprised.
He thought of Rosemary, drinking something strong and steaming in a climbing lodge with red-cheeked athletes, and of Bea, with paint on her shoes, purple dye in her hair. Those people had something to say to Allie, but he had no idea what he could possibly confess.
When the door opened, a woman with a clean face and soft-looking pants and a ponytail walked barefoot to the breakfast bar where he had set out some chamomile. He was surprised, it turned out.
Surprised he had so much he wanted to tell her.
“You’ve got yourself some excellent water pressure in that bathroom,” she said. “Top-notch.”
“Good to hear.”
She sniffed her tea. “Chamomile. Nice.”
When she set her chin in her cupped palms, elbows on the table, she should have looked too young for a man whose life had carried him so many years away from whatever late night adventures one had with a woman wearing a trench coat one had met in a basement bar. But it didn’t feel that way.