by Ruthie Knox
They looked nothing alike, she and her dad. She’d always looked just exactly like her mother, a younger duplicate, a clone. But her dad was the one who was here, and her mom the one who wouldn’t return her calls.
Her phone chimed with the incoming email receipt for the tickets. She turned onto her side to face her dad. “I’m going to send you the tickets.”
“Just keep them.”
“I’ll lose them.”
“How? They’re on your phone.”
“I lose all kinds of stuff.”
He frowned at her. “Who says?”
“Everybody.”
He just raised his eyebrows at her—the same way he’d looked at her that meant, If “everybody” jumped off a bridge…
“I know, but it’s pretty much true. That I’m always—always screwing up, losing track of things.” Hurting people.
She’d hurt Winston. She’d been trying not to, to disentangle herself from his life so she could move through this next part without dragging him down with her. But she’d hurt him anyway.
“You’ve been tracking an antiques inventory since you were still a kid. Never known you to lose anything.”
“That’s not what I mean, that’s just work. You know I keep most of it in my head, and what’s not in my head—”
“What’s not in your head, you’ve got in a database you paid to have built to your exact specifications. Anyone who thinks you’re always screwing up isn’t paying attention.”
His brusque tone made her mulish. “Matt used to call me flighty.”
“Matt.” He spit the name out. “He came by since you went to New York. Three different nights. First two times, I turned the garage light off and went down the basement. The third time, Ben was there, and I let Matt come in, asked him what he wanted.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“He says he’s worried about you. I say I don’t see why, you’re fine. He says you took off without telling him where you were going. I say I still don’t see the problem. He says you called him up from New York and told him he needs to keep away from our family and learn boundaries. Makes air quotes when he says the word ‘boundaries.’ I tell him that sounds about right. He doesn’t get it, and Ben tells him, ‘He means, “Get the fuck out of here.” ’ So he goes. Makes the saddest face in the whole world, like I stabbed him in the heart. Matt can kiss my ass.”
It took Allie a minute to locate how this story made her feel: proud, and grateful, and immensely relieved. “I wish I’d been there to see that.”
“Yeah, but you’da been there, it wouldn’t have happened.”
Tears flooded her eyes. She didn’t know why, really. Her emotional buckets were way overfull, and there was no way to keep them from spilling.
“Hey. No crying.” He stood beside the bed, his knees in her peripheral vision.
“I’m not,” she said, and wiped her face on the pillow. “I’m just leaking.”
He gave her shoulder a squeeze, the angle weird, his grip digging into her muscle and making her arm twinge. He’d never been the parent who comforted his crying daughters. He was more the type to bribe you into feeling better with a bowl of ice cream after the tears had dried. “You still hung up on Matt?”
She shook her head.
“Then what’re you crying about?”
She shook her head again.
“Allie.” He said her name like he always did, irascible and impatient. Get on with it, kid.
“That I dragged you here, I guess, and Mom’s somewhere out there with—” Rather than say his name, she just looked at her dad. He looked back at her, flat and unreadable. “And that you’re not really my dad, but you had to raise me, and she left us over and over again, and it’s your anniversary, and maybe she won’t come home.”
That I left Winston to come here.
That I miss him.
That things fall apart and I don’t want them to.
Her dad made a noise, a kind of huff. “You want to get some New York pizza? I can’t eat that stuff Ben cooks.”
“Yeah, we could order some.”
“I was thinking we’d go out for a slice.”
“Let me see if there’s anything nearby.” She checked on her phone and found a corner by-the-slice place within a few blocks. Miraculous New York. “Yeah, we’re in business.”
In the elevator, he caught her looking at him and said, “What?”
“I didn’t think you’d want to get back on this elevator.”
“It’s how you get downstairs.”
“I’m surprised you want to go out for pizza.”
“It’s supposed to be a big deal, New York pizza.”
“Have you ever been to New York before?”
“Nope.”
“Did you ever want to?”
“Nope.”
“Sorry.”
“Quit apologizing. You’re giving me a headache.”
They walked in silence for several blocks. Her dad stopped at three different bodegas and walked through the aisles, picking up unfamiliar foods, opening and closing the cooler doors. “What? I’ve never seen this stuff before,” he said when she failed to disguise her impatience.
Her phone said, Arrived. But they were nowhere—in the middle of the sidewalk, late at night, with nobody around and the traffic quiet.
They hadn’t arrived.
They were just lost.
Her dad pointed to a glowing spot on the pavement in the next block. “It’s right there.”
The pizza place was full of raucous teenagers. She got a slice with eleven kinds of vegetables. Her dad got three slices of cheese. “We’re in New York,” he said, when she raised an eyebrow.
Halfway through his first slice, he said, “Your mom’s been in love with New York as long as I’ve known her.”
In love with New York. In love with Justin. They weren’t exactly the same thing, but she didn’t have the heart to say so.
“And you didn’t drag me here,” her dad continued. “That’s the first thing you got wrong—I came here. Probably should’ve come a long time ago. For sure I should’ve come a long time ago.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“You have to understand, I knew Nancy from when we were kids. We went out in high school. I thought she was going to marry me.”
“She did marry you.”
“Yeah, she did, but she didn’t want us to buy a house and start a family until she got a chance to go to art school first. She went down to live in Milwaukee.”
“I didn’t know Mom went to art school.”
He just made a face, like, You kids think you’re supposed to know everything. “She told me she wasn’t ready to settle down until she got her shot at trying to make something with her talent, so I’d drive up and visit her weekends. I was still in Madison, finishing up grad school. She seemed happy. She had this guy in her classes, her new best friend. He was in love with her.”
“Justin.”
“Tell you the truth, I felt sorry for him, he was so far gone, and Nancy completely uninterested in him except to talk about art.” He took a big bite from the end of his second slice, dripping oil onto the paper tray, then glanced at her. “Quit making that face. She’s not with him. That’s another thing you got wrong.”
“I saw them together, drinking. They looked together-together.”
“What are you, Nancy Drew? Your mom’s known Justin a long time. Maybe they looked to you like they were together because you always think the worst thing’s going to happen, so that’s what you saw. Or maybe it looked like that because a professional woman’s occasionally got to flirt with a man to get what she deserves from him—something you’ve had more than one occasion to discover yourself, doing deals all over Manitowoc and Two Rivers, right?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“So either way, point is, I’m not worried about it. Eat your pizza.” He reached into his wallet and withdrew a ten. “Here. For when you want another slice.”
�
��It’s that good?”
He just grunted and shoved another bit into his mouth.
Allie tried it, then set to devouring her food. She went up to the counter for another. She tried to get her head around the idea that her dad wasn’t worried about it.
That her mom wasn’t cheating, hadn’t been cheating all these years.
It was a lot to take in.
She slid back into the booth. “So how did it happen?”
“How’d what happen?”
She pointed two thumbs at her own chest, and her dad sighed. “Your sister, I love her, but she was an incredibly difficult baby. Hardly slept, wanted to nurse all the damn time. Your mom lost a lot of weight, got quiet. These days I think they’d have flagged her for that postpartum depression. But back then, nobody talked about that stuff. She went off to New York like she sometimes did, stayed longer than I thought she would, and when she comes home, she tells me what happened. A mistake, she said. Wouldn’t happen again.”
“That’s horrible. How could you even…” Her dad scowled at her, and Allie didn’t know how to finish the sentence. “I mean—”
“It was one time, a long time ago.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Justin got one night with your mom, and he got to be a famous artist. I got thirty years and you girls. I always thought I got the better end of that deal.”
“But don’t you think—”
He pointed his slice at her. “I don’t know why you’re trying to argue with me about this. You don’t throw away something that’s always been good because one of you’s hurting. Hurting bad. You just don’t.”
The comment cut deep into her, made her bleed in a spot she couldn’t begin to name. A family came in, two moms and a pair of teenagers who looked like twins, all of them speaking to each other in a language Allie didn’t recognize. Her father ate his slice and watched them order.
Allie couldn’t keep ahead of all the new information, but there was something in her head, some important fishtail of meaning she kept trying to catch, only to have it swim away.
Her heart hurt.
“You’re telling me she’s just here on vacation? Time for herself, like you always said?”
Her dad wiped his mouth with a napkin and sat back in the booth. “When she needed time for herself, she went to Kohler with your aunt Cynthia. When she’s here, she’s working.”
“Working for who?”
He tapped his knuckles into the top of her head, gently. “For Justin. She was the one who gave him the idea in art school. Told him he needed to think about every single aspect of his life as a performance. And now look at him.”
“You’re telling me my mom was the genius behind Justice?”
“I’m telling you your mom is the genius behind Justice. She runs the Justice show. She always has.”
All these years, she’d thought her family had deep, dark secrets, and the more she’d learned, the darker and more terrible they seemed. But this was just…this was her mom, doing a part-time job for someone she’d known since art school.
This was a single night of indiscretion that led to an accidental pregnancy and a lot of stupid secrets that didn’t seem to have a point.
“Why would she do that? Why wouldn’t she say? All the sneaking around.”
“In case you didn’t notice, secrets are his whole thing. What’s she going to do, let a couple grade-school girls in on the identity of the best-kept secret in art?”
“Yeah, but—”
“It was her secret to decide what to do with, not yours. And not mine.”
Allie chewed on her lip. She wanted to argue, but his tone didn’t permit it. “You guys would fight when she got home, you were always sleeping in the basement—it’s not like I’m crazy. This is a problem, right? Like, this is a huge, big problem.”
“I used to think so.” He balled up his napkin and dropped it onto his empty plate. “When I was younger, I didn’t understand why she had to be Nancy Fredericks in Manitowoc and Nancy Van Der Beek in New York City, but never both at the same time. What did I care that dinner was on the table at five and the goddamn carpet had fresh vacuum lines on it? If she wanted to spend half her time in New York and the other half on the telephone, with you kids dropped off at day care, what’s it to me? But then I figured out, over time, that she cared. She’s a Sconnie, from way back. She wanted her split level with all her people in it to fuss over, and she wanted to boss Christ knows how many people all over New York City in secret, with no kids to think about anywhere in sight, and no husband to look after, and nothing to worry about except exactly what she wanted to worry about. It’s hard to be a woman—you get that, right? You being the queen of Manitowoc and that drip Matt trying to dampen you every which way. To protect Nancy Van Der Beek, Nancy Fredericks had to back off once in a while. That’s some shape of it. Did I make mistakes? Did your mom? Well, sure. Welcome to sixty years old.”
Allie gathered up their trash, threw it away, and returned to the table. There were a hundred thoughts in her head, but she couldn’t find one to think about.
She’d thought her dad always looked so at ease and comfortable back home because she had never seen him anywhere but in Manitowoc. It turned out, watching him lean against the high-top table folding his pizza into a perfect bite like he was old school New York, her dad was just comfortable. With himself. With the life that had been given to him.
She wondered if she ever would find that kind of comfortable.
“Why’d she leave art school in the first place?”
“May.”
“What, was it 1941 when May was born? Why didn’t she just finish?”
“She didn’t want to.” Her dad maneuvered his way out of the booth. “I saw online there’s a place has twenty-dollar milk shakes. Huge. You want to go find it?”
“It’s really late.”
“So check if it’s open.”
“Yeah, okay. If you split one with me.” She got out her phone, tapped in the search. The milk shake place came up. “They’re open late. We can get a cab.”
Her dad pulled a ridiculously huge smart phone out of his chino pocket and tapped the screen. “You heard of Uber?”
“I don’t live under a rock.”
He started toward the door, and she followed him outside. “Uber can be here in two minutes.” He looked up from his screen. “Our driver’s name is Muhammad, with a u and two m’s. How many ways you think there are to spell Muhammad?”
“A bunch.” She scratched her hands through her hair, over the crown of her head, trying to shake out some focus. “I had absolutely everything wrong. Like, everything. How did that happen? What kind of idiot am I?”
Her dad glanced at her. “You’re no idiot. You just work yourself up occasionally and act on the wrong ideas. Your heart’s always in the right place.”
“I guess.”
“You want this kind of thing to mean there’s something wrong with you.”
“No.” But she glanced up at him, and realized when she did that she was waiting for him to tell her what it was. As though her father had ever done that.
He hadn’t. Not once in her whole life had he told her what he thought was wrong with her. His basic assumption, always, had been that she was okay. And she was.
She was fine.
He reached out and rubbed her shoulder. “You’ve got a good head on you, Alison.”
“For business, maybe.”
“It’s your same head for everything. If you run into trouble, try applying what you know a little more liberally.” His phone chimed. “Muhammad’s here, it says. You see him? It says it’s a black Prius.”
“He’s right there.”
“Great.”
The car pulled up to the curb. They got in, confirmed their destination, and Muhammad pulled away from the curb.
“Can I ask you something?” Allie said.
“Fire away.”
“What if I found out, somehow, that Justice spent a lo
t of money recently at a very fancy store that sells jewelry. And what if we can’t find mom, and you don’t get to talk to her before Justin does whatever it is he plans to do on Saturday, and it turns out that what he plans to do involves some forty-something-thousand-dollar purchase from Harry Winston that Mom doesn’t know about, maybe in the shape of an engagement ring?”
The words began to sound ridiculous before she even completely finished saying them, and her dad seemed barely able to attend to her question, so absorbed was he in the passing sights.
“Dad?” she asked after a full minute had passed.
“I don’t want to find your mom,” he said. “She’s probably neck deep in problems to solve right now. She doesn’t need me showing up and making myself one more.”
“So why did you get on the plane?”
“You girls wanted me to. And anyway, it’s our anniversary, Allie. If I’m going to be married to your mom another thirty years, I figure there’s no better way to get started on the right foot than to finally see Nancy Van Der Beek in action.”
Allie leaned back in her seat. Tried to identify how she was feeling. Why she felt a little choke in her throat.
Love.
All of it. The love that had always been there, coming at her, in a big whirl.
All those times that her dad had driven her to Sal’s and waited for her in the car forever while she poked around looking at antiques. Her mom getting after May to do something practical with her art degree, even as she framed her work and hung it on the walls of the house. Her parents fighting after her mom came back from New York because her dad just wanted the whole world to get how great she was. May laughing with her after she ran away from her wedding.
Winston with her in the shower, in his bed, in her heart.
Love and love and love.
Chapter 23
“Oh my God, walk.” Beatrice stood in the middle of the street, waving them forward with both hands. A car bore down from half a block away, moving entirely too quickly for Winston’s comfort, but Bea didn’t even flinch when the horn honked. “You guys are like turtle people.”