by Ruthie Knox
“Nah, I’m good out here.”
Allie looked at the door. May was visible through the glass, her mouth small and hard, her posture perfectly correct.
She didn’t want to go back in there.
She sat on a bench by the door in the sun and popped open her cold sugar-coffee-beverage with a sigh. From deep in her pocket, weighted down with leftover quarters, her phone chimed. Winston.
What did your sister think of your plan for the restaurant?
Allie responded, She hated it.
Little blinking dots for a moment, and then, Bugger.
More blinking dots.
May hadn’t been ready—that was the thing. She’d given Allie her bank account number readily enough, shaky but smiling as Allie transferred an infusion of cash into her and Ben’s mutual account, which May promised to pay back with interest on whatever terms Allie wanted, even as Allie bit back the comment that the whole point was there were no terms for giving money to your sister, you just gave it to her and wished her well because she was your fucking sister.
But as soon as Allie started talking about Ben’s restaurant and what she thought it needed—including expanding into the next building from the lunch-counter-size space it was crammed into, in order to triple capacity—turning hiring over to an agency and bringing on a crapload more staff, and getting Ben to step back from absolute dictatorial management over the kitchen into a management and advisory role that would make it possible for the place to continue functioning when he wasn’t around—May had started asking unfocused questions, shaking her head and saying I’m not sure, and That’s a big step, and Ben isn’t going to like that, and Wow.
A great deal of wow, until wow started to sound a hell of a lot like, You don’t know what you’re doing, Allie, and Possibly you’re kind of nuts, and This is not what I want.
So she’d stopped trying. She hadn’t even mentioned her thoughts about getting May a studio space, maybe investing in a place in some up-and-coming neighborhood where they could rent studios to artists and offer gallery walls, possibly with a coffee shop so there could be art and poetry events, music.
What was the point? She had these ideas but there was nowhere to put them, and no one who wanted to hear them.
Winston’s next text finally popped up with a little zoop noise.
Give her time. With these sorts of investment projects, clients always think they want to move big and move fast, but when presented with the reality of what that would mean, they balk. She’ll come around eventually. She only needs to make room emotionally and mentally for what the change will mean.
After a brief pause, a second text popped up.
And it will mean only good things for your sister, and Ben, and for you. So she has nothing truly to object to.
Allie typed back, Thanks. I was starting to feel crazy.
You’re not crazy.
Perhaps a bit mad.
But in a good way.
She smiled and drank her oversugared caffeine drink. What are you up to?
Work. Deathly dull. Are you at the airport?
Yes. Waiting a few more minutes on the flight.
I’d rather be with you.
She’d like to have him next to her right now, though she’d turned him down this morning when he volunteered to come along. Her dad and Ben had never met Winston, her father hadn’t even heard of him, and it would only complicate things to introduce them. Better to keep it simple.
The dots blinked, and then, I miss you.
Allie typed, I miss you, too. Then deleted it.
She tried again. I have an idea.
?
We haven’t done #9 yet.
A long pause.
I had to look at the list, he wrote.
You don’t have it memorized?
I do. Just needed to be sure you were suggesting what you’re suggesting. Which you are. Suggesting that.
Allie smiled. Typed, S - E - X - T, B - A - B - Y!!! followed by three thumbs-up emoji.
It was enjoyable to imagine Winston squirming in his office chair.
How will this work? he asked.
You’re the one who put it on the list.
Yes.
How do you want it to work?
Are you able to…
Not at the airport. Not with May sitting in the terminal, all judgy. But we can take care of you. Do you have some kind of executive bathroom suite in your office?
Already there. I’ve locked the door. There’s a bench to sit on.
Very enterprising of you. So what we do is, I type, and you wank.
Three dots appeared on her screen. Disappeared. Reappeared. Disappeared. He couldn’t decide what to say.
Nervous, baby?
Yes.
I’ll take care of you. Do you have it out yet?
Um.
Are you typing with your left hand?
Y
Allie sent her next string of texts one sentence at a time, for maximum effect.
That’s good.
Imagine I’m with you, locked in that bathroom.
I came by to see you.
I’m wearing a dress with flowers all over it, with no sleeves, that’s full on the bottom with all these layers of underskirts.
And no panties.
You took a phone call, and I sat in front of you on your desk with my legs spread, so you could see everything.
But I wouldn’t let you touch.
And now I’ve led you into the bathroom, and I’m sitting on your knee in my dress, your hand up my skirts, jerking you.
Do you like it?
It took her a long time to type all that. She waited, imagining him on a bench in a swanky bathroom.
Yes.
Are you excited?
Y
She was getting excited, too, though not in an urgent way. It was just enjoyable to think of Winston thinking about her, doing something so intimate with her that he’d wanted to try.
You’re too horny to make me come, you’re just slipping your fingers all over me and inside me, and I’m very wet.
You’re so hard. You can smell how excited I am, and feel me wiggling all over your lap, kissing and sucking on your neck, fisting you hard.
I’m not very good at it. I’m too excited.
But I’m getting close to coming, even though I didn’t want to, and making noise, making a mess all over you. You’re worried someone will hear. But you don’t want me to stop, do you?
Allie waited for his reply, but he was gone. She shifted on the bench. It must mean he couldn’t type, was too close, maybe coming already.
So I don’t stop, I keep slipping my hand over you, faster and harder, fucking myself on your fingers, it feels so good, so hot, I come all over your hand.
And you come, too, on my fist, spilling hot on my fingers.
It’s so good, isn’t it?
You’re so good to me.
A jet engine was closing in. Allie was flushed, squirming on the bench. She finished her drink in three long swallows.
Winston texted, Darling.
Was it good?
It was unbelievable.
She felt sorry, then, not to be able to see his face. Text me a picture.
Of my…?
Of you.
After a full minute, it came through—what she thought might be Winston’s first selfie, his eyes downcast because he’d looked at the screen rather than the camera, his mouth in a shape she’d never seen it take before.
His ears were red, his postcoital flush deliciously in evidence. He looked adorable, and it was almost as good as having him here, almost enough to banish the dark clouds of her bad mood. Before she could talk herself out of it, she texted him a heart emoji.
He responded with three in a row.
The terminal doors slid open and May poked her head out. “What are you doing out here? You’re wiggling all over like a weirdo. People are looking.”
“What people?” She felt sordid, awash in instant shame for sitt
ing on a bench and fucking her New York fling over text while she waited for their father to land. But there were in fact no people.
“The plane’s here.”
“I’ll be right in.”
Got to go, she told Winston. My dad.
Good luck. Call me and tell me how it’s gone.
K.
Allie silenced her phone, slipped it back into her pocket with the remaining snacks, threw her bottle in the recycling bin, and walked into the coolness of the terminal.
—
May hugged Ben. Allie hugged her dad.
He was gray, his mouth sagging at the corners. He wore an aviator’s leather jacket he’d had stashed in the front coat closet her entire life over a pair of multipocketed safari-style pants she’d never seen and couldn’t imagine the reason for. He looked so terrible that her stomach lurched and she thought she might lose her coffee all over the shiny granite.
“How was the flight?” May asked.
“Interesting.” Ben’s face was hard as stone, and it told her exactly how badly the flight had gone.
Very badly.
“It’s quite a plane Dan’s got there, I bet.” Allie spoke in a hearty camp counselor voice and stepped closer to her dad, patting his arm as if he were the child and she the parent. “Smooth ride.” She swooped her hand through the air, utterly inane. “I’ve never been on a jet. Jean said it costs hundreds of dollars just to land. I plugged the distance into an estimator, and it said it would be six thousand dollars from Wisconsin to New York. And that’s if the plane is paid for rather than financed.”
“Waste of six thousand bucks,” her dad said. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have come. Who’s Jean?”
“Just our driver.” It didn’t seem like the time for full introductions, what with her father obviously not wanting to be here and all.
“Why didn’t May drive?”
“May sucks at city traffic.”
Her sister shot her a look that meant, Eat shit and die. “Thanks for coming, though, Dad,” she said. “Really. It means a lot.”
“I’ve got truckloads of donations to coordinate for shipment to Greece. Nobody else knows the system.”
“I’m sure it will be fine,” May said. “Dan’s got it under control.”
Their father said nothing, and it started to sink in for Allie that she hadn’t made a plan for any of what was supposed to come next. They were supposed to pull together now, as a family, and talk honestly, and be authentic, and…how. How had she thought that would work? She’d strong-armed her sister’s boyfriend into flying her dad from New York to Wisconsin in the private jet of her sister’s ex-boyfriend, wasting fuel, wasting money, wasting everybody’s time to get him here when he hadn’t wanted to come, because it was already over.
It had been over before he got on the plane. She could see it on his face.
Worse, she knew it from the string of texts she’d sent her mother, each of them sitting on her phone unanswered, marked Delivered.
She’d known because her dad already had a way of handling it when her mother disappeared: he declared she was taking time for herself, and he waited for her to come home.
Or not.
That was his strategy, and it had served him for as long as Allie could remember. Who was she to decide he should be doing this instead?
And Ben, Jesus. Looking at his face now, she couldn’t imagine it being even remotely possible, ever, in any circumstance, that this man would accept her as an advisor and investor in his restaurant. She’d invested in sandwich shops and diners in Manitowoc. This was New York fucking City. Probably she didn’t have the money to open an artist’s space even if she wanted to. May was right, she knew nothing about children’s book publishing, or agents, or any of it.
“Where am I staying?” Bill asked.
“We thought you could stay with us,” May said. “We have a pullout sofa.”
She’d made her father fly hundreds of miles to sleep on a pullout sofa. While she slept in sin at Winston’s luxurious apartment. She waited for the question, one, two, three beats…
“Where’s Allie staying?”
“With a friend. Come on.”
She couldn’t stand here anymore, with Ben’s hard face and May’s barely concealed panic and the crushing weight of her father looking smaller, weaker, and gloomier than she’d ever seen him before. So she grabbed the handle of her dad’s suitcase, a small blue vinyl bag from a bygone era. She could sell her father’s luggage on eBay for three hundred dollars, easy. Buy a bus ticket to Mexico. Disappear into the desert.
She wasn’t anybody’s savior, that much she could accept, but faced with the reality of what it looked like, felt like, to live right in the middle of Ben’s bee-swarm-about-to-happen…no, thank you. She didn’t want any part in it.
Just go home, she wanted to tell her dad. Just let’s all of us go home and not talk about it and leave things the way they were.
It would hurt so much less.
She pushed through the door, not even caring if they were behind her, realizing only when she spotted Jean that they wouldn’t all fit comfortably in the car. They’d have to squeeze, three in the backseat, one in the front. Of the four of them, she was the only one who was petite. May took after their dad, and Ben was basically May’s same height, the whole bunch of corn-fed midwesterners used to driving around in vans and SUVs on four-lane highways designed to accommodate their impressive Teutonic enormity.
She handed Jean her dad’s suitcase. She would have to sit in the middle back, between May and her dad, with Ben in the front.
It would be such a long forty minutes back to Queens.
“You know what?” she told Jean. “I’m going to Uber it.” She tapped the app open. “Where’s Winston live again?”
Jean gave her the address. The fare wasn’t cheap, and it would be a long time before a car could get out here to pick her up, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care that she had to explain three times to her sister why she wasn’t going to ride with them. She didn’t care that the real answer was, Because I don’t want to, because I give up, because this sucks and I hate it.
She waved and smiled as they pulled away from the curb, and then she hit the button to accept the Uber fare and sat down on the bench to wait.
She didn’t text Winston to tell him how it had gone.
She didn’t respond when May texted her, WTF.
Allie silenced her phone and watched the planes come in.
Chapter 21
An unfamiliar car pulled up to the curb and Allie got out. She wore a flowered dress—the same dress she’d described to him earlier, although weight in the pocket dragged the hem down on one side and spoiled the line. She clutched a variety of empty snack packages in one hand.
He didn’t like the worry lines in her forehead, but it was a relief to see her. She hadn’t responded when he phoned to follow up on his unanswered texts.
Chasity turned her chair to follow his gaze. “Good, it’s you. I’ve just been filling Winston in.”
They’d had to speak on the steps, as his apartment wasn’t wheelchair accessible—a fact that had never occurred to him before and now seemed to require immediate remediation. It was awful to be forced to speak with Chasity on the street, as though she wasn’t welcome inside.
He would speak with the estate agent and arrange for a builder to take care of it.
“So I’m pretty sure this event is going to happen on or near the Brooklyn Bridge, on the city side, Saturday morning. I haven’t figured out what the art piece will be, it looks like it might involve a lot of yardage of specialized textiles, if Bea’s source isn’t a red herring. I hit a dead end with the permit. It’s signed by an alias, some name Justice’s people have used on permits for years, but there’s no contact info to follow up on.”
“Justice has agreed through his agent to meet me tomorrow afternoon,” Winston added.
“Which means you’ve still got a way to try to get at her tomorrow,”
she said to Allie. “You tag along with Winston to this meeting and figure out a way at your mom through Justice.”
Allie walked up the steps to the front door. “Is this unlocked?”
“Of course.”
She opened the door and went inside. He thought for a moment she was stepping in to throw away her waste and would return, but she didn’t come back.
Winston was at a loss.
Chasity clucked. “Looks like you’ve got stuff to sort out. I’m gonna jet. Keep me posted.”
“Shall I call you a car?”
“Nah, I’ll take care of myself. You can go after your girl. See you around.”
She wasn’t his girl, not in the way Chasity meant. Not as he’d like her to be. But he couldn’t make up his mind to say so, couldn’t fully decide whether he’d like to hear what Chasity might have to say on the matter, and by the time he decided to speak, she was halfway down the block.
Winston went in. Allie wasn’t in the kitchen or living area. He checked the bedroom, then the patio, and finally found her on the roof.
She sat at the edge of the raised flower bed, her legs crossed beneath her skirt, her spine bowed in defeat. She didn’t look up when he sat beside her.
“You were rude to Chasity.”
She shrugged.
“I thought you’d be pleased.”
“I am.”
“Forgive me for pointing this out, but I’ve seen you pleased. This”—he gestured at the spectacle she made, her dress and her posture and her face all announcing that she’d had a difficult day—“this is not a pleased, Allie.”
She shrugged again.
He stood. “I’ll be downstairs if you want to talk.”
She grabbed his hand before he could walk away. “Don’t.” She pulled him back to stand beside her. “I’m sorry. I’m being childish.” She took a deep breath and exhaled. “It was bad.”
“Tell me.”
She told him, and he settled on the railroad tie beside her, listening to Allie tell him that she didn’t know how to do this next part, and that there was no reason to try to speak with her mother after all. It had all been harebrained and ill-considered. She should cancel the anniversary party and take her father home to Manitowoc right away. She would spend the next few years holding his hand through divorce, making him pots of soup to reheat and buying him new pairs of chinos when they went on sale at Kohl’s.