“Okay.”
He looks for a second as if he might have something else he wants to say, and then he decides better of it and puts his hat back on to leave.
“Thank you,” I say, folding the address and slipping it in the back pocket of my jeans.
He touches the rim of his hat as he walks away, and I head back into the sanctuary of my kitchen and lean against the door, massaging the bridge of my nose as I cycle through the familiarity of one of my breathing exercises.
* * *
—
TRUE TO HIS WORD, it’s not far to the address on Felipe’s scrap of paper. I’ve bundled up warm against the harsh December wind, and soon enough I see him loitering on the street outside a double-glass-windowed building covered in self-storage signs.
“I brought coffee,” he says, holding up a silver thermos. “Maria made it, actually.”
I yank my bobble hat off, sweat prickling in my hairline. “You haven’t told her about my mum, have you?”
He swats my concern away. “I told her I was catching up with an old friend, which, in a roundabout way, I am.”
There’s a spring in his step as I follow him into the building. I think he might be rather enjoying himself. For my part, I’m intrigued, and glad of the mental respite from thinking about Adam. We’re in one of those places that has sprung up everywhere, warehouses converted into small rental units for people to store their clutter and crap, an elevator ride up to a maze of identical white roller-shuttered doors.
Felipe pauses and looks around us to get his bearings, then heads off down one of the hallways. He has a small key on a plastic tag in his hand, and when he eventually stops he holds it out to me to look at.
“Three-five-nine, right?”
I nod. “My mother resisted reading glasses too,” I say lightly, and he huffs as he works the key into the padlock on the unit.
He rolls the door up with a showman’s flourish.
“I was here yesterday, thought I’d take a look for that damn recipe,” he says. “No such luck.”
I’m surprised by the interior of the unit. I was expecting disorganized boxes piled high, but it’s relatively tidy and there’s a leather chesterfield sofa set against one wall.
“This is kind of cozy,” I say, watching him fiddle with the switches on a blow heater.
He flicks on a lamp and grins. “Stick with me, kid.”
“Don’t they worry people will live in these places?”
He ushers me inside and pulls the shutter down. “They charge daily for an electricity upgrade to stop people from running refrigerators full of beer. Party poopers.”
“And their TVs,” I say pointedly, eyeing the portable TV on a stand.
“That too,” he says. “Have a seat.”
I unwind my scarf and unzip my coat as I perch on the sofa, feeling slightly bizarre. No one knows I’m here, yet I don’t feel any sense of danger. For one, Felipe is a Belotti, and secondly, he’s Gio’s father. Most importantly, though, I know he’s trying to do something decent for me out of respect for my mother—I suspect he’s made quite an effort to spruce this place up for today.
“You don’t look so good,” he says, pouring me coffee into a plastic cup.
I obviously need to up my makeup game—I thought I’d made a good job of hiding the dark circles under my eyes.
“I’m not sleeping very well.” I shrug. “It’ll pass, it always does.”
He sighs heavily as he sits down and reaches a large brown envelope up from the side of the sofa.
“I found these in a box,” he says. “I figured they might mean more to you than me at this stage of life.”
I put my coffee on the floor and rest the envelope on my knees.
“Just so you know, I’ll probably cry, but don’t feel bad about it because it seems I cry at least three times a day, at the moment anyway. I think I might actually have a fault with my eye ducts or something.”
He rubs his chin, watching me. “Your mother used to say odd things too.”
I consider being offended, but then decide to focus on whatever’s inside the envelope instead. It’s quite bulky. I pull out a bundle of newspapers and photographs and lay them on my lap.
“I don’t remember keeping them, truth told,” he says. “They must have been left behind by Louis.” He can obviously read from my expression that I don’t have a clue who Louis is. “Our manager at the time. He dropped us when things got sticky, bigger fish to fry.”
All of this is news to me. I wish I had a pen to write it all down so I never forget. I content myself with looking at the photograph on top of the pile instead.
“There’s one very similar to this in my mother’s scrapbook,” I say, looking at the staged shot of the band grouped around Charlie Raven’s drum kit. He’s perched on the stool with his drumsticks in his hands, nervous energy radiating from his tall, rangy pose.
“My father,” I say, touching the photo lightly.
“I was sorry to hear how he died,” Felipe says.
“We weren’t in touch,” I say.
Felipe makes a gruff sound low in his throat. “He made the same choice I did. Be a father or hit the road.”
“My mother had that choice too,” I say, looking at her picture.
“She picked you,” he says. “The band hit the skids pretty much as soon as she found out you were on the way. She got sick most days, Charlie got scared. They couldn’t be in the same room, let alone the same band.”
I hang on to Felipe’s every word as I set the photograph aside to look through the others. Some of them I’ve seen before but many are new to me; it’s such an unexpected gift to see her again.
Felipe does his best to supply locations and anecdotes as I work my way through them, and after a few minutes he passes me a box of tissues.
“It’s the ducts,” I mumble.
“You said.”
I smooth out a rolled-up poster for a gig in some downtown L.A. club, a silhouetted outline shot of my mother onstage. It captures her essence so well that a small noise escapes my throat, and I cough a couple of times to clear it.
“She found out she was pregnant the day that was taken,” he says. “I can see her now, shoving the test in her back pocket as she ran out onto the stage.”
I study the poster closely, and sure enough you can just about make out the white tip of the plastic test sticking out of her pocket. I turn to Felipe, knowing I must be a mascara-streaked mess.
“I’m in this picture,” I whisper. “Right there, probably no bigger than a grain of rice, but I’m there.”
I demonstrate the minuscule rice size with my thumb and finger, and he puts his arm around my shoulders and pulls another tissue from the box for me. I’ve never seen any photographs of my mother during her pregnancy, this is a precious first.
“I’m going to frame it.” I blow my nose. “Hang it on my wall forever.”
He pats my shoulder.
“There’s something else, but given your…ducts,” he gestures toward my face, “I don’t know if we should hold off for another day. Tomorrow, maybe.”