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I had no idea what she was talking about, but I gestured for her to come in and ran to grab her a towel so she could dry off.
“What are you talking about?” I asked, taking the most absorbent towel I could find — the one at the bottom of the pile, which I’d likely never used.
“You stole my phone,” she said. “Why did you steal my phone?”
There was wine on her breath, which I couldn’t blame her for. I was going to crack open a bottle of beer with dinner to help me sleep, if nothing else, but it slurred her voice and made it take a little more effort to get information from her.
As she dried off, I managed to get her to explain that she’d lost her phone and tracked it back to my house, which she hadn’t realized was my house. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what had happened.
“You probably left it in the car,” I said. “Take a seat, I’ll go grab it for you.”
I ran out to the car, still in the driveway. The rain was really starting to come down, which was unusual but not unheard of for LA. Every couple of years, we’d get a really heavy rain for a few days and endure the ensuing flooding and chaos that took place, then return to normal as if nothing happened. Already, the bottom of the street was beginning to slightly flood. I’d never seen it get so bad that there was property damage, but it might get tricky for anyone who had a pet that needed walking.
I found the phone on the floor of the passenger seat of the car and brought it inside. And when I did, my heart sank. Not because of Sloane, but because of the burning smell. I’d forgotten about the frozen dinner and Sloane was asleep on the couch. I turned off the oven, grabbed a mitt, and pulled the pizza out. It was charred black and completely inedible, so I dropped it in the sink and ran some water on it to cool it off.
“Sloane?” I asked, and she mumbled something to indicate she was awake. “Have you eaten at all tonight?”
“No,” she said.
“There’s a really good pizza place up the street,” I told her. They’d be able to deliver without having to deal with any of the flooding and I’d tip a bit extra for the trouble of going out in the rain, but I had no intention of leaving the house at this point. “What toppings do you like?”
“Pepperoni,” she said, starting to stir. “Oh, and peppers. And onion.” She was getting excited, back to the Sloane that I knew from the office. “No pineapple or olives. I fucking hate olives.”
I handed her phone to her as I called in the order, which they said would take about a half hour. Her phone, incidentally, was in the red, battery-wise, so I plugged it into the charger and then I sat beside her on the couch where we watched the movie that I’d left on.
“We can watch something else if you want,” I said.
“No, I like the Marx Brothers.”
“I would have figured no one your age had seen them.”
She shook her head. “No, I used to stay up late and watch old movies on TV. The dramas were okay, but I always loved the black and white comedies. I’d always get excited when they’d air Some Like It Hot, which was my favorite, but anything with the Marx Brothers was my close second.”
“It’s timeless,” I said. “A good laugh is timeless. I swear, the only time I ever saw my dad smile was while watching these three bozos. He never did like Zeppo much, though.”
“I’ve never heard of anyone liking Zeppo.”
“Me either.” Zeppo was the fourth Marx brother. While the other three had distinct personalities and a knack for comedy, Zeppo mostly just tagged along for the ride. Their later movies dropped him completely and nobody even seemed to notice.
“On some level, though, I sympathized with him,” I said. “He represents what we’re all afraid of. Most people can blame their lack of success on lack of opportunity, but he had opportunity. And they gave him several chances, but he just wasn’t very funny.” And then something clicked in my head. “I think my dad didn’t like Zeppo because he was a Zeppo.”
“What do you mean?”
Something in her eyes made me want to tell the world to her, to share every little thought I had. We weren’t in the office anymore; we were at home where I could be a little more relaxed. If it hadn’t been such a long day and I wasn’t so tired — not to mention hungry — maybe I wouldn’t have said anything more. But she got me in a weakened state and so I kept talking.
“He inherited my grandfather’s meat market, which he took over when I was just a kid,” I said. “But the business ended up going under because, I guess, this was around the dawn of the microwave and people realized they could just get cheap food from the supermarket that cooked faster.
“That was okay, though, because he got into car sales after that. But he wasn’t much of a salesman and wasn’t very successful there, either. That led him to a job as a driver’s ed instructor, which I guess he did okay at, but we had to move out of our house into somewhere smaller because the salary wasn’t so good. My mom offered to work, but he refused to let her.
“He wasn’t a good man,” I said. “Maybe that’s why he wasn’t successful. Nobody wanted to buy his meat because he was an asshole. And nobody trusted the cars he sold would run more than a thousand miles. He came home grumpy and angry and took it out on me and my mom.”
I could see tears forming in Sloane’s eyes.
“I managed to convince my mom to leave him, though. When I was a teenager. And so, we escaped him and, you know, lived happily ever after and all that.”
She nodded. “So, you’re happy?”
No. “Yes,” I said. “Every day I thank my lucky stars that I didn’t stay under my dad’s reign any longer than I had to.”
