AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I’m so sorry I can’t help you more, but I can make sure you don’t get lost. This is the number for my driver, Jean. Please feel free to use his services towards your cause while you’re in town.
W.R.C.
He’d printed his own number beneath his initials.
They’d watched Goonies. She cried happy tears at the end, and Winston speculated whether the jewels the children had kept were valuable enough to save their houses. He’d worried about it, talking diamond and gem markets, as he held her hand all the way through the credits.
Chapter 6
He couldn’t get used to her hair.
His daughter worked behind the counter at a crowded university-adjacent coffeehouse. The work required her to be constantly in motion, smiling and talking, and Winston liked when she demanded that he meet her here because she always misjudged when her shift would be over, and he often ended up seated at a table with a newspaper, ostensibly reading but in fact watching Beatrice.
As a girl, her hair had been a prim English blond like her mother’s, long and perfectly straight, with a fringe.
Now, it was a waterfall of color held off her face by a thick printed scarf, and the blond had been transformed into shades of blue and mermaid green, vibrant pink and lilac. He didn’t know if it was all the color he couldn’t get used to or how much this tangled rainbow suited her.
She plunked an espresso down in front of him. “I’m going to be, like, ten more minutes probably. But I’ve got to be uptown in half an hour for dance class, so we might have to walk and talk.”
“Bea! I need you to reset the toddy and figure out what crawled up the steamer and clogged it all to fuck.” A child with dreadlocks tied back in a ponytail and an improbable curled moustache beckoned, and she went.
He tried to remember a time when he hadn’t felt like she was constantly rushing away from him, and couldn’t. One school year in New York and even her accent was running away, a clip here, a flattened vowel there. When she was younger, he could never decide if her childhood of riding lessons and piano, a proper school with Latin, made him proud or a little uneasy. Now he couldn’t decide if this vibrant, brash New Yorker was really the end point of Rosemary’s parenting or if he was meant to step in before Rosemary phoned to tell him he’d cocked up.
“Shit,” she said, her eyes on the clock as she dumped his cup and saucer into a gray plastic bin. “We’ve got to jet.”
He trailed in her wake down the sidewalk, his calves burning, every third word that she threw over her shoulder lost in the crowd so that he found his end of the conversation consisted largely of the words “Pardon?” and “Come again?”
He could already sense that they would arrive at her building or a friend’s building, or maybe the courtyard of one of her classrooms, and she would make an excuse for why dance class couldn’t be missed or why they couldn’t enjoy a meal that didn’t involve leaning against a high-top table dripping pizza grease.
She’d always been willing to go to high tea at Brown’s with Rosemary, or for an afternoon’s shopping. He’d come home from work countless nights to find them chattering in the kitchen, Bea spilling the details of her day, telling her secrets to her mother.
She told him nothing.
“I had a date last night.” He made sure to use his boardroom voice.
Beatrice halted, an eddy of people flowing around her, and turned around. He stopped so short he nearly knocked her over, and so guided her out of the middle of the sidewalk to stand near a stoop.
“What.”
“I had a date last night. With a woman. I went into a bar, a basement bar, an American basement bar, and a woman picked me up, and we watched a movie.”
“What.”
“She’s American, as well, and doesn’t work in finance. I hadn’t even met her before last night. She resides in the state of Wisconsin, but is here on…business.”
“She resides in the state of Wisconsin?”
“I believe it’s in the Midwest.”
“Holy shit, Dad.”
“Yes, well. This is a thing that happened. To me. Your dad.”
“You should’ve told me sooner—now I have to go to my class and I want to know everything. What’d you do? Where’d you go? What movie did you see? Come on, we have to walk.” She grabbed his elbow, pulling him back into the stream of pedestrians, but now she walked alongside him.
“Goonies. It’s a treasure-hunting adventure movie. I think it’s for children, actually, but Netflix recommended it after I watched that terrible Nicolas Cage film. I liked it very much. And the woman. I liked her, too. Her name’s Allie Fredericks. She’s in town looking for her mother, but it’s complicated.”
“I could get you such a good gig writing movie reviews, swear to God. Okay, so, it’s complicated. What’s that mean?” She still had her hand on his arm. It made him feel fatherly.
