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“With a friend. Come on.”
She couldn’t stand here anymore, with Ben’s hard face and May’s barely concealed panic and the crushing weight of her father looking smaller, weaker, and gloomier than she’d ever seen him before. So she grabbed the handle of her dad’s suitcase, a small blue vinyl bag from a bygone era. She could sell her father’s luggage on eBay for three hundred dollars, easy. Buy a bus ticket to Mexico. Disappear into the desert.
She wasn’t anybody’s savior, that much she could accept, but faced with the reality of what it looked like, felt like, to live right in the middle of Ben’s bee-swarm-about-to-happen…no, thank you. She didn’t want any part in it.
Just go home, she wanted to tell her dad. Just let’s all of us go home and not talk about it and leave things the way they were.
It would hurt so much less.
She pushed through the door, not even caring if they were behind her, realizing only when she spotted Jean that they wouldn’t all fit comfortably in the car. They’d have to squeeze, three in the backseat, one in the front. Of the four of them, she was the only one who was petite. May took after their dad, and Ben was basically May’s same height, the whole bunch of corn-fed midwesterners used to driving around in vans and SUVs on four-lane highways designed to accommodate their impressive Teutonic enormity.
She handed Jean her dad’s suitcase. She would have to sit in the middle back, between May and her dad, with Ben in the front.
It would be such a long forty minutes back to Queens.
“You know what?” she told Jean. “I’m going to Uber it.” She tapped the app open. “Where’s Winston live again?”
Jean gave her the address. The fare wasn’t cheap, and it would be a long time before a car could get out here to pick her up, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care that she had to explain three times to her sister why she wasn’t going to ride with them. She didn’t care that the real answer was, Because I don’t want to, because I give up, because this sucks and I hate it.
She waved and smiled as they pulled away from the curb, and then she hit the button to accept the Uber fare and sat down on the bench to wait.
She didn’t text Winston to tell him how it had gone.
She didn’t respond when May texted her, WTF.
Allie silenced her phone and watched the planes come in.
Chapter 21
An unfamiliar car pulled up to the curb and Allie got out. She wore a flowered dress—the same dress she’d described to him earlier, although weight in the pocket dragged the hem down on one side and spoiled the line. She clutched a variety of empty snack packages in one hand.
He didn’t like the worry lines in her forehead, but it was a relief to see her. She hadn’t responded when he phoned to follow up on his unanswered texts.
Chasity turned her chair to follow his gaze. “Good, it’s you. I’ve just been filling Winston in.”
They’d had to speak on the steps, as his apartment wasn’t wheelchair accessible—a fact that had never occurred to him before and now seemed to require immediate remediation. It was awful to be forced to speak with Chasity on the street, as though she wasn’t welcome inside.
He would speak with the estate agent and arrange for a builder to take care of it.
“So I’m pretty sure this event is going to happen on or near the Brooklyn Bridge, on the city side, Saturday morning. I haven’t figured out what the art piece will be, it looks like it might involve a lot of yardage of specialized textiles, if Bea’s source isn’t a red herring. I hit a dead end with the permit. It’s signed by an alias, some name Justice’s people have used on permits for years, but there’s no contact info to follow up on.”
“Justice has agreed through his agent to meet me tomorrow afternoon,” Winston added.
“Which means you’ve still got a way to try to get at her tomorrow,”
she said to Allie. “You tag along with Winston to this meeting and figure out a way at your mom through Justice.”
Allie walked up the steps to the front door. “Is this unlocked?”
“Of course.”
She opened the door and went inside. He thought for a moment she was stepping in to throw away her waste and would return, but she didn’t come back.
Winston was at a loss.
Chasity clucked. “Looks like you’ve got stuff to sort out. I’m gonna jet. Keep me posted.”
“Shall I call you a car?”
