We. The mother, presumably; how else could the healthy sister hold a job at the Naval Yard and turn up at Moonshine of an evening? A cripple like this would need constant care—would normally be in a home, he suspected. Recalling her hurry at the curb, he bit back an impulse to ask whether her mother was aware of today’s escapade. Not his lookout. He was as deep inside this family as he meant to go.
They sped past Grand Army Plaza and alongside Prospect Park toward Ocean Avenue. Dexter’s mother hovered in his thoughts—as if, having been summoned by the bell, she was reluctant to sign off just yet. There had been a time when she was healthy, before his brother’s stillbirth, when Dexter was seven. It had damaged his mother’s heart, so that something once solid inside her became terribly fragile: a clock made from sugar. Her inner frailty distinguished her from other mothers, whose many squalling children they were often ignoring or backhanding across the face. She would have to leave him prematurely: this was the secret they both pretended not to know. She withdrew from the restaurant Dexter’s father had opened—his own, at long last—and saved herself for Dexter. Mostly, she slept. Dexter’s lunchtime was her dawn, and it broke with the sound of his shoes mauling the stairs as he ran up four flights to their apartment. Other children came home to bread and milk and ham left out, but Dexter enjoyed a full meal his father had brought from the restaurant the night before, warmed in the oven. His mother greeted him fresh and full of questions, laughing and kissing him until it was time for him to return to school, at which point she sank back into her bower, lined with pillows his father had had specially made for her, to renew herself for his return.
Dexter had adored her to a degree that was unheard of among neighborhood boys. She was a person who might disappear at any time, yet she was always there: an enthralling blend of unattainability and complete possession. How had she done it? Witchcraft? Fairy dust? Later, he learned from his father that they’d been told her heart would not last a year past the stillbirth. Yet six years after, when Dexter turned thirteen, she was still there. He began to resent her, and stayed out playing stickball until after dark. He stole apples and peppermints and chalk: little acts of subterfuge that he feared she could actually see when she cupped his guilty face in her delicate hands. She declined with a merciless speed that seemed retroactive, as if the clock had already crumbled long before, and her body had only just realized.
“Say, I never asked,” Anna said after a long silence. “Where are we going, exactly?”
“Manhattan Beach,” he told her. “It’s near Coney Island but cleaner, private. My house is right on the water—in fact, you could take her on the back porch and avoid the sand altogether.”
“That sounds swell,” Anna strained to say lightly. Returning to Manhattan Beach put an intolerable pressure on the question she’d been agonizing over since they had made their plan four days ago: should she tell Dexter Styles about the connection between them? At the last minute she’d decided not to; her goal was to gather information, not give it away. Hastily, she’d removed from the walls photographs of her mother and Brianne in their dancing costumes; her parents on their wedding day; a movie still from Let a Bullet Fly that showed Brianne cowering in a doorway as a man’s shadow fell across her.
Yet riding in Dexter Styles’s automobile to the very place where she’d met him years ago was a duplicity too egregious to sustain. She wanted to tell him, to have it out in the open. But that wasn’t true—she dreaded telling him. What she wanted was already to have told him.
She held Lydia’s slender body against her own, hands around her sister’s midriff, where the heart nudged the soft bones of her chest. Lydia’s eyes were open. She seemed to look through the window at the spiky gray trees of Prospect Park. Anna felt her sister’s alertness, and it roused in her a rush of anticipation: They were going to the sea! They would see it together! She had made the request of Dexter Styles unthinkingly, snatching at any excuse to keep him in sight. But now that they were underway, her mother and Brianne out for a day of shopping and Schrafft’s and a matinee of Star and Garter, she felt the richness of what she’d set in motion. She must not jeopardize it. That meant not telling him who she was until their day had ended.
“How do you like working at the Naval Yard?” Mr. Styles asked suddenly. “What exactly do you do?”
“I measure tiny parts that go on ships,” Anna began, every word threatening to burst under the pressure of all she was withholding. But he seemed interested, or perhaps just tired of driving in silence. The longer she talked, the more natural it came to seem. She told him about her hatred of measuring, her wish to become a diver. Eventually, prodded by his questions, she found herself recounting what had happened with Lieutenant Axel the evening before.
“That crumbum,” he said, sounding genuinely angry. “What a bunch of screwballs. Tell them to jump in the river.”
“Then I wouldn’t have a job.”
“To hell with their lousy job. Come work for me.”
Anna held very still, her arms around Lydia, who seemed also to be listening. “Quit the Naval Yard?”
“Why not? I’d pay you better than they do.”
“I make forty-two a week before overtime.”
He seemed impressed. “Well, I’d match it.”
Anna felt a sudden uncanny proximity to her father. Not that she pictured him, exactly—she still couldn’t call him to mind. It was more like standing in a station she knew he’d passed through at an earlier point, trying to guess which train he had boarded. For the first time in years, the air was enlivened by a faint tingling trace of him.
“What do people do? Who work for you,” she asked carefully.
“Well, I’ve many businesses. One of them you’ve seen, the nightclub, and there are more in that line here and in other cities. And then there are businesses that . . . interact with those. Flow through them, you might say.”
“I see,” Anna said, though she didn’t.
“Not all of those businesses are legal, in the strictest sense of that word. I’m of a mind that people should decide for themselves how they like to be amused, rather than have the law decide for them. You may feel differently, of course. Not everyone has the stomach for that sort of thing.”
“I’ve a strong stomach,” Anna said. She felt like Alice in Wonderland, fitting herself through smaller and smaller doors with no idea where they might lead.
“That’s why I made the offer,” he said. “Consider it a standing offer. If you’re interested, I’ll work you in.”
*
Anna remembered Mr. Styles’s home as a castle on an outcropping of cliff surrounded by snow and sea. What she saw when he parked his car was a city block lined with freestanding homes—grand, yes, but no grander than houses she’d seen near Brooklyn College. She felt a dig of disappointment.
“I’ll bring the chair,” he said. The car rocked as he lifted it from the trunk.