by Ruthie Knox
“You’re supposed to wait for the little white man to appear,” Winston protested.
“The world is bored with waiting for little white men,” Bea replied. “The age of the little white man is over. Come on, we’re going to be late.”
Somewhere around here was Ben’s restaurant, where they were to meet with Allie and her people. Chasity was already nearly a block away. She’d zipped across in her wheelchair, glanced back over her shoulder, and kept rolling. Cath moved into the street against the flashing orange. “It’s been years since I could do proper jaywalking. Nev won’t let me.”
“I would, if you could be trusted to check in the direction the traffic was actually coming from.”
Cath stuck out her tongue, then grabbed Bea’s hand and began skipping down the street, singing the song from Alice in Wonderland about being late. Winston hung back with Nev, not wanting to impinge on Beatrice’s time with a woman she’d adored since their first meeting, when Bea was only a teenager.
“When you were her age,” he said to Nev, “you’d just started work at the bank. You tried to convince me we should knock down all the office walls and have open, glass-walled cubicles, like a Silicon Valley startup.”
“I still think that would’ve livened things up around the place.” Nev waggled his eyebrows.
“It’s a bank. It’s not meant to be lively.”
“You’d know best.”
Winston glanced at his brother, afraid, suddenly, he’d stepped into an old argument, but Nev was smiling.
“Relax. It’s all right,” he said. And then, after a pause, “We’re all right. You and me. You don’t have to dance around, worried we’ll fall apart.”
“I was criminally shite to you.”
“You were. But you’ve repented and changed.” Bea and Cath’s skipping had turned manic, and they’d begun to giggle like children. “I’m glad I came to New York,” Nev said, watching them. “It’s good to see you.” Winston swallowed over a lump in his throat. “But I have to tell you, pleasant reunion aside, you’re driving me completely mad.”
Winston’s surprise brought him to a stop in the middle of the sidewalk. “What? How?”
Nev reached out and slapped him squarely between the shoulder blades. “When you were your daughter’s age, you brought Rosemary home to visit. Mum loathed her. I loathed her, too, because you barely glanced at me the whole holiday, and I’d been so looking forward to skulking around with you.”
“I remember.”
Nev shoved his hands into his pockets. Kicked a pebble. Then said, slowly, “It was hard, over the years, watching all the life leach out of Rosemary.”
Winston had to clear his throat again. “I didn’t give her enough room.”
“You were at university, looking for a wife, and you picked the most interesting girl in the twenty-five-foot radius around you and checked her off your list. Wife. Done.” Winston wanted to protest, but it wasn’t an entirely inaccurate portrayal. “It was the same thing you tried to make me do,” Nev continued, “and it would be easier to hate you for it if it weren’t the same thing half the men in England do when they hit twenty-five or thirty years old. Find a wife, lock her down, move along. And then you wankers are all so gobsmacked to discover the divorce statistics apply to you, because it turns out you can’t pick the most interesting woman you know and check her off a list and expect happy-ever-after to take care of itself.”
“We were young.” But the response sounded feeble to him.
Neville kicked a fast-food wrapper toward the curb with his toe. “You’re old now, but you’re still just as stupid.”
Winston couldn’t think of a response beyond his blind desire to bludgeon his brother with a blunt object. He took a deep breath. Tried another tack. “Perhaps you should explain what you mean instead of lobbing vague accusations and insulting me.”
“What I mean is you’re one lucky bastard. You’re rich, you’re powerful, you live in the best city in America, you have a daughter who’s healthy and brilliant and turns up regularly for tea, and you walked into a bar a few days ago and met a really great woman. You didn’t have to go on eHarmony or whatever the fuck and shop yourself around town for a date. You met a woman at a bar, who you look at exactly the same way you used to look at Rosemary, and what pisses me off is that what you have to say to me is not, ‘Look, little brother, at how incredibly well my life is going for me even though I was a wanker and fucked up and probably don’t deserve all this good fortune,’ it’s that you’re thinking about moving back to London.”
“I don’t—”
“Just shut up a minute. You have an opportunity in New York. You have a kid who you love, and who loves you, and a chance to be here for her. You met a woman, here for the week, and you desperately don’t want to ruin it with her. You’re supposed to pay attention to that.”
“I may have already ruined it.”
“What did you do?”
“I pushed her when she wasn’t in a place to be pushed.”
“She took off?”
Winston nodded. His apartment felt emptier, utterly without personality. It seemed wrong that he should miss her so much after such a short acquaintance.
He couldn’t not pay attention to that. It was literally all he could think about.
“But she asked you to this meeting,” Nev said.
“Technically, Beatrice instructed me to come, and Chasity texted to let me know how we’d be traveling and at what time. I haven’t a clue if Allie wants me here.”
Nev shook his head. “If you’d ruined it, she wouldn’t have made sure you were invited today, much less your daughter, your brother, your brother’s partner, and your personal assistant, all of whom have turned up—and I shouldn’t have to tell you this—for you. Because we want you to be happy. Because we want to know what you think, and support what you want, even when you make it incredibly fucking difficult.” Nev blew out an irritated breath. “You’re supposed to show up for your own life, you know? You’re supposed to buy furniture and insist your daughter share her schoolwork and tell the girl you met at a bar that you want her to stay so you can figure out if what you really want is for her to stay forever. Just because you were a controlling asshole four years ago doesn’t mean what you’re supposed to do from now until you die is just let shit happen to you. This isn’t penance. It’s fucking New York.”
“I—I’m not sure I understand.”
“Jesus Christ.” Neville walked away from him, stalking five steps down the street. But then he stopped. Turned around. “You know, things got a bit rocky between Cath and me, the first months we were together.”
“At Leyton, you mean? I believe I was on hand to witness it.”
“Not then, later on. After we got back together at my gallery opening. The first few months, she walked out on me twice. It took me until the third time to figure out I kept trying to force things that weren’t mine to force. I had to learn to trust her to figure out her life in her own way, not dream up ways to soothe my fear and lock her down for all eternity.”
“You’re telling me to give Allie space.”
“No, I’m telling you she’s not going to drop off the face of the earth—you’ve got a cell phone and access to an airport. Maybe she goes home without telling you she wants to belong to you until the end of time. It doesn’t mean she’s not going to text you an hour after she lands, or add you on Skype in a week and see if you want to video chat. And if she does that, when she does that, it’s because she wants you. You. Winston Chamberlain. For whatever fucking reason. And you’re not doing her a favor if what you decide to do is give her space and never tell what it is you want.”
“I don’t have a Skype.”
“Get one. Use it to call Mum and Dad. They’d like to see your face.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Good.”
They stared at each other for a moment, yards between them, and Nev shoved his hands in his pockets again and rocked back on
his heels. One end of his mouth drew up in a smirk, which cracked into a smile. “You okay?” he asked.
“I think so.”
“Because we just had a row, you and me.”
“We did.”
“And the earth didn’t crash into the sun.”
“No.”
“I’m still your brother. Now you know what I think. See how that works?”
Winston sighed and rubbed his fingertips between his eyebrows. “Yes, and you can stop condescending any time.”
Nev walked back to where Winston was standing, put his arm around his shoulders and led him toward the restaurant. “It’s a very enjoyable role reversal for me.”
“No doubt.”
They reached the corner. Half a block down, Bea stood alone outside the restaurant. “Get the lead out! Cath and Chasity already went in.”
Nev turned to look at him. “She’s a great kid, you know. Your daughter. You can stop worrying about her any time now. You’ve done a good job there.”
Winston didn’t respond. He just let his brother’s good opinion soak in, the way the sun soaked in, and the sight of his daughter wearing farmer’s overalls and a dance leotard, her rainbow hair piled at the very crown of her head in an enormous mess, wispy pieces falling down her neck and shoulders.
She was a great kid. He hadn’t needed his brother to tell him, but it didn’t hurt to hear it.
It didn’t hurt a bit.
“You guys just took a thousand years to walk one city block,” she said when they arrived. “I hope you’re proud of yourselves.”
Nev grinned. “I’m proud of him. You should be, too. He’s not a bad gent, your father.” He slapped Winston on the arm and sauntered into the restaurant, stroking his absurd hipster beard, his expression smug.
When Bea moved to follow him, Winston grabbed her hand. “Beatrice.”
“Father.” She said it lightly, an inside joke between the two of them, as though the scene at the coffeehouse had never happened.
“May I have a word?”
“Make it quick. I don’t want to miss anything.”
For a moment, he hesitated. A sign on the door read, RESERVED FOR PRIVATE PARTY. sorry for the inconvenience. As Winston drew his daughter aside, a couple approached the door and saw the sign. “This sucks,” the young man said, and he and his partner fell into murmured conversation, whipping out their phones to make a new lunch plan.
Beatrice craned to get a view inside the restaurant, and he thought of what Neville had said. That she was here for him, because she wanted to support him, wanted his happiness. That it wasn’t out of line for him to insist on telling her what he wanted, and thought, and deserved.
“I wanted to check in about whether you’d phoned your mum.”
Bea fiddled with her overall strap. “Yeah. I talked to her last night.”
“And?”
“She hasn’t changed her mind about Everest.” She looked past him at the street, her eyes glistening. “But I made the list, like you’d said to, and told her the things I needed to say. So if she dies up there, you know, that won’t be on my conscience at least.”
“I didn’t mean for you to say some final goodbye. She isn’t climbing Everest for months.”
“Yeah, but she’s climbing a lot right now with some Russian dude, and it’s dangerous. Have you looked at any of these Instagram accounts, or Tumblr? These are some crazy motherfuckers.”
“Language, Bea.”
“Sorry. It’s just, I can’t know that she’s being careful enough.”
“I can. I’ve known your mother longer than you’ve been alive. She’s risk averse and extraordinarily intelligent. She’ll be fine.”
“Things happen.”
“Things do happen. It’s part of being alive.” Bea looked away from him again. “Look at me.” She did. Her cheeks were pink, full of feeling she couldn’t contain inside herself. “I was thinking about what you needed to hear about your mum.”
“I’m good, Dad. Really. You don’t have to give me some—”
“Shh.” He said it sternly, the way he’d spoken when she was small and too full of her own ideas to listen, and she stilled. “What you need to understand, Beatrice, is that you are the only person in the world with the power to call your mother down off a mountain. If you phone and tell her that you need her, she’ll walk away from her tent and her plans, and she’ll keep walking until she gets on a plane and another plane, puts herself behind the wheel of a car, and ends up at your door. You know this is true. You know it.”
She stared at the sidewalk, one foot pressed against her calf in her thinking pose. Listening.
“She loves you, and you love her, and that gives you the power to stop her from doing what she most wants to do. It gives you the power to control her. And you could try it. You could tell her not to climb that mountain and see how you feel when she comes home to you safe, all yours.”
The tops of her ears were red. Her scalp was pale where she’d parted her hair, her head down.
“But I could tell you, right now, how you would feel if you tried to keep your mum safe,” he said gently. “Because I know a great deal more about this than you do.”
“Bad,” she said quietly.
“What’s that?”
“I would feel bad.”
“You would be devastated.”
Love had such incredible power to ruin people.
And it had as much power, or more, to help them.
He wanted to tell his daughter that the point was that to be in love was to accept that change would come to you, and loss would come to you, and you’d never get to choose how much or when. You were only permitted to choose whether to accept it, and remain open to it, or not.
He’d married, become a parent, made a family, all without being willing to accept change, or loss—all without being willing to ask himself what he wanted, or what Rosemary wanted, and what risks it would entail to have it—and he’d made a wreckage of his life.
He’d moved to New York because he wanted to do his duty, and he wanted to keep Beatrice safe, but none of that was living, and none of it was love.
And now he’d fallen in love. He’d met a woman in a bar with a story, and he’d made his story part of hers. What that meant was he had to accept that this love could help him or ruin him, and the outcome was his to decide.
“Will you phone her again?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Bea.”
“She wants me to call her next week.”
“Then you ought to.”
“She’s writing a book.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. She told me about it. It’s hard to tell what it’s about. I’m not sure it’s the kind of book that’s about something.”
He waited, but she didn’t say anything more. After a long moment, she set her foot down and wrapped her arms around his waist. She made a noise, a kind of meep, and rubbed her cheek on his shirt.
He kissed the top of her head. “I love you, bun.”
“I know. You always say.”
“You’re meant to say you love me back.”
“But you already know.”
Yes. He did know. And he knew his daughter needed him, even as most of the time she also needed to make it look as though she didn’t.
There were things that love taught you, if you let it.
She straightened abruptly. “I’m going inside. I don’t want to miss anything. I can’t wait to tell Allie all the stuff I’ve found out.”
“I’ll be right behind you.”
He hung back, though, blocking yet another pair of soon-to-be disappointed diners, just so he could watch his daughter go.
—
Ben watched the door with absolutely the worst expression on his face. “There goes another loyal two-top.”
“They’ll be back.” Allie tried to make her voice all maternally smoothing, but it was difficult because she had written him a very big check to comp
ensate for his giving the restaurant over to her this morning, and she wanted him to stop being such a baby.
Also, she’d talked him into letting her sneak a peek at his books and wheedled him into a conversation about his long-term plan, all of which had confirmed that Ben was an excellent chef—truly unparalleled in the department of making mean faces, as well as in the department of being good for her sister—but he didn’t know much of anything about managing a not-going-bankrupt restaurant, and she had better ideas than him. Now she just needed to figure out how to get him to accept it.
Well, not now. Now, she needed to get all her people on the same page, preferably without getting distracted by her unexpected desire to crawl on her hands and knees over to Winston and beg at his feet.
It was just that he looked so good. So, so good and Winstonish, direct from the office in his proper Winston suit, gray today with a white pinstripe and a double-breasted waistcoat and a purplish paisley tie and a pocket square that made her want to die.
His face, too, with that jaw and that nose and those eyes that looked right down inside her and made her feel perfectly herself, and perfectly okay. But she didn’t get a lot of opportunities to look at his face, just sneaking glances when she hoped he had his attention elsewhere so he couldn’t tell she was doing terrible, combustive pining.
“Allie!”
“What?”
“I just said your name four times.”
“Jeez. Sorry. This is a little bit too exciting, I think. I’m getting loopy.”
May handed her a clipboard. “You’re just being you. Here. Hold this.”
“This is Ben’s vegetable order.”
“Right, but it makes you look important, and it feels good to hold onto.”
Allie took the pen from behind the clip, clicked it open, and pushed the clipboard into her stomach, hard. “It does feel good.”
“Is this everybody?” May asked.
Chasity was parked at the table closest to the door, with Bea and Jean beside her. Cath and Nev shared the next table, and there was Winston—she zoomed her eyes over him, but not fast enough to keep from noticing that his socks were some kind of thin purple silk trouser sock situation, because he was the sexiest man in the universe. Dad sat at a table by himself, May was with her, and Ben stalked back to the kitchen from yet another grim glance out the front door, no doubt to whip up another set of weird fig-jam sandwiches as an outlet for his stress.