by Ruthie Knox
“You think he’s getting ready to exhibit something.”
“I don’t even think these withdrawals represent costs he accrued for a project. He usually has some private investor who funds these stunts. I think it’s ready to launch, somewhere, someplace in the city, and these are the costs leading right up to when it’s happening. Party planning. And if he’s called your friend’s ma here out of the blue, and she’s disappeared in the city with him, I think it’s pretty likely she’s a part of it.”
Winston stared at the spot in the corner where the ceiling tiles didn’t quite align. She had to be right, but he needed to verify her assumptions, and then to find the means to turn this information into action.
Speaking with Justice was out of the question. What else was there?
“Big stuff,” he said aloud. “Public stuff. If it’s public—when he did the Statue of Liberty, did he get in trouble? Get arrested?”
“No, he had a permit, arranged it with the city and the harbor authority. It was a big fucking mound of paperwork for somebody.”
“Can you find out if he’s doing that now? Arranging permits, hiring off-duty police for security, whatever he’d have to do to make a big public event work?”
Chasity leaned back in her chair, cracking her back so thoroughly that Winston worried she broke it. When she sat up, she gave him the crocodile look again. “You swear this is to help find this woman’s mother? That’s it, that’s your whole interest?”
He considered the wisdom of telling her that Justice was also Allie’s biological father, but it seemed beside the point, and not his secret to reveal.
“I care about Allie. I wasn’t going to help her, because there’s such a terrible conflict of interest, but…Bea. I had a dreadful fight with Bea. She compelled me to see it wouldn’t be right not to try to help, and I admit I didn’t feel right doing nothing when I had this connection.”
“Bea somehow has her head on straight, for a kid. Thing is, I’d do anything for my ma. She worked herself sick taking care of us kids. If anything like this happened to her, I’d flip my shit. This lady’s married, you say? It’s strange behavior for her?”
“Allie seemed quite motivated to get her home. Regardless of whatever decision her mother makes, she feels her mother isn’t thinking it through right now, and is…caught up in something.”
“Lemme make some calls. My brother Jeremy works dispatch in Harlem. He’d tell me where to start to look for something like this.”
“Thank you.”
She stopped at the threshold of his office. “If this comes out, just to be clear, you’re the one taking all the blame for it. I’m just following orders, right?”
Winston froze. He hadn’t stopped to consider that by sharing the truth with Chasity, he also exposed her to danger. “Wait a moment. I think—You know, it’s better if I make the calls. How do they work, the permit offices, in the States? Do I call the directory and ask for the office number or—”
He stopped because she was making a sound he’d never heard before, bent over at the waist. She smacked the door frame, hard, and straightened. Chasity was laughing. “Oh my God, like I’d let you handle it. You couldn’t find your ass with both hands, no offense. ‘Do I call the directory?’ Yeah, call the directory, see if they’ll give you directions to your apartment.” She was laughing so hard, she wasn’t making any noise except for an alarming high-pitched squeak.
He let it go.
Honestly.
“Don’t worry about me. You must know I could get a job anywhere in the city. Martha goddamned Stewart called me the other day and offered me a job, and lemme tell you, she does not like the word no. You just be grateful I got that fat bonus last quarter.”
He did feel grateful, actually.
Chapter 9
“Did you ever drive anybody who, like, waited in the back of the car topless? And then when the client came out they were like, ‘Surprise!’ ”
Jean chuckled. “No. That has not happened.”
“What’s the craziest thing that has happened? Are there, like, prostitutes? Escorts, I mean?” Allie opened up the bag of five-layer-dip Combos and passed them to Jean. She had left the backseat to sit next to him in the front hours ago. “You should try these, they’re delicious. What was I saying?”
“Escorts.”
“Right, so, do you drive around a lot of ladies of the night, and they’re popping open champagne bottles and standing up so they stick out of the sunroof and pour champagne all over the car?”
“You’ve seen too many videos.” Jean stuck a Combo in his mouth. “This is disgusting.”
“No, give it a minute, it’ll improve. You’re dodging my questions.”
“This car has no sunroof.”
“You only ever drive this one? I figured you get to drive the stretch Hummers sometimes.”
“No stretch Hummer. Only this car, for Mr. Chamberlain.”
“You’re his driver all the time?”
Jean nodded and reached for another Combo.
“I told you they were awesome.”
“The flavor develops.”
“Like wine, some snack foods have to breathe.”
Allie checked her phone.
“Anything?” Jean asked.
“Not yet.” She’d emailed, left voicemails, and texted at regular intervals. Her mother had gone dark, and Allie kept waiting for some brilliant next move to occur to her. Or for her to find the balls to do one of any number of things she was avoiding, like come clean with her sister. Or her dad.
“Keep the faith,” Jean said, and passed her the Combos.
Allie snacked with Jean companionably for a few minutes, letting herself enjoy people- watching from behind the security of tinted windows. The way people dressed here was fantastic. Even the young women in their boring sample-sale St. John blazers and Jimmy Choos were interesting to her because they were dressing how they wanted to look.
“Before I met Matt, I was such a nutty dresser.” She had told Jean about leaving Matt at the altar. She was finding it easier and easier to say the words, to tell it as a story, here in New York. Telling Jean was the first time she didn’t think of herself, entirely, as the bad guy. Though she still choked a little at the end, when she told him the part about how she tried to dye her wedding dress in a bathtub after canceling her wedding. That was the night she made up with her sister after a terrible fight.
She wanted that night back, if only for how close she’d felt to May.
Jean looked her over. “You were a nutty dresser?”
“This is a post-runaway-bride-era outfit. Not dissimilar to the pre-Matt era.”
“Of course.”
“Matt didn’t like how I dressed. I mean, he didn’t say so. Like, directly. He’d just…you know what I mean by ‘neg’? Like when a guy wraps an insult in a compliment?”
Jean rolled his eyes. “I was born in New York City. Washington Heights.”
“I’m being racist, probably.”
“Yes. You’re from Wisconsin, so I expect it.”
“Fair enough. I will do better, but don’t let me get away with it. So, yeah. He’d neg. But not even in a frat boy sort of way where you feel free to tell them to shut the fuck up and carry on, but more in this…insidious way.”
“My sister had a boyfriend like that. It sucked, and she was always stressed and insecure, but didn’t seem to know why.”
“Yeah. Exactly.”
A minute passed. Allie watched one of the most beautiful men she’d ever seen in real life walk into the Starbucks. A woman wearing a perfectly preserved Pucci dress bought a hot dog from a street vendor.
“The craziest thing that has happened,” Jean said, “is that one night when I was taking the car back to the garage, I passed by a man taking a woman into an alley. And he wasn’t hurting her, or dragging her. But it didn’t look right. I turned around, half a mile past them, and came back.”
“Did you find them?”
“Yes.”
When he didn’t say anything more, when he looked through the windshield at the street but didn’t seem to see it, she could only ask, “Was she okay?”
He sighed. “She survived.”
Allie leaned over and put her head on Jean’s shoulder and held out the bag of Combos to him. Life was a hard thing. It started out rough, it sometimes got rougher. Elvira said that every single time things got rough, mostly what you learned was that you could do hard things.
Allie was trying to do hard things. She was here, in New York, to fetch her mom and mend her family’s fault lines, but she kept running into all these other broken parts of her life, like her neglected relationship with May, or how far things were from settled with Matt.
It seemed futile—this mission, and her being in charge of it.
She wanted to give up, but she was certain there was still so much to save. She knew there was still love between her parents. She’d seen it. And she knew she and May had stories they needed to learn to tell each other. She’d give anything if May could be her mailman.
She pulled her phone from her pocket to just feel the ache of not calling her.
The suitcase she’d brought with her to New York was full of her favorite clothes because wearing some surprising outfit made her feel armored to do things and say things and act on things that she had put aside for too long. Probably because dressing like herself reminded her to be herself. It reminded her that she and life had beautiful things alongside hard things, which reminded her, in turn, to be brave.
She could be brave, and she could do hard things. She had to. The alternative was too terrible to contemplate.
“You think a lot of Winston,” she said.
“That night I took the woman to the hospital? He gave me a week off, paid. Had to take the subway to work, which he told me later put him into the office at ten forty-five the first day. I don’t think he ever did make it in by nine.”
“It’s not hard to imagine him being kind in that way, but he makes it sound like he wasn’t always.”
“Yeah, when he first came here, he was so quiet. Hardly talked at all, not like that daughter of his. Then a few months in, he calls me from upstate. He’s signed himself up for this canal boat tour, which sounds like it was a disaster—just him and some big church group made up of old ladies fussing over his accent—and once it’s over he’s gonna ride the commuter train back to the city, checked the schedule and everything, only he checked it wrong and there’s no train. So I’ve got to drive out a couple hundred miles to pick him up, and we have that whole ride back together. He started talking more, joked. Only talked about the shows we liked to watch, at first. Then he told me about what had gone down with his brother, how the divorce had spooled all out, after. He had made up with his brother, and they were talking again. That was a big change for him, and made him easier to get to know.”
“I feel a little bad learning all this from you. I don’t actually want to gossip.”
“I think you’re good. I wouldn’t want any woman hanging out with some guy they just met without more than the usual intel.”
“Yeah. Though he’s not hard to trust. Like, right away.”
“Money guys are like that, though.”
“Yeah? Know a lot of money guys?”
“Getting to. Winston’s been helping me with investments. I’m more than a little interested.”
“Nice. That stuff’s my verb, too.”
Jean laughed. “Your verb, eh? You don’t seem like any of the money guys I’ve met. Or money ladies.”
“Don’t judge Wisconsin by its cheese, Jean. We’ve got all kinds.”
“Seems like.”
Jean sat up straight, alert. “There he is.”
Winston was striding across the plaza in front of his office building. He wore pinstripes today, and the sun gleamed off his wristwatch, his cuff links, his shined shoes. He veered to the right, heading away from them down the sidewalk.
“Where’s he going?”
“Probably thinks he’s taking the subway home. He can’t keep track of which way the station is.”
Allie watched Winston’s retreating back. He seemed cheerful, wandering off in completely the wrong direction. “How far are you going to let him go?”
But even as she asked, Jean was pulling away from the curb. “Can’t let him get too far, or we’ll lose him.” Her window lowered. “Flag him down.”
Allie unbuckled her seatbelt and stuck her whole torso out the window as the car slowed. “Hey, sugar, you looking for some company tonight? I’ll take real good care of you.”
Winston picked up his pace. His left hand came up and he shook his head without looking at her—his whole body saying, No, thank you.
Jean lost his shit. Head bent over the steering wheel, he drove three miles an hour and shook with silent laughter.
Allie couldn’t stop herself. “Come on, honey, take a look over here. I’ve got something you’ll like, I just know it.”
His hand was blocking his face now, a gesture that said, If I can’t see you, you can’t see me. He sort of flailed his briefcase at her.
“He thinks he’s getting solicited,” Jean wheezed. “At six o’clock in the afternoon on a weekday on Pearl Street.”
“Pull over.”
As the car neared the curb, Allie jumped out and jogged the half block Winston had put between himself and the car. “Hey! Winston!”
He finally turned around. She felt guilty then, at his obvious discomfort. When she was in college she’d sometimes done this, got caught up in the moment and taken a joke too far, but she’d thought she’d grown out of it.
Don’t worry about anyone but yourself, Allie. You never do.
She swallowed hard and found her voice. “It’s just me.” She gave him a low wave. “Hi.”
At first Winston only looked at her, a slow stock-taking sort of survey that made her aware of the sun shining through the gauzy white fabric of her dress. Possibly she was too naked in this outfit—or too something. Her short voile toga was suspended from thin ribbons of rhinestone, crisscrossed at her breasts. She wore gold platform sandals with gladiator straps to the knee and a vintage crown of gold-leaf laurel woven through with trailing crimson ribbons. It was a lot of outfit, and Winston was doing a lot of looking, which wasn’t, in Allie’s experience, generally a good thing.
A car horn sounded, making Winston jump. The traffic had started piling up behind Jean. “We came to get you,” Allie explained. “Want a ride?”
“Yes.”
Because she was nervous, embarrassed by her own excess, she said, “Come on, say it like you mean it, Chamberlain.”
Unexpectedly, he smiled. It broke over her, relief and pleasure.
“Yes. I do.” He did that thing she’d only seen in old movies where he waited for her to move toward the car and encircled his arm around her shoulders, without touching, as if he were guiding her. Suddenly, her mad-Gatsby-fever-dream outfit felt exactly right. Somehow, it went perfectly well with his charcoal pinstripes and grass-green Windsor knot.
—
“This is actually the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten in all of my life.” Allie slurped at the bottom corners of her Popsicle, catching milky pineapple juice before it could run onto the back of her hand. “Why don’t they have these in Wisconsin?”
“Surely you have Popsicles.”
“Yeah, but we don’t have seven-dollar Popsicles made with fat chunks of fresh pineapple and magic fairy dust.”
Winston frowned at his Popsicle. “Yours must be better than mine. They’ve left out my fairy dust.”
“No, it’s got to be in there. That’s why it cost seven dollars.”
They strolled along the High Line, which Winston had sold to her as being “a sort of seaside boardwalk, except instead of views of the sea, there are a lot of brick buildings.” It was better than that, though, an elevated park with a walking path for city people and tourists to stroll along, peopl
e-watching and eating overpriced Popsicles and drinking craft beer.
The sky was the kind of intense blue that went with clear, laser-beam heat, but up on the High Line there were musicians playing guitar and cello, babies in strollers, and everywhere a landscape of faces and skin and bodies so different from the human landscape of Manitowoc that she couldn’t think about it, because it made her want to cry.
She understood why May had moved to New York, she really did. The people, the energy, the diversity—it was wonderful. But Allie couldn’t look at a crowd without checking every face against the possibility it might be her mother, and walking alongside Winston required her to actively suppress the part of her that wanted to ask him what he knew, ask him to help, ask him ask him ask him.
Earlier, with Jean, they’d done some Internet research on their phones, trying to figure out if there was a way Winston might be able to arrange a meeting between Justice and Allie without risk. But the more they’d looked into it, the clearer it had been that Winston could very easily get in trouble for helping her.
He had a daughter.
Allie couldn’t ask him. She just couldn’t.
“Would you like a taste?” Winston asked. She held out her hand for his Popsicle.
He’d done his cuff-link ritual, placing them carefully in his shirt pocket and rolling up his sleeves. The sun showed up all the silver in his short salt-and-pepper hair, lit the lines at the corners of his eyes and beside his mouth, but it only made her like him more to see this evidence that he’d had a life before she knew him, a history that brought him across the ocean to New York, to the High Line, with her.
She bit off a bite of pomegranate ice and sighed. “That’s delicious.”
“Mind you don’t drip on your dress.”
She held it away from her, pulling her legs and stomach back. “You better take it. The dress is vintage, and if I stain it, I can’t sell it.”
“It’s lovely.”
“Right? I found it at an estate sale in Milwaukee. This woman had been a big arts booster, and she had rooms full of clothes and furs, almost all of it in good shape. I had an insider who let me look over everything before the sale, and I cleaned up.”