by Darcey Bell
The place is called There Is Such a Thing as a Free Lunch. Ruth says, “Let’s not judge it by its name,” just as Rocco is getting ready to judge it by its trendy name.
They agree to meet there at six. Rocco offers to pick Ruth up in Union Square, near her office, but she says the rush hour traffic will be terrible. It will be much faster if she takes the train. Rocco admires the fact that she’s got the energy to trek out to East New York by subway.
When Rocco wakes up, sunlight is streaming into Ruth’s apartment. She’s left for work. He decides to buy her flowers and surprise her at her office. He knows that she’s working with a bunch of frat-boy sadists. Twice she’s burst into tears describing how they treat her, and though he’s offered to punch them out, they both knew he was joking.
Now he thinks it might be helpful to show the frat boys that Ruth has someone in her corner, a boyfriend who brings her flowers.
Charlotte would be happy to put a great bouquet together. For free. But he decides not to ask her. It’s not that he doesn’t want his sister to be happy for him, or that he wants to waste money. It’s about privacy. He doesn’t want Charlotte charting the progress of his emotional life, especially if his relationship with Ruth doesn’t last.
Rocco drives out to the Park Slope Greenmarket and buys an armload of flowers. Then he layers the flowers in a cooler and drives to Union Square. He parks in a garage—he’s living large, it’s Ruth’s birthday!—and walks to the office building where he’d left her with all that kale the day they met.
In the small foyer, a middle-aged black guy in a short-sleeved shirt stands behind a counter. The doorman watches Rocco look for STEP on the letter board on the wall. The businesses are listed alphabetically, and he looks from Sayers Inc. to Title Research International. No STEP, nothing like it. Rocco knows that start-ups sometimes operate out of other offices. He asks the doorman, who says there’s no business like that in the building. All the firms listed have been there forever, and the management company doesn’t permit subletting office space.
Rocco takes out his phone and shows the doorman the picture of himself kissing Ruth—the photo Tengbo took in the market.
“No, sir, I never saw her before.”
“Can you take another look?”
“Sir, please. I would tell you if I had seen that girl, but I’m sorry, I haven’t.”
Rocco says, “Okay, sorry, I must have the wrong building.”
“I don’t work here every day.” The doorman’s trying to make Rocco feel better. He sees the damn bouquet! This poor slob is bringing flowers to a girl, and he doesn’t even know where she works.
“That must be it,” Rocco says. “I’ve got the wrong building.”
“No problem.” The guy thinks a moment, as if deciding whether to say more.
“I heard from the janitor that something happened here last week. Ambulances and cop cars.”
“Jesus,” says Rocco. “What was it? Some kind of workplace shooting?”
Why did his mind go directly to that? Because of the times they live in.
“Nah,” says the man. “More like some kind of workplace food poisoning. I clean my hands”—he produced a bottle of hand sanitizer from under the desk—“every half hour.”
“Thanks,” Rocco says. “I’ll keep that in mind.” He tries the next building and the next. Nothing like STEP. No one has seen Ruth; no one recognizes her photo; no one knows what he’s talking about. Yet he knows he left her here with those bags of kale.
A couple of times, he’d tried to look her office up on the internet. He’d been unable to find it, and Ruth said that they’d taken down their website. They’d been hacked, and they were undergoing a redesign. He hadn’t bothered to follow up.
Now he thinks, This will be easily straightened out, the mystery cleared up. He’s gotten things wrong before. He’s gotten people wrong. Especially women.
He would ask her tonight. Except that . . . it’s her birthday! Just in case things got awkward, it might be better to wait . . .
LIT BY AN enormous skylight, the restaurant occupies a cavernous repurposed garage. Straw mats and picnic tables cover the oil stains. Strings of lights are wound around posts and looped around scraggly trees in planters.
Rocco arrives early and waits at the bar. He watches Ruth cross the atrium. She’s dressed up in a black-and-red flowered dress and high heels. He sees how envious the other guys look when she kisses the lucky guy. That lucky guy being . . . him.
A waitress in a tight orange T-shirt and blue jeans shows them to their seats on benches, across from each other at a picnic table. There are people on either side of them. It’s hard to hear.
“Happy birthday.” Rocco hands Ruth the flowers, and she begins to cry. He’s always been squeamish about women’s tears, but tonight he’s so focused on the mystery of Ruth’s job that it hardly registers. The flowers look only a little worse for having been dragged around the city all day.
Ruth’s eyes are glistening as she gives the waiter a disarming smile and asks if he could please “do something” with the flowers until she can take them home. He agrees, whether he knows what to do with them or not.
Rocco wonders why his good mood has been so rapidly spoiled. Or maybe his mood wasn’t nearly so good as he imagined.
He can’t help asking, “How was work?”
Something in Ruth’s expression turns wary. Has she heard something in his tone? “Pretty quiet. Not horrible—for a change. What about you?”
“I was off today,” Rocco says.
“I know. I mean this weekend. How was your visit with Andrew John? What are you trucking into the city?”
“The first pumpkins,” he says. “The last summer squash. Apples and gourds.”
“Ooh,” says Ruth. “Let’s make a pie.”
The prospect of a pie sounds wonderful, until he remembers his . . . doubts. No point spoiling her birthday. He’ll ask about her job when they get back to her place. Or he can wait.
The meal is delicious, but the dishes have too many edible flowers for Rocco’s taste—nasturtiums in the ramen, a daisy peeking out from under the arctic char, violets atop the crème brûlée. He’s trying to think of a joke about being served the bouquet he’s brought Ruth. But nothing seems funny. He concentrates on not cross-examining Ruth. Let her talk about the circus, about Daisy. How wonderful it was! How much fun!
At the end of the meal, the waiter brings individual little chocolate cakes with sparklers shooting off splinters of light. Ruth’s face is as luminous as it was when she watched the trapeze artists sailing through the air.
But Rocco can’t forget his conversation with the doorman. Maybe she got Rocco to leave her and the kale at a place that wasn’t really her office. Maybe she was ashamed of her workplace. Maybe she’d been afraid that one of her coworkers would say something that would make Rocco think less of her. Probably it’s something like that. Still, he can’t help wanting an explanation.
Driving back to Ruth’s, he decides he might regret having sex with Ruth if he’s thinking that she might have lied about her job. It’s unfair to her and . . . distracting.
Strangely, it makes the sex hotter. Ruth has taken off most of her clothes, and then most of his clothes, within moments of their walking in the door. All he can think of is how good it feels, and how mysterious—how inexplicable—these feelings are. Lying beside Ruth, steeped in the pleasurable after-chemicals, Rocco is willing to believe that he’s made a mistake about where she works. But he can’t bring himself to ask her outright. First you have sex with a woman . . . and then you suggest that she might not know where her own office is.
He wants a cigarette; he wants a drink. Two things he hasn’t wanted in . . . he can’t remember how long. Rehab saved him, he knows that . . . If it hadn’t been . . . That’s not what he wants to think about.
The only light leaks in from a streetlamp outside, but still Rocco shuts his eyes—he doesn’t want to see Ruth’s face—when he asks, �
�I was trying to remember today . . . I know you told me a million times. But . . . what’s the name of your company?”
“STEP,” Ruth says guardedly. Or is he imagining guardedness? “Actually, I told you a zillion times. Don’t you listen to me at all, ever?”
Once Rocco’s started, he can’t stop, perhaps because he can’t figure out how he can return to the subject later without making it seem more important than it is. “I know you told me. But the thing is, I went there today, and there’s no such company.”
There. He’s said it. He wishes they weren’t both naked. He wants to pull the blankets over her, to protect and shield her.
Ruth doesn’t flinch. “Why would you go to my workplace?”
“To give you the flowers. Ruth, there is no such company.”
“Not anymore,” she says.
“And you don’t work there.” He touches her shoulder, as if to soften what he’s saying, but she brushes his hand away.
“I did. The company dissolved overnight. My boss went MIA. I think the frat boys were involved in something darker than glorified Airbnb. Maybe they pissed off the wrong guy in Moscow or Juárez. I think they were into some heavy dark stuff.”
“How long ago was this? How long ago did your company dissolve overnight?”
Rocco’s afraid that he sounds as if he’s imitating her when he’s just repeating what she said. He can’t bring himself to say that none of the neighborhood doormen recalled ever having seen her. Ruth might reply that’s no surprise, that it’s a terrible picture of them kissing, her face is practically squashed into his, and besides, doormen have come and gone, the management companies are nightmares, they hire and then fire the workers before they have to start paying benefits. Why is he interrogating her?
She’d have every reason to get defensive. Or would she? If she doesn’t have a job, where does she get her money? She dresses well, wears expensive perfume. Do her grandparents support her?
“Hello-o!” Ruth snaps her fingers, close enough to his face to be annoying but not close enough to be infuriating. “Are you still with me? The start-up vanished into thin air . . . let’s see, three days ago. No, wait. Four. You were up in the country. My God, Rocco, we must be in really close touch, I mean psychically, if you sensed there was a problem there—and you went to find me.”
“The doormen had never heard of you and your company.” Rocco is sorry the minute he says it.
Ruth coughs so long and hard that Rocco hands her his water glass and makes her take a sip.
After a while, Ruth croaks, “Everybody got threatened. The consensus was: What happened never happened. There never was a STEP start-up. I wasn’t supposed to know, but I heard that two guys showed up in the lobby with guns. I wouldn’t be surprised if the doorman quit on the spot.”
“And it took you all this time to tell me?”
“Listen, Rocco, please. I know this might seem strange, but will you watch a movie with me? I want to show you something.”
They get up and get half dressed and go into the living room and nestle on the big couch in front of the flat-screen. Ruth clicks through the streaming channels until she finds a French film about a guy who gets fired and can’t tell his family and leaves for work at the same time every day and goes and sits in his car and comes home when his workday is supposed to be over.
Rocco’s tired. The subtitles flash across the screen too fast for him to read. Twice he nearly falls asleep. By the end, the French guy seems to be back with his wife, and they seem happy about it.
Over the credits Ruth says, “I couldn’t bring myself to admit I didn’t work there anymore. Not even to myself. I couldn’t process it until I’d figured out some answers. How could I not have known? How could I not have picked up a signal that things weren’t what they seemed? I would have told you eventually, I swear. I would have admitted defeat.
“Except . . . you know what? I don’t feel defeated. Right now I have this idea for an indie feature film: A woman gets fired from a shady start-up and sits in Union Square and feeds the pigeons and becomes friends with all the unemployed people, male and female, old and young, black and brown and white, also hanging out and feeding the pigeons.”
It’s the kind of movie Rocco would like someone to make, if not the kind that he wants to see. It’s interesting that Ruth would try to explain her being newly unemployed by making him watch a film with one pathetic star on Netflix. How did she even find it? Did the movie give her the idea? Or did she have the idea first and find the film and wait to show it to him until he figured out the truth?
Ruth says, “People do stupid things, and then they admit them. That’s what it means to be human. And then we try to do better.”
That’s what Rocco believes, what he wants to believe. He wants forgiveness for everything he’s done: Forgiveness from the crazy girlfriends he’s mistreated in ways in which he is determined not to treat Ruth. Forgiveness for what he did when he was drinking. Forgiveness for nearly attacking his mother . . .
Why not let Ruth make this one mistake and pick up where they left off? Or start over? She would be more careful. More trusting, poor thing.
That’s what he decides to do. And they go back to bed.
IN THE MORNING, he wakes up, and the first thing he thinks is how sorry he is that he agreed to let Ruth come to Oaxaca. What if she lies about something . . . and Mom catches her in a lie?
Lately, Rocco sees his mother two or three times a year. Mostly she flies up north to visit Daisy. She stays with Charlotte and Eli, and she drives them crazy. But she prefers her family to come visit her. She has also, it’s turned out, made some wise investments, wise enough so that if she adds the interest to the income she cobbles together from her various jobs, she can live simply and even hire a maid, the sweet-tempered, endlessly patient Luz.
Her house is big enough for them to stay. When he goes down there (Mom pays for his ticket), she seems happy to see him, though she soon grows bored with him. It annoys her that Rocco has quit drinking, and though she knows that for him sobriety is a matter of life and death, some part of her thinks it’s self-righteous of her son to spoil everyone else’s fun.
Ruth has offered to pay for her own ticket to Mom’s birthday celebration. They’re flying separately. Because of a difference in fares, Ruth will be arriving a few days after Rocco and Charlotte and her family, and they’ll all fly home together.
At least, Rocco hopes, Mom might be interested in Ruth even after she’s lost interest in him.
Part Two
Our Mexican Adventure
14
Charlotte
This will be the first time that Charlotte and Eli have brought Daisy to Mexico. Charlotte’s not sure why they’ve hesitated before, especially since Mom always assumes they’ll bring her, and it always takes her days to get over her rage at them for having left her granddaughter at home. Charlotte and Eli aren’t worried about drug crime and kidnappings, which are uncommon in Oaxaca. But kids get sick . . . Maybe they just fear that they’ll feel more . . . vulnerable with a child.
Besides, there’s Daisy’s asthma. Charlotte has asked their doctor, who says she’ll be as safe in Mexico as she would in New York, or almost as safe. But he warns Charlotte to keep Daisy’s inhaler readily accessible in the Mexico City airport.
Seven thousand five hundred feet in the air with some of the world’s worst air pollution are not words guaranteed to reassure the anxious parent. Is Daisy an actual person to her doctor or just another wheezy little chest? Charlotte decides to change doctors, if need be, when they get home.
Charlotte’s never anxious or restless in Oaxaca. She always feels happy there, especially when she manages to get away from Mom and her expat friends. A few times Eli has stayed in New York with Daisy, and Charlotte has gone alone, or with Rocco; a few times Eli’s parents came up from Florida to watch Daisy so Eli and Charlotte could go together.
Charlotte loves the soft clear mountain light, the brightly colored w
alls, the hilly cobblestone streets, the gorgeous vegetation, and the smells of someone cooking something delicious behind the kitchen windows. Turning a corner to find herself in the middle of a parade with brass bands and people throwing baskets of candy at the happy children—that’s when Charlotte would miss Daisy most and wish they’d brought her along.
It’s Mom’s—Daisy’s grandmother’s—sixtieth birthday. Daisy has a right to be there. She belongs there. They can always fly home if something goes wrong. Mom will understand. Eventually. She’ll be frosty and then defrost after a couple of months. Anyway, nothing is going to go wrong.
There was only once—just once—when the trip was a nightmare.
That was before Daisy was born. Rocco and Charlotte had gone down there to help Mom get settled, only to find that she was already settled. She’d hired the endlessly kind, resourceful Luz to help around the house.
Rocco had been drinking heavily. He was unemployed. Probably homeless, though he never admitted that to Charlotte, who would have insisted that he come stay with her and Eli.
He’d gotten the money for the fare from Mom.
And one night, after who knows how many tequila shots, he’d pulled a knife—a kitchen knife, but still—on Mom and demanded to know why she’d burned down their house.
With Rocco inside it.
It’s one of those family . . . what? Not secrets, exactly. They all know about it. Charlotte and Eli. Mom and Rocco, obviously. But no one ever mentions it.
It’s one of those family . . . things that no one talks about. Ever. One of those things they all pretend to have forgotten, though no one will ever forget.
Charlotte was a senior in high school then, getting ready to leave for college.
One afternoon, walking home from the school bus stop, she had to jump out of the way of the town fire engine speeding toward . . . It took her a while to realize where the fire truck was going, but on this stretch of the road, it could only have been heading for her house.