Chapter Six
Chapter Six
“Are you fantasizing about the one in the hat or the one in the glasses?” Miles asks me three hours later while we sit on a bench in Riverside Park.
“Huh?” I jolt upright. “Neither!” (Both.)
He gives me a look like Come on, but I definitely don’t explain that Glasses was going to propose to me on a Jumbotron (I’d decline, most likely) and Hat doesn’t believe in marriage but would eventually agree to a courthouse ceremony after he accidentally read a page from my diary and realized how important it was to me.
“All right,” I say with a clap. “How is this going to work?”
“I mean…should we make a plan for how to get Ainsley to like me?…I guess you just start spending time with her and I tag along?”
I’m unimpressed. “I already reached out to Reese to get some regular hours with Ainsley. But don’t you think she’ll be weirded out if you’re always tagging along? I mean, I kind of understood when I didn’t know them at all and Reese was out of town, and not to be rude, but if she wanted you to be with her kid every day, wouldn’t she have just asked you to do it instead of paying me?”
“Oh.” He leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees, watching two novice rollerbladers hold hands and clop their way toward certain injury. “I didn’t think of that. I guess…I’ll have to ask her if it’s okay.”
“Definitely.”
“Honestly, Ainsley will probably be the easier sell. She doesn’t seem to care one way or the other if I’m around. Reese is the one I’m worried about.”
“No way,” I disagree. “You know what they say, hate is not the opposite of love. Indifference is.”
“Oh, thanks,” he says caustically. “Glad to know that Ainsley opposite-of-loves me.”
“No!” I laugh because even though that’s kind of exactly what I just said, it’s not what I meant. “I meant that I think you’re probably closer to connecting with Reese than you think. From the way I see it, you’re probably like one great joke away from endearing yourself to her.”
“It’s just that…It’s really not my skill set.” He’s scrubbing a hand over his buzzed hair. “Look, my mom, she just always kind of got me. So I just thought that it was easy. That if my intentions were generally good, people would get me. But obviously it doesn’t work that way and, I guess, sometimes I bring out the worst in people. Without meaning to. So. Yeah.”
I consider this. “Well, maybe we should give ourselves some homework. Yours is easy. Watch all the Indiana Jones movies and brush up on your Madonna discography. Endear yourself to Ainsley a little bit. It’ll give you something to talk about. What’s my homework? Find a priest and scare the pants off him with my bleak outlook on life? Wait, do priests even wear pants? Oh, my God, are they naked under their robes?”
He handles me like a pro by completely ignoring me. “If I just start bringing up Indiana Jones and Madonna she’s going to see right through me. She’s a smart kid. Trust me. I’ve tried to suck up to her before.”
“True…okay, well, what are you actually interested in?” I turn to study him.
His brow furrows and his chin drops. A ladybug lands on his knee and he gently brushes it away. I grow more astonished as the seconds pass.
“You can’t think of a single thing you’re interested in?” I demand. “Well, what do you like to do around the city? Eat? Jog?”
He shrugs. “I’ve actually only been here for a little bit. I grew up upstate. Near the Adirondacks. I never thought I’d live in the city. I’d only been here twice before I moved here…still getting used to it. I guess? But I guess generally…I like nonfiction. Reading it, I mean. Let’s see…Ilike watching Jeopardy! …I like dogs…I like music from the nineties…I’m not opposed to other music, I just don’t spend a lot of time looking for new stuff.”
“Cool! Okay…and for work?”
He sighs and crosses his arms. “I’m not going to even bother telling you about my job. You’re going to think I’m lying.”
I poke his thigh. “Midnight radio DJ?” I guess. “You play the oldies for star-crossed lovers? This one’s going out to Jan, Gary is sorry, come back to him ?”
“Yeah, that’s me,” he says flatly. “You got it in one.”
“Ex-pilot? You lost your license because you banged a flight attendant in the cockpit while landing the plane? Just looking for a thrill wherever you could find one? Anything to feel alive?”
He makes a face that I’m almost positive is an attempt to keep himself from laughing.
I clap my hands. “Got it! Botanist. You’ve spent your career attempting to splice two different kinds of orchids together. When you finally achieve it, you’ll name it after the girlfriend who dumped you in high school. When she finds out, she’ll show up on your doorstep and reveal she never got over you. Aw, Miles, that’s so sweet!”
This time he does laugh, scrubbing a hand over his face. I open my mouth to hazard another guess, but without even looking up he reaches over and stop-signs his hand two inches from my face. “I’m a bricklayer.”
I blink, flutter my eyes as I try to assimilate this information. “Come again?”
“You heard me.”
“Those exist ? In the twenty-first century?”
“Someone has to lay the brick, Lenny.”
“Well, shit,” I say, leaning back on the bench and staring into nothing. “I guess so.” After a minute I turn and eye him up. “Doesn’t seem like you’re…doing much bricklaying these days?”
“Yeah.” He crosses his arms over his chest again. “My business was upstate, really. My neighbor taught me the trade. But then I…recently came into some money. New thing for me. So I moved here. To try to…you know…get to know Ainsley. It’s not exactly going well. I’m bored out of my mind. I’m used to getting up at five and starting my day, working my ass off, and falling into bed after dinner. I miss it. Working. But what it would take to start a business in this city…maybe I’ll just bleed my bank account dry and drag my ass back upstate in a couple years.”
We sit side by side and chew on that.
“Maybe Jeopardy! ”
“Hm?” he asks, pulling himself out of some reverie.
“I don’t think there are gonna be many opportunities to teach Ainsley about bricklaying. So I guess let’s try the Jeopardy! angle. I can see her being into it!”
“Lenny?”
I jolt and turn at the familiar voice calling my name from the cobblestone path in front of us.
“Lenny, that is you!”
“Marzia,” I say weakly, standing up for a familiar hug that gets me poked in the chest, face, and back by her copious jewelry. “Hi.”
“Honey, you’ve lost weight!” she crows, holding my hands out to the sides and surveying me closely.
It’s true. And I look like a character from Beetlejuice, but I guess it’s only the lbs she cares about.
“Your mother says you haven’t been doing so well, but look at you…” She trails off suggestively, making wide eyes in Miles’s direction. “Introduce me.”
“Miles Honey, this is Marzia Marcutio, my family’s longtime dental hygienist and…proxy family member?” How best to describe someone who has inserted herself into your family politics through sheer force of will? “Marzia, Miles is a friend. This isn’t a date.”
She nods knowingly, not believing me at all. “Well, it’s good to see you out and about. The last time I saw you was at the funeral.”
My stomach pulls tight like she’s garroted it with fishing line.
“It was dreadful,” she stage-whispers to Miles. “So young, of course, but we all saw it coming. Stage four doesn’t leave much room for happy endings.”
“Oh.” Miles blinks at her and then slides his gaze over to me. He’s probably trying to figure out if he’s interpreting this correctly. If Marzia could possibly be this insensitive.
Trust me, she can.
“Ovarian cancer of all things!” she powers on. “And for such a pretty girl. Hysterectomy, you know, when she should have been out meeting a true love. What a shame she never met somebody. A waste. And then the cancer came back. I always wondered if it came back because of how much she celebrated after it was over the first time. You can’t tempt fate like that! A hysterectomy something to celebrate? Well, it was dreadful, and this one here took it worst of all.”
Even knowing Marzia, I’m still struck dumb. If she’d run me over with a taxicab I wouldn’t be more stunned than I am right now. How could someone believe that about Lou? And how could she say all that? And to my face? Like Lou’s entire journey is just a sad, gossipy story she gets to shill to whoever she happens to run into in the park? Like Lou got what was coming to her? I feel hot emotion creeping up from my extremities; when it meets in my chest, Marzia’s gonna see me blow.
“Wow,” Miles says, giving her the same face he gave the amorous dancers just last night. “Well, that was fucking rude.”
“Hm?” Marzia blinks, certain she hasn’t heard him correctly.
“I said you’re being fucking rude.”
Her mouth drops open.
My mouth drops open.
“Excuse me?”
I’m not sure if Marzia or I am more shocked. Someone telling her to her face that she’s being fucking rude is enough to discombobulate my nervous system. My rage and pain just sort of scatter as he opens his mouth again.
“Lou’s story clearly doesn’t matter to you,” he says slowly. “But to Lenny…” His hand clamps my shoulder. I’m here, it says. So are you, it says. “Like I said. Rude.”
Marzia does a very good impression of an extremely flustered duck. “Lenny, honey. I didn’t—I’m not sure. Well, your friend is—” She’s oscillating between outrage and embarrassment. She’s backing away from us, red in the face, sputtering. Giving up, she leaves without saying goodbye.
We sit back down on the bench and I study him. My heart doesn’t feel like it’s beating right. Probably all the adrenaline still pumping with nowhere to go. “You…stuck up for me.”
He raises his eyebrows but looks a tiny bit embarrassed. “It seemed an obvious moment for me to hold up my end of the deal.” One finger points at his own chest. “Grief wingman, you know.”
I gag. “Worst kind to have. It’s the only kind of wingman who doesn’t try to get you laid.”
He sucks air through his teeth and squints his eyes. “We’re gonna have to cross that bridge eventually, you know. At least three items on your Live Again list are, ya know.” He moves his hands in a few different configurations because he apparently can’t say the words sex positions out loud.
“Those were joke additions,” I insist. “Well, mostly.”
We both laugh and then fall into silence. I kick his shoe with my shoe. “Thanks. For saying that to her. I was either going to politely defer to my elder and then hate myself forever or I was going to burst into flames and smite her entire bloodline.”
“Happy to help.”
It’s just a thing people say, but I actually believe him.
“I’m sure she’s calling up my mother to tell her the story right this very instant.”
Miles grimaces. “Sorry.”
“I’m not. If she tells it accurately, my mother will kick her ass for what she said.” And then I grimace too. “Though she’s not going to tell it accurately. Sorry. You’re probably forever a villain in my family lore.”
He shrugs. “Worth it.” And then he glances at me. “You mentioned you’re not really talking to your parents right now?”
“I just don’t want them to experience the trainwreck along with me. It’s kind of a Go on without me! sort of thing.”
He’s quiet for a minute, absorbing that. “Did they know her well?”
“Lou? Gosh, yeah. I mean, she was my best friend since I was five years old.”
“And you grew up here?”
“Brooklyn born and raised.”
“College too?”
“Nah. Well, Lou did. She registered for Pratt, in the design school. But she dropped out after her first cancer diagnosis. Never actually attended. Another tragedy, as Marzia would say.”
“But not you?”
“No. It probably makes me apathetic, but I really just never had the interest. I wasn’t a good student.”
“Lemme guess, you talked too much in class and distracted others?”
I laugh. “Oh, suddenly you’re an expert, huh?” I stand and stretch. Those six hours of sleep last night were apparently less than a drop in the bucket because I’m suddenly overwhelmed with fatigue. I can feel it gumming up my cellular processes; my oxygen levels drop, my metabolism slows, and if Godzilla showed up right now, I’d roll facedown and let him stomp me.
He stands too; it’s clear that parting is imminent. He hesitates and then offers me a hand. Like we’re two golf associates who’ve just decided to commit tax fraud together.
“Oh, come on,” I say again, batting his hand away and holding my arms out instead, for a hug. After all, he just took on the most gossipy dental hygienist in Brooklyn for me.
He stares down at me, nonplussed, but then he leans in.
It’s a friendly hug, with our arms alternatingly linked, our ears pressed together, and for a moment he’s stiff. His words come back to me. They’re my only family. I wonder when was the last time he was hugged. Actually, come to think of it, when was the last time I was hugged? A moment passes, and the timing arrives when most people would stop hugging. But Miles has just loosened his tension by a shoelace and I can’t let go now. Instead, I cinch up my arms and resituate my chin against his shoulder.
“I don’t do anything halfway,” I warn him.
“Okay,” he says in a low voice.
When we come apart from the hug, his cheeks are slightly pink and he looks a little different to me than he did pre-hug. He’s not quite the scowly asshole I’m used to. Now he’s a scowly asshole who I’ve recently learned could really use a hug from time to time.
He clears his throat and reaches into his pocket to pull out two double-A batteries. “Do me a favor and change the batteries in the smoke detector at the apartment, yeah?”
“Oh. Sure.”
“See you…tomorrow?”
“Yeah. There’s no school. Private school teacher development day, their schedule is all screwy. Reese is working from home but she asked me to come by and hang out with Ainsley. I’ll be there by ten a.m. ”
“Okay.”
We say goodbye and I give him a wave as we walk our separate ways. I glance back and see that he’s standing on the path, thirty feet back, hands in his pockets, eyes narrowed, studying me. I flash him a double thumbs-up and then shoo him away.
He laughs, shakes his head, and turns.
When I get back to the studio apartment, I change the batteries right away, so I don’t forget. I’m confused, though, because the light is already blinking green even before I change them. I collapse onto the twin bed and pull my phone out.
Pretty slick, I text Miles.
A few minutes pass and then, What?
You assign me a fake chore just to make sure I go back to this apartment tonight?
Another few minutes pass. So it worked?
I will not dignify that with a response, I respond, and go take a shower. I scald myself and nearly weep, it feels so good. I make an honest attempt at combing my hair, but 2-in-1 was not designed for people who can tuck their hair into their waistbands. I give up.
I haven’t bothered with any lights, so eventually darkness fills in all the cracks. I slide to my butt next to the bed and wipe the tears out of my eyes with my knees. The tears don’t stop until I’m on my side, counting floorboards, until the light changes again and I’m hollow and ragged and the world that everyone else lives in is a funhouse.
The next day is here but I haven’t done anything to say farewell to the last one. Time dogpiles me and I marvel at the fact that anyone, ever, has the strength to get up off the floor.