Lizzie shook her head. “I’m not a fan,” she said. Her father had loved the banana cream. She remembered the first time she’d come here, during that initial year they lived in L.A. She and Joseph had ordered burgers; Sarah, nearly eleven years old then, had announced that she was a vegetarian. She was unhappy with the menu options. Finally she ordered the grilled cheese.
When it showed up, Sarah took a tiny bite, made a face, and then pulled at the hardened cheese along the crust. “It tastes funny,” she’d muttered unhappily to Lizzie, who was polishing off her burger.
“Just try to eat some,” Lizzie whispered back. Sarah’s pickiness had gotten worse after their mother died. “Here,” she said, reaching to tear off a bite for herself. “I think it’s good.” She tried to say it encouragingly, but Sarah shook her head.
“What’s wrong?” Joseph said.
“Nothing,” Lizzie said.
“I’m asking Sarah,” their father said. “Sarah?”
“I don’t like the cheese,” Sarah said. “It’s too cheesy.”
“The cheese is too cheesy?” Joseph repeated. “But it’s grilled cheese. That’s what it is.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” Sarah said, faltering.
Lizzie turned to her father and tried to catch his eye. So she didn’t like it. Couldn’t he be nicer about it? Their mother would have been. Sarah was close to tears.
“Fine,” he said, but it was clear he didn’t mean it, and no one spoke while Lizzie finished her burger and Joseph did too.
“What do you want for dessert?” he asked Lizzie.
“What about Sarah?” Lizzie said.
“She can have dessert when she finishes her sandwich.”
“But she’s not going to finish it,” Lizzie insisted as her sister hung her head.
“It’s dessert,” Joseph said. “It is not a God-given right.”
“That is really mean,” Lizzie said. Why couldn’t he make Sarah feel better? She was trying. It was just a stupid sandwich.
Joseph ordered a slice of banana cream. “When you’re a parent, you’ll make the decisions,” he said. Infuriated, Lizzie pulled her straw out of its paper encasing, and folded and crinkled the wrapper to make it as small as possible. Her father had no idea what to do with them. Lizzie could probably make better decisions than him. She sucked up droplets of water in her straw, dropped them on the crinkled-up wrapper, and watched it spasm and elongate; for a brief hapless moment, it seemed alive.
“What do you know about being a parent?” Lizzie said.
“What?”
“You know what I mean; you left.”
Joseph let out a strange sputter of a laugh. “Do not test me. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she muttered. She shouldn’t have said it, but she was not sorry. Her anger had been hardening for months now, ever since she arrived. How much longer could they dance around what they all knew to be true? She and Sarah didn’t want to be here, and Joseph wanted them even less.
“Can we please go?” Sarah implored, her eyes enormous, glassy with tears. “Please.” She tugged on her sister’s sleeve. She sounded younger than her ten years.
Joseph swung back toward the counter. “No,” he said. “Not yet. I am finishing my dessert.” He bent over his plate.
She despised him, she really did, she couldn’t imagine that her mother had ever loved him. Divorcing him had been the smartest thing she ever did. Lizzie had been young but not stupid. Her father working late, never around. Maybe it had been that part-time bookkeeper at his office, maybe it had been someone he knew in the city, but he’d had an affair with someone. She had distinct memories of her mother from that time, always whispering on the phone, pulling the curled telephone cord taut, behind closed doors. She must have known too.
“If you two want dessert, you can have it,” Joseph muttered. “Sarah, a milk shake?”
“Yeah,” Sarah said tentatively, the beginnings of a smile forming on her teary face. “Chocolate, please.”
“Good,” he said, grinning. “A milk shake’s got milk. Lizzie?”
She shook her head. “No thank you,” she said clearly, seething. So he had changed his mind; now he was a hypocrite who couldn’t stand by his convictions. She wanted to hate him. She had to.
“You’re missing out,” he said tightly. “It really is delicious.” And he’d polished off the pie, hadn’t left a crumb behind.
“How good is good?” Claudia was saying.
“What? What’s good?” Lizzie echoed. It must have been so hard for her father back then. She had only made it harder.
“How good is Max? Maybe stay-in-L.A. good?”
Lizzie smiled sadly. “I don’t know.”
“Why not?”
“What do you mean? You know: my whole life is in New York.” She said this as much for herself as for Claudia. “And this thing with Max—it’s only been two weeks.”
“So? I knew I would marry Ian the first night we got together.”
“That’s you. I’m not like that. You know I’m not.”
“Okay,” Claudia said. “But why wouldn’t it work?”
“Oh, come on, there are so many reasons.”
Claudia folded her arms across her chest. “Name them.”
“Okay, it’s not just that he’s so much older.” Eighteen years, to be exact. Permutations of that number kept running in her head. In five years, he would be sixty. Would she still be attracted to him in a few months, let alone a few years? And that was the superficial side of the equation. No one stayed healthy forever.
“Irrelevant,” Claudia was saying.
“Not irrelevant—”
“Okay, but definitely not a deal breaker.”
“Okay,” Lizzie said. She knew the principal cause for her reluctance, the reason she felt she could not trust herself. Would they be together if she and Max weren’t both grieving for her father? Wasn’t it an unseemly way to mourn? “He was my dad’s best friend,” Lizzie said.
“Also not a deal breaker,” Claudia said.
“Come on. It’s weird,” Lizzie said. When would she stop being embarrassed about it?
Claudia shrugged. “I can think of weirder.”
“Of course you can.” She took up the last of the fries. “And you know I want to have kids.” It was hard for her to admit, even to Claudia, this elemental desire.
“And do you know that he doesn’t? Do you like him? Do you?”
“Yeah,” Lizzie said. For all of her caveats and concerns, she knew. “Fuck, I really do.”
“You should embrace it. For once, you should embrace something. Take it. The Cossacks aren’t chasing you.”
“That,” Lizzie said, “is exactly what I was worried about here on the Westside.”
On Wednesday night, Max brought home a gift for Lizzie, a gorgeous wrap dress in an eye-popping pattern of greens and blacks. “I saw it in the window of a shop on Abbott Kinney, and I thought it would look great on you.”
“Wow,” Lizzie said. “It’s beautiful. Thank you.” No man had ever bought her clothing before. When Ben considered her gifts, he often brought her by the store to get her approval beforehand. At the time she said she liked the practicality of it. But this gave her a rush, imagining Max walk into a boutique and imagining her size, picturing her body in the dress.