“Does the marketing? Like, to stock the ‘icebox’ with Wonder Bread and cans of Tab? I don’t know if anyone really ‘does the marketing’ in this day and age, Dad.”
“Don’t insult Tab,” he said, smiling and waving the bread knife in her general direction as he considered the various quarter loaves clustered together in the bread box. “Tab made me the man I am today.”
She was careful to breathe slowly, through her nostrils, so that it wouldn’t sound anything like a sigh.
“We’re on our way here. We’ll just do a Nonna Connie special. Just some oil, some garlic, bread crumbs, red pepper. It’s so easy, you could make it yourself.”
“Thanks for that vote of confidence,” Madison said. “So easy even a moron can master it!”
“It’s hardly your fault, princess. We haven’t taught you anything, have we? That’s my fault. Your mother’s a fantastic cook.”
“She never cooks.”
“I don’t like her having to worry when we’re entertaining.”
“She could cook for us, though.”
“Your mother has cooked for you many times.”
“I can barely even remember five times she’s cooked for me.”
“Come on, Madison. That’s not true.”
“Don’t tell me that,” she said. She could hear her tone sharpen, shimmer. “Don’t tell me what’s happened. I was there.”
Her father stood up stiffly. He’d been searching in a low corner drawer for his favorite skillet, the heavy cast iron.
“Then don’t do that,” he replied. “Don’t pretend you don’t remember our life.”
He crossed back and heaved the pan onto the stove with a clatter. Madison flinched, but there were no sounds from upstairs. Her father drizzled the oil.
“We’d cook for you out on Shelter all the time. All those times your grandparents forced me to go eat stringy chicken paillard at that godforsaken club, you were at home eating something your mother and I had sautéed with love. So don’t sit there telling me otherwise.”
She waited for him to reassure her that he wasn’t really angry, but he just put the pot of water on. Her father could be like that, though. His storms were just like real storms: they’d make themselves known in terrifying flashes, then move on to some other target and leave you cringing in a suddenly peaceful world.
It had always been him, she thought. He had always been the one to cook dinner out on Shelter. Sometimes her mother would come in for the end of his preparations, fastening an earring with one hand, reaching out to stir a pot with the other. Complimenting him on whatever he’d made. But the cooking dinner, together, had never been her mother’s idea.
“Why are you awake?” she asked again. His knife struck the wood-block cutting board.
“I haven’t been sleeping well.” He began to grind salt from a shaker, holding it in the air above the boiling water and letting the grains fall.
“You know that’s bad for the salt,” she admonished, and he made a gun shape with his thumb and forefinger, cocking it in her direction and sucking his teeth for effect.
“Good girl.”
“You’ve been sleeping in your study,” she pushed. “Maybe you can’t sleep because you’ve been on a sofa with the TV blasting all night.”
“I wouldn’t rule it out, Madison. I wouldn’t rule that out at all.”
He turned back to the pasta and she was left with her middling victory.
“Why don’t you tell me about the party,” he said.
“It was boring.”
“I doubt that.”
“Well, it took place in Suzanne Welsh’s ballroom.”
“Say no more. Why’d you go, then?” He looked over, one hand in the pocket of his sweats and the other holding the wooden spoon. “A boy, possibly?”
She said nothing.
“I wonder,” her father said, “if I might be more inclined to keep some things to myself, say the vodka on your breath, if I had a window on what you were thinking.”
“Blackmail?”
“Whatever it takes.”
“He’s no one special.”
“No one is, compared to you.” He smiled. “Everyone’s got something to work with, and that will be yours. You’ll always be holding more cards than the other guy.”
“What was yours? Your thing to work with?”
He peered over the tops of his glasses. “I was cocky. And hungry. Risky combination. You generally want more of one than the other, if you’re really ambitious you want to have that bottomless tolerance for eating shit, you know? You can’t be too high on your horse. So sometimes it took me too long to figure out what was what. When you’re living in Brooklyn with Nonna, you’ve got to keep pushing. There’s a lot you’ve got to push right past.”
“But you didn’t push past Mom.”
She felt it, then. That she was rising to his level, speaking to him the way he spoke to her. Even drunk, she knew it wasn’t parity, but it was still something very, very difficult to do with her father.
“Well that,” he said, “is my good fortune, kiddo. It’s my good luck that she didn’t always feel the way she felt about me that first night. She gave in.”
The garlic and oil were heating up, and they sat for a while in companionable silence.
“Do you think Concetta will ever sell that building?”
“Who knows,” he said. “We aren’t still sitting on that thing for my own lack of trying.” He prodded the garlic with a wooden spoon, setting it to sizzle. “Your grandmother likes any arrangement that gives her the maximum amount of power.”
“Dad,” Madison said. “Come on. Pot, kettle.”
“I didn’t say it was a bad thing. You know Nonna’s story. Her father ran a hardware store and she thought your Pop was a class act just because he had proximity to important people. Two generations later, we’ve got you. So whatever your mother may say about Nonna’s table manners, no one can say the woman isn’t impressive.”
“I wouldn’t want her as my landlord, though.”
“Having been in that exact situation until I was twenty-two, I can tell you that your instincts are correct. You’ve seen the apartment. She likes everything in its place.”
“You like everything in its place,” Madison said, gesturing vaguely out at the house, the pool, the woods.
“That’s your mother,” he said. “I know your mother acts like I forced this house down her throat, but I didn’t. She picked every single fixture. You know I didn’t have a say in anything but my own two rooms, and even for those ones, she’s credited as consigliere.”
Madison smiled.
“Maybe what we need,” she said, “is a wartime consigliere.” Her father laughed.
“Nice,” he said. “Very nice. But no, you know that isn’t what I care about. I only care that everyone knows where they are when they walk in. Which silk for the drapes—I could care less. Jesus, the drapes. I love your mother, but she thinks she’s low maintenance because her indulgences are for her, not for other women. She wants to be high maintenance, trust me, she can be. I won’t tell you what we spent on the goddamn hardware alone, for the drapes in the den. I’d have to cry.”
“What do you mean, that everyone knows where they are?” Madison said.
“They walk into an event, here, in our home, they know who I am. That’s what I mean.”