“I’m okay, Jojo. I’m fine. See? Look.” He wiggled his hairless eyebrows, tapping his chest like it was an old TV that coughed out bad signal. “I just went to visit Mrs. Hawthorne. She was under the impression that I’d sent her flowers. Can you believe that?”
I could. Because I was the one who’d left them at her door. Mrs. Hawthorne was fairly new to our building. She’d moved out of her huge Rochester place when her husband died, seeing as her kids were married and out of the house.
“Anyway,” he chuckled. “Must’ve gotten tired on my way down and crashed. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to worry you.”
I was torn between letting myself break down completely front of him and keeping myself together for him. I clutched his cold cheeks and angled his head so we looked at each other. My dad was a big guy. He’d worked as a roofer in Brooklyn his entire life before cancer came barging through our door. But somehow along his journey with the disease, he’d become scrawny. So frail, in fact, that whenever he accompanied me to the supermarket, I was the one supporting him—the man who’d carried me on his shoulders until I was in first grade.
“Excuse me, little girl, did you follow me?” he’d always said when he put me down.
I always laughed. “You carried me, silly!”
“Huh…” He’d stroked his chin. “Whaddaya know? You’re light as a feather.”
I helped Dad into our apartment. No matter the weather outside, it was still subzero, somehow. I was playing chicken with the thermostat, trying to walk the line between a sensible electricity bill and not freezing to death in this particularly chilly spring. It’s like New York had decided to make life even more difficult on us. I wondered how it felt to be Célian, who probably had heated flooring in his bathroom and never had to experience any discomfort.
I pondered what my boss’s apartment might look like as I made Dad chicken soup, sans the chicken. We ended up watching a rerun of SNL under blankets in the living room. Some might call it a sad state of affairs for a woman in her early twenties to be hanging out with her dad on a Friday night, but there was nothing I could think of that would be better. Even though we were both silent, I drank in his presence, so acutely aware of the elephant in the room.
“Milton has been looking for you,” he said when I got up and stretched after the show was over.
My heart missed a beat. Countless times, I had wondered if I should give Milton a heads-up about my father not knowing about our breakup. But since he was seeking me out so actively, I figured talking to him, no matter the capacity, would just encourage his cheating ass.
“Oh?” I hoped it sounded like, Oh, he has? and not Oh, I forgot to tell you. We broke up a month ago because he was screwing his boss while I was tending to my sick dad. But hey! Now I’m screwing mine, too. The circle of life, anyone?
“Called me on my cell. Asked if I could tell you to get back to him. I’m sure you have by now, but I just thought you should know. Will we be seeing him this weekend?”
Dad fingered his empty bowl of soup and sucked on the leftovers. He liked Milton. Every time I asked him why, he said, “Because he is smart enough to love my daughter.”
“Hard to say, Dad. We’re both very busy with work.”
This was tearing me apart. I hated not being honest with my father, but I hated the idea that the truth would hurt him even more.
The minute my head hit my pillow, I started sobbing. Not just crying, but full-blown, so-sorry-for-myself bawling with tears and snot. The whole shebang.
I was not a crier. I’d cried the day my mother died and on a few occasions after that, like the day I’d gotten my period without her there to calm me down and after I’d stolen that wallet. But tonight, it felt like the weight of the world rested squarely on my shoulders, and I wanted to throw it away or let it bury me in the ground.
The thing about crying for hours is, you always end up sleeping like the dead afterward. It happened to me the night after my mother died. (The night she did, I couldn’t sleep a wink—was too afraid the world would collapse if I let my eyes drift shut.) Misery has a way of pulling you down and drowning you in it. It’s sweet and suffocating, like a lullaby, soothing you to sleep.
That night, I slept like a baby.
Living alone was a choice I made rather happily.
The alternative was living a lie, and I didn’t do lies, nor theft—not since both things had exploded in my face in spectacular fashion. Even though I had a car, I took the subway to work every morning. And since everyone in my family for the last three generations had personal drivers, I was seen as the black sheep of the tribe. Luckily, the tribe had dwindled and was nearly nonexistent, so it’s not like I had anyone to impress.
Besides, I liked the smell of piss and the general misery of harsh city life. It reminded me that I was a lucky motherfucker, even on the days I felt like God—if he existed—had made a point of pissing all over my plans.
On my way to work, I thought about what had driven me to pull Judith into the power room on Friday and fuck her mouth into what could have been a mass power outage in one of the largest skyscrapers in New York. My jizz definitely shouldn’t have been anywhere near all those electrical switches.
I was definitely trying to piss all over my territory, but in the process, I’d also pissed over my no-repeats rule, as well as my professional relationship with her. Currently, I was trying to decide if I should go back to normal and act like she didn’t exist until she quit and the problem took care of itself, or figure the damage had already been done and make her a booty call for when I was too tired to go on the prowl.
Pros: the Manhattan singles scene was beginning to grate on my nerves. I was starting to see the same faces in the same clubs. Every hookup and Tinder profile blended together in my head. At least with Judith, I had sexual chemistry.
Cons: her pussy aside, she had an annoying, holier-than-thou attitude, not to mention, she was mouthy, and I really couldn’t fucking stand her.
When I got to the office building, I had to take a phone call. Lily. I normally sent her straight to voicemail, but this was the third time she’d called since I’d gotten off the subway, so I wanted to make sure Madelyn, her grandmother, was okay.
“Anyone dead?” These were my exact words when I took the call.
I didn’t go into the building, knowing things could get pretty crappy and fast when it came to Lily and me. I rarely raised my voice, but for her, I was always happy to make an exception.
“What?” Her default voice was whining. The kind that sounds like a fork scraping against a plate. “No. Grams is doing great. I was just wondering if—”
“No need to wonder. The answer is no.”
“Célian, wait! I—”
But I’d already hung up. I turned around to walk through the double glass doors and spotted Judith sitting on the top stair reading, soaking in the first rays of sun like a thirsty flower. She wore one of her crumpled, wannabe-grownup black suits and hugged her backpack.
Her Chucks were red today. Oh, boy.
She wiped her eyes quickly, but I wasn’t sure whether she was crying or about to. She was talking on the phone, and any other bastard would’ve turned around, walked away, and vowed to stop making her life more difficult.
But I was programmed differently, carved from stone like the very people who’d created me.
I rounded her tiny, blond figure, half-listening to her conversation.
“Okay, Milton. Just…please don’t tell him.”
Milton sounded very much male and very much like a douchebag. The latter wasn’t based solely on his affiliation with Judith, but also his name. Now I was fully invested in the conversation.
“I’m really not interested in hearing what you have to say.”
Pause.
“Please don’t make it any more difficult than it already is. Promise me you won’t tell him. That’s all I ask.”
Pause.