Another reason to keep the doors and windows sealed in winter was the heat. We blasted it to keep Dad’s joints comfortable. Warm and dry were the doctor’s orders.
The house was built like the letter O, with a courtyard in the center, the public part of the house in the front and on the east side, the kitchen in the back, and four bedrooms and a den on the west side. The furniture had been top-of-the-line circa 1967, going out of style and back in again in the time I lived there.
I could cross to the other side of the house through the center. So I slid open one of the heavy, seven-foot-high glass doors that separated the living room from the courtyard.
“Close that!” a voice came from the kitchen. “I don’t have stock in LADWP.”
I slid it closed. “LADWP isn’t publicly traded.”
Dad stood in the dining room, leaning on his walker. It had tennis balls stuck onto the two back legs. We’d tried everything to get a controlled slide out of those back legs, and nothing worked like a couple of Wilsons. He was still young, but he had to have done something to piss off the gods because arthritis was crippling him before his time. “You keep saying that, but I was around when LILCO went public.”
“In New York.” I kissed his cheek. “We don’t privatize utilities here in paradise.”
“Such a know-it-all. A real wisenheimer.” He turned his hand into a flat plane and shook it at me. He’d brought his comedy schtick right from his family synagogue in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.
Our kitchen was massive, and the appliances were from the same era as the furniture. Only Dad’s handy repairs kept everything in beautiful working order.
I took the lid off the simmering pot. “Oh. Pot roast.”
“You staying for dinner?”
He looked at me with his brown eyes. Mine were an icy non-color. Almost blue. Sometimes grey. His skin was olive, and mine was peachy. But he’d been a father to me since I was born.
As her divorce attorney, he’d fallen in love with my pregnant mother. He got her the house in the settlement and moved into it. I was six when my mom died. He hadn’t blinked, adopting me without my biological father’s interference. I didn’t appreciate that properly until I was twelve, when he’d brought a woman home to meet me. I didn’t remember her name, but she had red hair and was younger than he was. She ignored me so noticeably that Dad excused himself, picked up my plate, and he and I ate dinner in the kitchen while she finished alone.
She never came back. When I’d asked him about her later, he said he only needed one woman in the house. It was then that I felt chosen, and that feeling had never left me.
I put the lid back on the pot. I felt chosen, but I didn’t want him to stay single the rest of his life.
“How did you peel the potatoes?” I glanced at his hands for signs that he’d aggravated his arthritis.
“They come peeled at the store now. It’s like they read my mind. So I asked the deli to cut them. Then the lady back there, nice Spanish lady, she cut the carrots too. Even peeled the skins.”
He shrugged as if to say, “I still got it.”
“You didn’t close the door again. We should get those lever handles so you don’t have to grip a knob to lock it.”
He waved again. “Such a mensch. Eat. Then go out.”
“How did you know I was going out?” I got two plates and cups from the cabinet. They were my mother and bio dad’s good wedding china.
“You’re single and beautiful. It’s Friday. You don’t need to be a genius.”
I couldn’t stay home after that. He’d sulk if I did.
I set the table, and he made his way to his chair, tennis balls sliding across the linoleum. Some days he didn’t need the walker and it was fine, and some days he broke my heart.
three
Vivian
“Well? What do you think?” Francine fidgeted with the fringe on her vintage crochet poncho. It looked like an afghan with a hole, and she looked like a cover model in it.
“He’s a nice-looking guy.”
He was Latino, built like a god, probably sang like Enrique Iglesias and fucked like James Deen. But I was barely fifteen minutes late because of an accident on the 10, and he was already making small talk with another girl at the bar.
“Those are real gang tats,” Larry, Francine’s boyfriend, said. He’d shaved his beard in favor of a Rollie Fingers curled moustache.
“He’s reformed,” she said with an excited smile.
My bones could feel how badly she wanted to jumpy-clap. I was her project. Sometimes I wondered if she put my face on Tinder and swiped right on my behalf.
I had a book burning a hole in my Kindle, and Officer Hotpants was coming at me with an LED smile and two glasses of something I was sure was alcoholic. My mother had been killed by a drunk driver, so if I had the car, I drank Sprite or took a cab home.