Bingo.
She likes me. She doesn’t know it yet, but she does. I know because those two gestures—hand to the face and showing the wrist—are both things female human beings do when they’re sexually attracted. When you know evolutionary biology, the world starts to get a lot less confusing.
“Let’s get down to business, Mr. Daniels.” Her smile disappears. She hasn’t lost her temper, but she’s not exactly keeping perfect track of it, either. “Okay?”
Let’s get down to business, Mr. Daniels.
Her abrupt shift in tone immediately causes my heart to rev and my mouth to go dry. I have to unstick my lips from my teeth. My whole body is on alert. Which means I haven’t changed that much. Female anger still scares me. I take two breaths from as deep in my belly as I can get my breath to go.
This is what I mean by I know myself now. The second Melissa uses that clipped tone with me, I’m no longer sitting in a chair at the Oregon Residential Reentry Facility. I’m back in my childhood home, my overworked, overburdened mother shutting me up with just a glance across the room.
In the past, I would have reacted. I would have come back at Melissa with some anger of my own. I would have made trouble for myself by getting mouthy. And that would be how, not two hours after getting released from prison, I would have taken the first step toward committing my next crime and going back. But now I’m different. Now I have choices.
Now I can spend a few minutes thinking about how my life of crime mirrored my childhood. How growing up, I was always in trouble—the crazy one, with the ten hundred questions and the ability to charm—and my mother only really noticed me when I told a bad joke or sang too loud or laughed too much or talked too fast while she was trying to watch her favorite shows—she loved her cop shows. I guess I learned early on that if I couldn’t get attention for being a good boy, I’d get it for being a bad one. Maybe my mother was so hard on me because I was the spitting image—in looks and behavior—of her own dad, whom she worshipped, but who drank and womanized and, according to my mom, made the whole family’s life miserable. I met Grandpa Ross one time, at his funeral. You could tell he was a scoundrel even when you saw him lying in that coffin. He had a full head of slicked-back hair and a thick mustache, and despite being dead, he was still handsome. I was twelve years old, and I never forgot the image of my mother going up to him and kissing his dead forehead. Then she said, Fuck you, and walked away. Is it any wonder I could never please this woman?
As the fifth of seven kids—officially by two fathers, but in truth, probably three—I enjoyed the benefits of being mostly ignored. For one thing, I didn’t have responsibilities like my older sisters. I never had to babysit, mow the lawn, cook, or do dishes. Instead, I basically “starred” in the life of our block—a sort of smoking, shoplifting, pyromaniacal Huckleberry Finn, who was known all the way at the other end of the street as the best-looking, boldest, craftiest little shit in the neighborhood.
Yeah, I was proud of that. I’d go where no one else dared go, say what no one else dared say, and steal what no one else dared steal. I had cojones. By the time I was in fifth grade, I’d already perfected my first con: a fake charity where me and a couple of my little sidekicks would head over to the area north of Gilbert Avenue and go door-to-door asking for money for “needy children.” Two hours later, we’d be feasting on Charleston Chews and maybe passing around a new yo-yo. What? I was needy, wasn’t I?
By high school I was pulling down a retail manager’s salary selling marijuana and Quaaludes. In my senior year I got myself an apartment a block from campus, making sure to dress well, keep my hair cut, and maintain a decent grade point average (I’m not bragging; I mean above a C minus) because, like I said, presentation is key. I knew: a) the teachers assumed the “good”-looking kids were good and the “bad”-looking kids were bad, and b) being a drug dealer in high school is like being the biggest store in a very busy shopping mall—it’s all location, location, location, and then let the game come to you.
I went “pro” in my early twenties, almost by accident. In addition to my small-time drug and pimping hustle (two girls I was screwing were also screwing the occasional john I set them up with), I had a sideline going at the biggest pool hall in Seattle. I used to regularly take guys for two, three, four hundred dollars a shot. Half my success there was my understanding of psychology. Where a normal hustler is just looking for drunk and stupid, I picked my marks based on how they were acting. Were they insecure about their place in the group and had to prove something to their buddies? Were they wishful thinkers who had fantasies of being Paul Newman in The Hustler? Were they unable to back down from a challenge to their ego? I’d exploit vulnerabilities you didn’t even know you were showing.
Eventually, I caught the eye of a guy named Diamonds (I never did know his real name) who had gotten into the cocaine business in the eighties, just as it was going mainstream. He owned the whole Seattle market, at least at the wholesale level, and wanted to branch out to Portland, but needed help. He picked me. I didn’t know dookie about Portland, but I had balls and the name of someone to get in touch with. I drove my first pound down there in a maroon 1979 Cutlass Supreme, and that was it. I’d found my calling. I got the break of a lifetime when Diamonds got busted nine months later. It was too soon for me to be implicated in his business, but long enough that I knew a few players in his distribution network. I took over his business, relocated to Portland, and suddenly, now I was The Man.
But for all my swagger, I always had that soft spot where I never got Mama’s love. And it drove me. I didn’t know that at the time, but it’s clear as day now. I was going to make women love me. All of them. The ones doing the Jane Fonda workout. The ones waiting tables. The ones who were married. The ones who were hos. If I had to seduce, finagle, lie, beg, or coerce—I would make them love me. Unfortunately, no matter how nice my car, no matter how much cocaine I moved, no matter how many hundreds I had in my pocket, or how many women I could get into my bed—no matter what—there was one place I could feel like Little Ronnie again in a hot second. And that place was in a woman’s eyes. All a female had to do was whisper anger, frustration, judgment, or, worst of all, disregard, with her eyes and I’d feel smaller than a cockroach.
Sort of like how Melissa’s got me feeling right now. She might think I’m attractive, but she still has the power to send me back to prison, and that’s a fact. She’s the one who decides if and when I leave this halfway house. She’s the one I need to keep happy.
Which makes me wonder about her superpower.
Every woman has a superpower—the thing she thinks makes her special. Not what a man would notice about her, necessarily. Men are all about the goodies—a stacked chest, a round ass, long legs. But most girls have something they love about themselves: their smarts, their cooking, that space between their teeth. If you can figure out a girl’s superpower and tap into it, if you can reach her there, you got her. She’ll smile at you and talk to you and maybe even give her body to you. And if she gives her body to you, her heart is just a matter of time.
Knowing a woman’s superpower is my superpower.
“Mr. Daniels?” she says. “Mr. Daniels?”
“Yeah?” I snap back into the room. “You really got to call me Ronnie,” I say. “Since we’re going to be spending so much time together.”
“Can you stay with me here, Ronnie?” She smiles just a little bit. “We’re almost done.”
“Actually, I can’t. Hold on a second,” I say. I make a hang-on gesture and bow my head a little and concentrate because an insight is coming—this is the whole reason I meditate, by the way, because it has turned my mind into a fifty-five-thousand-watt radio station that picks up signals from the past, present, and sometimes future.
“Mr. Daniels. Ronnie,” she says. But then she stops talking and watches me with curiosity. She’s probably never seen one of her clients meditate
before. “What are you doing?”
“I’m getting an insight,” I say. “From you.”
This is what I’m getting. Every woman who has ever given in to me, and probably every woman I’ve ever been attracted to, had a father who failed her. That Daddy failure—that spot where he left her—cuts a door out of a woman’s mind, and that’s where the bad boy, the flirter, the cheater, the drinker, the workaholic, enters. Where I enter. There’s no force, no masked men, no home invasion—there’s just a door that a guy like me walks right up to (he might even knock) and the woman opens it. And then he’s inside.
This is why women go after bad boys. A regular guy—a guy with a good job, nice parents, and the ability to commit—could never walk through that door. He doesn’t even know where that door is. Only a “bad” man can do that. What a woman wants is a guy who has the potential to abandon her exactly like Daddy did, but then doesn’t. Right! She desperately hopes that somehow she will take the “bad” man and turn him good. She’ll take him in and fix him up. She wants him to turn good on her shift. For her.
I’m getting all of this from Melissa. This is what Melissa wants. This is why she’s in her thirties and single. Because so far, all the bad boys just keep acting like Daddy.
Melissa’s superpower is that she needs to be needed.
Well, I need her. A lot.
“Melissa?” I say softly. “You know what?”
She looks up at me. I hold her gaze and watch her pupils dilate. She really is attractive when her face is relaxed. “Yeah?”
“I need your help,” I say.
* * *
“She really looks like you,” Melissa says, staring at the computer screen. “Really looks like you. She’s beautiful.”
“Oh, so that means you think I’m good-lookin’, then?” I’m ribbing Melissa. Partly because I like her, and partly because I’m nervous. I asked if she would look Nicki up on Facebook, and now it’s taking forever for her to turn the computer screen toward my chair. So I can see my baby. “Can I see?”
Melissa struggles with the cords that are preventing her from being able to turn the monitor. “Here, come over here.” She tugs my chair toward hers. “You can’t see all of them because of her privacy settings. But these are the ones that are public.”
I have to get up and move the chair, and as I stand—
God.
There she is.
Nicki. On that Facebook thing.
Nicki.
She is beautiful.
She looks like a woman now. Not older really, but grown, like she has responsibilities and she carries them out. Her eyes are still so big. Yellowy-orangey-green—depending on the light. I can see Beth in her, too. Something in her expression. Intelligent, but with a sweetness that Beth never had.
Don’t think about everything you missed.
“That’s her?” Oh my God. My daughter. “I can’t believe it. I really can’t believe it.” Obviously, I know it’s her, but I’m trying to process it. “That’s her.”
“Didn’t she send you pictures? Or come to visit?” Melissa points toward the right-arrow key on the computer. “There are lots more here, looks like. Just keep clicking that.”
“Not in a while,” I say.
I can’t tell this woman I haven’t spoken to my daughter in seventeen years. Melissa is a prison official. Even if she was capable of understanding—and she isn’t—I could never risk the truth. Because if she knew that I don’t have anywhere to live after this, well . . . Let’s just say I can’t let that happen.
I click through photos of Nicki’s life. At her birthday party. With Cody. He’s about thirteen or fourteen in the picture—it’s a graduation of some kind, junior high maybe?—one foot in puberty, the other in childhood. There’s Nicki and Cody in Paris. Paris? My little girl went to Paris? And took her son? There they are at the Grand Canyon and in Venice. There are photos of a man who must be her boyfriend. I guess he looks all right.
“So, what do you think?” Melissa asks. “She must be so excited to see you!”
She’s not.
I have to be very careful. I don’t want to slip and fall into one of the excruciating places—I’ve missed my daughter’s life! My grandson has my eyebrows—that I’ve avoided for so long. Because I don’t want to die of grief or lose my mind. I just want another chance. So I say, “I think she’s beautiful.”
“She is beautiful. And your grandson is so handsome,” she says.
She doesn’t even know I’m out.
The reason she stopped speaking to me is my own fault. I thought surely I would get off on the charges, so I didn’t tell her I got arrested. I almost told her right after I got popped, but before I could spit out the news, she told me she was pregnant. Pregnant! And once she said that, I couldn’t very well talk about going before the grand jury, could I? I couldn’t explain that one of my distribution guys had turned state’s evidence, and now there was a very good chance that I would be going away for a long, long time.
So I didn’t say anything. I put it off another day and another day and another day, and next thing I knew the jury foreman was reading the verdict.
Guilty—guilty as charged.
Melissa can’t possibly understand what it’s like to call your daughter from prison to tell her that you’re going to be there for the next 239 months. I don’t blame Nicki for hanging up on me. I don’t blame her for blocking my calls from that day on. I was guilty of so much more than conspiracy to distribute cocaine. I was guilty of depriving a twenty-one-year-old girl of her father, just when she needed him most. I was guilty of abandoning my grandson, before he was even born. When you betray people like that, you have to know you might never get them back.
But I believe—I have to believe—that Nicki will let me into her life again. She’ll do it because I’m her father and she needs me, and her boy needs me. And I need them. Not just for somewhere to serve my home detention, either, though I wouldn’t blame someone for thinking that. I have a genuine desire to be in her life again, to make up for all the ways I’ve disappointed her, to be the man I never had the ability to be. Until now. Whether she knows it or not, she still needs her dad. Because no girl should have to go through life without the love and care and support of her father if he’s still breathing. I’d go to the ends of the earth for that little girl and her son. As long as I’m still alive, I’m not going to give up trying to be part of her life. She’ll love me again. I know she will.
I just have to explain things to her, that’s all.
PART TWO
* * *
In Escrow
5
* * *
NICKI
The sellers accept my first offer on the Southeast Burnett house without even countering and, of course, now I think I overpaid. I’m filled with anxiety and it doesn’t feel like the regular old buyer’s remorse I had last time—that was more of a low hum and this is more of the sound of high-tension wires—not that it matters, because either way, I’m in escrow. Which means that sometime in the next thirty-six hours I have to—oh, sorry, get to—write a check with six figures before the decimal point and pretend like it doesn’t scare the shit out of me. And sometime after that—thirty or forty-five days and five thousand phone calls and inspections later—they’re going to hand me an eighteen-inch-tall stack of papers and I’m going to sit in a room with terrible fluorescent lighting and sign them all.
I told Cody about the new house and he shrugged. “Why are we moving? I like it here,” he said. Not exactly the reaction I was hoping for. I told him how Jake and I have decided to make it official—instead of just keeping half his clothes here and sleeping over all the time, we’ll be moving in together permanently. Without trying to sell it too hard, I said how I’m especially excited to have the kind of family structure we’ve never had before. That prompted Cody to ask if we’re gettin
g married, naturally, a question I dodged by saying I think that’ll happen eventually, but for now we’re as good as married, we just don’t have a contract with the state about it. He gave a fine, then shrug, which was less enthusiasm than I might have liked, but at least it wasn’t protest.
I’m contemplating all this as I walk up to the restaurant. It is hard not to love this place. It’s on one of those perfect little corners in Southeast Portland where everything you could ever imagine wanting—a swell vintage clothing store, a bookstore, an art gallery, a boutique—is just waiting for you. Never mind the fact that there’s not one thing in any of these stores anyone actually needs. It’s all about desire. A whole intersection devoted to things that are so damn irresistible, so wantable, that people with more money than they need can’t help it—they are moved to open their wallets.
The day Jake brought me here to show me this place he said, “The only thing missing is a restaurant,” and he was right. Then he launched into a detailed rundown of the economics. “Rent is twenty-three hundred a month. I figure we can fit fourteen two-tops and ten four-tops. That would allow us to do one hundred forty-five covers a night. Plus breakfast and lunch.” He scooped me into a hug and held me tight. “Babe, this is the project we’ve been waiting for. All you have to do is say yes.”
All I had to do was say yes. That’s it.
I’ve never been one of those girls obsessed with Cartier boxes or Tiffany ads or getting a big, fat diamond ring. I’ve never craved a proposal where the guy drops to one knee and asks me to marry him. But somehow, hearing Jake say those words—All you have to do is say yes—moved me. It spoke to something deep in me that has always wanted to be in one of those relationships where you live and love and work together so well that Portland magazine wants to do a feature story on you. Maybe it’s because I’m such a workaholic, but working together—that has always seemed like the ultimate partnership to me. Because then you’re both equally invested in the thing that matters most besides children—your work. Your kids will leave you eventually, but your work never will. And of all the guys I’ve been with in my life, Jake is the first one I could really start a business with. He has the personality, the know-how, and the will to succeed. I completely trust that he will make this place a success. Completely.
Multiple Listings Page 5
