by Alexa Hart
“Unfuckingbelievable,” he says. He stuffs his hand into his jacket pocket.
“You shouldn’t swear, Daddy.”
“What?” he glances down at Maddie.
“Summer said when she was growing up her parents kept a swear jar and anytime they swore they had to put a dollar in it. Because swearing is bad.”
“Summer told you that, huh?” He looks at me with such disdain that I can’t help but feel like I am as naïve and prissy as he must think.
“I’m just saying I could be rich by now if you had to do that,” Maddie says. “Bye, Summer!” She waves as he takes her hand and they turn from me.
“Bye, Maddie,” I say.
The man looks over his shoulder and gives me one more look, half-withering, half something I don’t want to think about even if it makes my knees a little weak, or maybe because it makes my knees a little weak. I give a small apologetic wave and he turns his head back like I’ve slapped him. I hear him growl at Maddie, “I told you a thousand times Maddie, you should be more careful who you make friends with.”
Chapter 4
Summer
When I arrive at La Florentina, my grandparents’ old bakery that’s now owned by Uncle Rudy, I’m immediately filled with worry to find the store open but nearly completely empty of customers. When I would visit the bakery with my parents as a little girl back when my grandparents still ran the place, I remember the bakery was always bustling with customers and sometimes the line stretched out the door and around the corner. The wood-paneled walls were always polished to a shine and the windows a little foggy from the heat of the ovens in the back, baking everything from bread to cookies and cannoli. The air was always a mix of the most wonderful smells, like fresh bread baking in one of the ovens in the back and chocolate chip cookies cooling on the counter. Before my grandparents passed away, you could always find my grandmother in the back frosting cupcakes and chopping crystallized ginger for her famous ginger cookies and my grandfather working the counter and talking to everyone who came in like they were his long lost best friend. The warmth was everywhere. The place, the people, they radiated it. When we’d visit, my mother and I would always be put to work baking, and my father assigned some odd job like fixing a broken step or repainting the sign, though it hardly felt like work at the time to any of us. La Florentina was my favorite place. It was like a second home. Now my grandparents and parents are long gone. The bakery and Uncle Rudy are all that is left of what was once a happy family.
But as I step inside the bakery now, the teenager working behind the counter scrolling through her phone doesn’t even look up at me. I wheel my suitcase up to the counter and one old man reading a newspaper in the corner is the only apparent customer. He at least looks up at me, though he gives me something not exactly equal to a smile. I look down at the sparse display of baked goods and am upset to see the pastries in the glass case all look as if they’d been baked a few days before. The air is as stale as the food and I can tell the ovens haven't even been turned on yet today. I run my hand across the counter and it is dusty. This at least gets the teenage cashier’s attention.
“Can I help you?” she asks with almost palpable annoyance that I have taken her away from her Instagram feed.
“Um, is Rudy here?” I ask.
“Nope,” she snaps the gum in her mouth. “He’s not here,” she says.
“Do you know where I can find him?” I had thought Rudy was supposed to be home from the hospital by now, but I begin to worry that there might have been complications. I haven’t heard from him in a few days.
She looks at me like I’m some sort of spy and she won’t leak secrets no matter how hard I go at her. “Do you have an appointment, or whatever?” she says. I know I’ve only traveled a few hours from Wisconsin to Chicago but darn it if this isn’t the unfriendliest city.
“I’m his niece, Summer,” I say. “He’s expecting me.”
“Summer?” She pops her gum again. “Never heard of you.”
“Okay. Is Angelo here? He knows I’m coming too,” I say.
The girl snorts like I’ve just made the joke of the year.
The old man reading the newspaper looks up. “Rudy’s still in the hospital. Chicago General.”
The girl glares at the man. “What are you doing, Al?”
“It’s Summer,” he points his newspaper at me. “Rudy’s niece. Good to see you, Hon. You look just like your mom.”
“Whatever,” she rolls her eyes. “So are you, like, here for a reason?”
“I’m here to help Angelo with the place while Rudy recovers,” I say.
The girl laughs again.
“Is that funny?” I ask.
“Just the part about Angelo,” she shrugs. “I’m sure Rudy will be glad you’re here.”
“Maybe I should go see him now?” I say. I look around. “Things seem different than I was expecting.”
The old man shakes his head. “Visiting hours are over for the day. Tomorrow at 9 is your best shot. You staying upstairs?”
My grandparents had lived upstairs, raised my mom and Rudy there, and now Rudy and Angelo shared the apartment.
“Yes,” I nod. “I was going to stay in my mom’s old room.”
The girl just snorts again. “When was the last time you came to visit?”
I frown. I don’t know how to say that I haven’t been back since my grandfather’s funeral five years ago. I can’t say how painful it was to even think about this place, all the lost happiness. I look around. All gone, like so much else in my life. The girl can see some pain in my face and gives me a momentary reprieve of snarkiness. “You want something, to like, eat or whatever?”
I nod. I’m not really hungry but I also feel like I’ll take what forms of friendship I can find in this city. “Sure, um, what do you recommend?”
The girl pulls the last croissant out of the display with a piece of cellophane paper and drops it in a small white bag. She folds it over and hands it to me.
“Thanks,” I say. “I’ll save it for later. I think I’m going to head up and get some rest.”
I head behind the counter and up the stairs to Rudy and Angelo’s apartment. My grandparents had always loved living above the bakery. They said mixing business with pleasure had always been the great pleasure of their life. My mom and Rudy had grown up there, and my mom used to joke that baking was in her blood. I hope I have inherited enough of it to help turn this place around. It clearly needs it.
I go up the stairs and enter the apartment and I can see that the downstairs bakery isn’t all that’s suffered the last few years. Rudy’s back has been giving him pain for a long time, and I had hoped, and assumed, that Angelo was doing his best to help his stepfather out as his body kept him more and more from doing the work he needed to do, but it is clear that whatever Angelo was up to, it wasn’t helping Rudy at all. The apartment is filthy and the kitchen of the apartment is overloaded with dirty dishes and carry-out containers. A few flies buzz near the sink.
The living room isn’t much better. I can see where Rudy must have spent much of his time, laid out on the couch with a stack of crossword puzzle books and the television remote nearby. I wonder how painful it was for him to move from one room to the other, let alone go downstairs and bake all day on his feet. The room is filthy with trash and laundry. I walk carefully across the floor and down the hallway. I knock on Angelo’s door first, the room that had once been Rudy’s when he was growing up. There’s no answer and I open the door, calling out Angelo’s name just in case. Truth is, I’ve never liked Angelo. He always stares at me just a little too long and likes to brag a little too much. But I always hoped my dislike was because he joined the family later in my life and I just hadn’t had a chance to know him. His mom lives out in Las Vegas now and even after she and Rudy divorced, Rudy looked after Angelo even though they aren’t blood related. I think maybe Rudy hoped it would bring her back to him, or maybe, like me, he’s hanging onto what little family re
mains. I feel a sense of relief that Angelo isn’t home, and a sense of fear that this isn’t a good feeling to have about your future roommate and work partner. Angelo’s room is empty and as messy as the rest of the apartment. I go down the hallway to Rudy’s room, which was once my grandparents’ bedroom. This room is empty too, cleaner but also stale and dusty. Rudy kept some of my grandparent’s old furniture and it feels, more than anywhere else I’ve been since arriving, like the place I remember. I walk over to the old granite vanity table that belonged to my grandmother and that Rudy always joked was too heavy to get rid of. I look in the mirror and frown. Nothing about this place or my reflection feels familiar.
When I get to my mom’s old room, I can see why the girl at the front counter laughed. For a long time, the room was left as it had been before her death. But Angelo has moved in a bunch of weights and exercise equipment, and a few Playboys are strewn about on the ground and on her old wooden desk. The whole room reeks of smoke and a full ashtray is tipped over on the bed, staining a quilt my grandmother made for my mother when she was a girl. I walk over to the closet and find most of my mother’s old things stuffed into boxes. Her wedding dress hangs on a rack, encased in plastic. It at least, thanks to the plastic, is untouched by Angelo’s man cave grossness. I shut the door to my mother’s old room and lean against the wall. I am exhausted from the travel but I’ll need to clean this place before I can even think about sleeping.
I take off my cardigan and fold it neatly away in my suitcase, trading in my blouse and skirt for jeans and a t-shirt. I find an apron in the small pantry next to the kitchen and some plastic dish gloves under the sink. Before I get to work I text Angelo’s number telling him I’ve arrived and asking him to let me know when he’ll be home. I tell him we have a lot to discuss. I give a frown emoji, which is the closest I come to showing my disapproval of this whole situation. Then, with a sigh, I rearrange my long wavy brown hair in a pert ponytail and get to work.
Chapter 5
Kane
When Maddie and I get home from the bus station, she stomps up to her room with a dramatic door slam. I head first to the bathroom where I bandage my hand and then to my own room. I don’t slam the door, but I sure as hell feel like punching another wall. Instead, I do a few reps of pull-ups to diffuse my anger at the prissy, cookie-tin-throwing baker I just ran into. I feel something other than anger when I think of her, something harder and more lustful, and that needs to get worked out of my body too, and fast. The way she looked up at me all stern and sweet. Does she know she bites her lip when she’s embarrassed? I have a strong, sudden urge to find her and bite that lip myself--naked of the bright, garish red lipstick that Trixie and her cohorts prefer. And the look I got of her legs when I picked up the cookie tin, nothing prissy about how those legs would feel underneath me. This feeling is not the kind I need right now. She is not the kind of woman I want.
I strip down to just my jeans and pull myself up above the bar hanging from my door. I do ten pull-ups fast and as the sweat begins to bead on my chest, the strain of the exercise finally begins to cool off the strain of thinking about her, about the whole thing. I keep pumping my body up and down. I get control back and manage to not exactly forget about the woman from earlier, but at least, shove her image back into my head. Instead, I start to focus on how pissed I am at Maddie, and more so at Julie. I’m not the only one in this house who’s pissed right now either. Maddie’s up in her room reading and being equally angry at me. She’s been like that since we got home. Like I’m the one who did something wrong when she’s the one who lied about her age at the bus station so she could get a ticket home alone and didn’t tell her mom she was leaving, causing all hell to break loose at her grandparents’ house. Her grandparents have called me a dozen times, but I ignored their calls. They’ve hated me since the first time Julie brought me home as part of their rich, spoiled daughter’s rebellious stage. Her mother took one look at the snake tattoos roping up my arms and actually clutched the string of pearls around her neck in horror. I was young and stupid then and sort of got a kick out of helping Julie piss them off. And she was fun back then. Her drinking seemed just like a thing to do, not something she couldn’t stop, and she was wild as hell. The only difference was she had the money to cover it all up afterward, whereas I was always sitting the night in a cell waiting for Danny to bail me out.
So the irony of Maddie being mad at me is not lost on me. I do another pull-up. True, she’s mostly pissed that I was rude to her new baker friend, Summer, and she’s afraid Summer won’t teach her how to bake now that I gave her my, in her words, “mean face.” Nevermind that the little baker threw a cookie tin at me because she took a look at me and made all the same judgments as Julie’s parents, or worse.
I rub my shoulder where the cookie tin had bounced off and crack a smile picturing her lobbing the thing at me. She couldn’t have crushed a spider with that toss, though she’d certainly put her heart into it. As Maddie pointed out, it was meant to protect her from me. But then my smile disappears. Where the hell does that woman get off judging me? She’s like everyone else I’ve dealt with my entire life, from teachers and cops to my ex and especially her snobby rich parents. They all think I’m trash the moment they look at me. Well, fine, I certainly came from trash, there’s no denying that my childhood was nothing but. But I fought and scrapped and pulled myself out of it, and I’ve done pretty well for myself. I don’t steal from anyone who hasn’t stolen first, and I only hurt people who deserve it. I get paid well for my work and thanks to that we always have food on the table and clean clothes and nobody drunk and smashing up the place like my dad used to do or Maddie’s mom still does. Maddie’s proof enough I did okay, though I think sometimes she’s more than I deserve — a bright little kid with an enormous, kind heart. Unlike me. What did Danny say? A ruthless dick? Maybe that baker had a point not thinking Maddie and I were related, but I don’t care. Ever since I was a kid I’ve dealt with types like Summer and they never give you a chance. You’re trash and always will be. The only thing you’re good for is a wild night or a rebellious weekend. No, even though Maddie wants to visit Summer again, I won’t allow it. She’ll turn Maddie against me. And the one person I can’t let think of me as dirt is my daughter.
The night I’d taken Maddie from Julie to stay with me for good, I’d found Julie passed out in her own vomit in her parents’ pool house. She’d moved into the pool house with Maddie after a failed attempt at independence and they had her on an allowance. Their cook watched Maddie most of the time and Julie was still drinking and partying most nights. The cook had her day off that day, and when I’d arrived I’d found Maddie, who was still just a toddler, red-faced from crying in her crib, probably for hours, and her diaper soaked. I’d packed a bag of Maddie’s stuff, cleaned up Julie and put her in bed, and left a note for her to call me when she sobered up. I told her she could have Maddie back if she could prove she could take care of her, but honestly, I think she was relieved I’d taken her. I think that’s why she’d called me drunk and crying to come to visit even though she’d been ignoring my calls. When Julie had found out she was pregnant, I was shocked and scared, but I’d asked her to marry me without a second thought. I didn’t want Maddie to grow up without a dad. I was ready to be there for her in a way my dad had never been. But Julie’s parents had threatened to cut her off if she didn’t cut me off, and the one thing Julie loves more than alcohol is money. But for the last seven years since that night in the pool house, besides these semi-annual trips that always start with Julie trying to placate her parents and end with Maddie disappointed and hurt, it has been me and Maddie against the world. I do one last pull up and then drop down to the ground. I grab a towel and wipe the sweat from my head and neck. The doorbell rings and I know it’s Shana, the babysitter. I throw on a t-shirt.
“Maddie, Shana is here!” I call down the hallway before shuffling down the stairs to the door. Shana, like most of the folks on the block where we live, t
hinks I do work in finance and as I always tell Maddie, the secret to a good lie is to keep it close to the truth. I do work in finance, just more the taking and collecting of debts and loans from some of the less desirable folks in this city. To keep Maddie safe, I keep my work and home life separate. It’s hard not to make enemies in my line of work, Maddie is a vulnerability, and I won’t ever let her get hurt because of what I do.
Shana is an art student who lives with her parents down the street while she’s at college. She’s wearing a tight miniskirt and tank top even though it’s too cold outside, and her nipples agree. She’s got the same look as Trixie, and she stands the same chance of success. For me, finding a decent babysitter is far harder than finding a decent woman to sleep with. And like I said, no mixing business with pleasure. I nod at Shana coolly and sluff on my leather jacket. Maddie comes down the stairs.
“Hey, Shana,” she says. “Want to bake a cake tonight?”
“A cake? Like from scratch?” Shana asks. “I thought maybe we could watch a movie on tv instead?”
Maddie frowns. “Sure. Whatever.”
I lean down and kiss Maddie on the head. I can tell she’s cooling off too because she lets me. “I’ll be home after the game and a few beers with the boys,” I say.
Maddie looks up at me and winks. She knows I’m not going to play in a recreational baseball league and then hang out with my fake teammates as Shana thinks. I’m going to do my job. I grab my baseball bat and sling it under my arm.
“Sure,” Maddie says. “Be safe.” I can tell she doesn’t like this. I’ve tried to keep what I do from her, but she’s too smart not to know that it’s dangerous. That there is a reason for all the lies.