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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?”
