Multiple Listings

by Tracy McMillan

  “I’m checking out cards for the new deck I’m putting together.” Now I remember that Cody and his buddies are going up to Seattle this weekend for a big Magic tournament. They’ll stay in a hotel room on Friday night, then play the game all day Saturday and Sunday. I had to talk Nicki into letting him do it. She thought he was too young to go.

  “It’s gonna be so hype. We’re totally all going to make day two.” Cody picks up his deck and starts shuffling through it. “Last time, Justin came in sixth out of one hundred and forty-seven people. Everyone else in our group day two’d.”

  I don’t know much about the particulars, but I think day twoing means you won a lot of matches on day one.

  “I’m at least gonna top eight and win money,” he says. If there’s a gambler gene, this family has it. But at least Cody’s got it channeled in a direction that won’t get him in trouble. “I really wish I could get this card, Force of Will? You need four of them for a Legacy deck, but they’re so amazing. They make your deck, like, unstoppable. The only problem is that they’re seventy bucks each.”

  “Whew! That’s steep!”

  I always have a hard time following when Cody starts talking about Magic. He throws around these card names and terms and rules of the game so fast it makes my head spin. I step behind him to get a glance at his computer screen, thinking maybe that’ll help me understand what he’s talking about, but what I see instead is a Google search:

  Gio Recari.

  I glance from the screen to Cody. He didn’t want me to see that.

  “Son, you’re searching for Gio?” I pause a moment. “Is that who I think it is?”

  He snaps the computer shut. There’s a moment of silence—I’m not sure what to say. I know what I saw. Cody doesn’t want to talk about it. But I know from my studies that the worst thing an attachment figure can do when they see a child in pain is to ignore it.

  “Codes . . .” I sit down on one of the stools next to him and put my hand on his shoulder. “Hey.”

  He starts talking fast, like he’s trying to talk his way out of doing something wrong. “I was researching cards and I just got the idea that I wonder where my dad is. No big deal. It wasn’t even really anything, the thought just popped into my head. So I put his name in and—”

  “That’s perfectly understandable,” I say. “You’re probably just curious.”

  Cody studies my face. Between the look in his eyes and how fast he’s talking, I can see that a bunch of feelings are coming to the surface for him. Not surprising, since his mom is dealing with so much dad business—of course his own issues would start percolating. He shrugs it off. “I don’t even know why.”

  “I think it makes perfect sense. I mean, here I am, back in your mom’s life, and even though it’s been cool, it’s bound to stir up a lot of dad stuff,” I say. Then, as casually as I possibly can, I say, “Do you have any memories of him? Gio, I mean?”

  “No,” Cody says a little too fast. He looks braced against the possibility that if he opens up the box that contains Gio, he might never be able to shut it again. He thinks a second. “I mean, my mom says I met him once. When I was a baby. She said he took me to a park. Sometimes I drive by a park and I wonder whether that’s the park.”

  Cody exhales. What a therapist would call a “release” breath.

  My heart is flooding for this little boy who has never known his dad. My dad was a bastard who got drunk every night, but there were some good times in there, and at least I knew who he was. On the other hand, he had no ability to regulate his emotions, and he raged. He beat me and my brothers and sisters, and who knows what he put my mom through. Cody grew up feeling more safe and secure than I ever did, because Nicki’s a good mom who has money. But in prison, you realize 99 percent of the people there suffered serious trauma in childhood, and the deeper I get into learning how that affects people, the more I’ve come to the conclusion that having no father is better than having an abusive one.

  Then there’s the fact that until two months ago, both he and Nicki were fatherless. Now things have changed: she has a dad, and he doesn’t. No wonder he’s searching for Gio.

  “Maybe your mom’s dad coming back,” I say, “made you wonder about your own dad?”

  “Maybe.” Cody stuffs some papers into his backpack and scoots back his stool. “I’m going to my room.”

  “Wait. Son,” I say. I pull the computer over and open it. “Maybe I could help you check it out. It’s okay to be curious. We could check it out together.”

  Cody looks at me. There’s this expression he gets where he looks just like Nicki. Same combination of thinking and feeling. I take his silence as a go-ahead, and open the computer. “Have you ever searched for anyone online before?”

  “You mean, like stalked girls?”

  “Probably like that, yeah,” I say with a laugh. “I got pretty good at this in the halfway house.” Melissa taught me how to search the Web that first day there. I spent at least one full week Googling every person I’d ever met. I learned a lot about finding people, then I learned a lot about how well I’m aging. Man, back in the day, you just lost track of people. You never knew how unattractive they’d become. Now there’s very few people from your past left to fantasize about. “What’s his date of birth?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The year?”

  Kind of strange to realize Cody knows almost nothing about his own father. Maybe we should call Nicki? But then something tells me he wouldn’t want her knowing about this. “Let’s start with 1974,” I say. “Do you know what state?”

  “Oregon?”

  “For some reason, I remember Nicki telling me Gio was from New York. Let’s try that.” I type in Gio Recari, then click into the little drop-down box and track down to the N’s. “It’s not a very common name. Let’s see what happens.” I hit return and wait.

  Cody stands right next to me, so he can get a better look at the screen. The page loads. We got something. I start reading off the screen. “Gio Recari, thirty-eight? Used to live in Portland, then Seattle, then it looks like . . . Los Angeles?”

  That’s gotta be him.

  Cody pulls the laptop in front of him and clicks on a link. “Look.” He turns the laptop toward me. It’s a Facebook page with a picture of a guy who looks like Cody in that one way people look like their less dominant parent—as if one parent’s face is seeping through the other. Or is it hovering over the other? “That’s him. Is that him?”

  We stare at him a minute.

  “Click on some more pictures,” I say. “Where is he, is he married, does he have other kids? What’s his deal?”

  “Wait a minute,” Cody says.

  That’s when I see all the comments. The whole right side of the page is lined with comments, and they all say the same thing.

  RIP man.

  We’ll miss you, Gio.

  Heaven has a new angel.

  RIP. 1976–2014.

  Gio! Your smile will not be forgotten.

  I put my arm around Cody. Mother of Christ. Gio is dead.

  “Is that him?” he asks. Even though we both know it’s him, I understand why he asked. He only just met this man and he’s already having to say good-bye to him. “Are you sure that’s him?”

  “I’m sorry, Cody.”

  I squeeze him tight as he just stares at the screen. He doesn’t cry or anything. He’s just scrolling down the page, trying to process everything he’s seeing. Is this my dad? Those are my eyes. That’s my dad. It says rest in peace. Is that my dad?

  Finally, he says, “It looks like he died. In a car crash.”

  “Cody, I’m so sorry.”

  What do I say to this boy, my grandson, who just lost the father he just found? There’s no way for him to absorb the impact of what’s happening. It’ll probably take the rest of his life to figure out how
he feels about this. I shut the computer.

  “Can we not tell my mom?”

  “We don’t have to tell your mom,” I say. Even though I think Nicki would really want to know, there is time for Cody to process it before Nicki needs to hear it. “Not for a long time, if you don’t want to. You just tell me when. It’s up to you.”

  “Thank you,” he says. This boy has such a sweetness to him. Way down underneath the nonchalance is a deeply feeling person who is trying to become a man. Not an easy task for anyone, much less a kid who has never had a dad.

  “Come on, let’s go for a drive,” I say. I grab Nicki’s extra key from the kitchen drawer. “You’re behind the wheel.”

  Driving isn’t going to bring Cody’s dad back. But it might give him some space to make sense out of it.

  * * *

  Later that night, Nicki and I are sitting in front of the Christmas tree. The tree is truly spectacular. I made Nicki and Cody go with me to Target and buy a whole cartful of ornaments, not just the mirrored balls, but the expensive ones, too. At the store, we had a big debate over whether to get all-one-color lights or multicolored lights. Cody wanted all blue, Nicki wanted all white. I voted multicolor and I won. Or I should say: they let me have my way, since this was my first Christmas out of prison. It’s the most beautiful tree I’ve ever seen in my life.

  I made a fire in the fireplace, and in the background, I have my favorite Motown Christmas record on the iPod, which I have finally figured out how to use—even the downloading and syncing part. I’m feeling so full of spirit. Not holiday spirit, just spirit. God. Yahweh. Divine intelligence. The most high. All of it.

  “Thank you, Nicki,” I say. I hand her a cup of mint tea, which I used to drink with the Muslim guys in the penitentiary. It’s one of the few rituals from in there that I’ve continued on the outside. “Thank you for letting me back into your life. You didn’t have to take me back in.”

  Nicki generally winces when I get grateful on her. I’m not trying to embarrass her. But those days in County reminded me that you got to tell people how you really feel about them. Life is too short not to. I expect to see her brush it off, but she doesn’t.

  “You’re right. I didn’t want you here,” she says evenly. “At all.”

  “I know,” I say. “I know you didn’t.” I read somewhere in a relationship book that when two people each want different things—say, one wants Hawaii for a vacation and the other wants Mexico—the solution is generosity. One person says yes to their second choice and the other person gracefully receives that as a gift. This is what Nicki has done for me. I needed her, and even though she didn’t need me back, she gracefully accepted her second choice. Me. She put what she wanted behind what I needed. When I think about it, that’s what the parent is supposed to do. Have the maturity and grace to willingly put the other person first. I was never able to do that for her, and yet, she’s doing it for me. This is the most humbling thing I’ve ever experienced in my life. Even more humbling than seventeen years in jail.

  “There’s no way I’ll ever be able to repay you,” I say.

  “I didn’t do it for you,” she says. “I did it for me. Because I wanted to be a person who wouldn’t make an old man go back to prison. And in order to be her, I had to let you stay. Even though I didn’t want to.”

  This is my Nicki. When she was a little girl, she was so practical, so logical, I worried about her. I remember one time she was looking at one of those Tiger Beat magazines, with the posters of teen idols. I asked her if she was going to put the poster of John Stamos up on the wall. With a serious face she answered no. “I’m never going to meet John Stamos,” she said. “First of all, he would have to come to Oregon. And second of all, he would have to be in the same place I was. Which probably isn’t going to happen.” She was so earthbound. Any other little girl would indulge herself in a fantasy of John Stamos. Not Nicki. She wouldn’t dare to want anything she couldn’t have.

  “And you know what?” Nicki’s thinking while she talks, staring into the blinking lights on the tree, almost in a trance. One of her curls falls across her face and she looks just like the little girl I took shopping every Saturday, who loved to ride in the front seat of my El Dorado.

  “What?”

  “In the end, I didn’t do it for you. And I didn’t even do it for me,” she says. “I did it for Cody.” She snaps out of her thought, taking a sip of her tea. Her voice drops a bit as she addresses me directly. “I’ve been looking at houses for my whole life, really. I thought that’s what I needed to give Cody and me a good life. Give him structure, you know? But it turns out—” She hesitates, like she doesn’t want to say this. “It turns out that what he really needed was you.”

  In the background Stevie Wonder sings “One Little Christmas Tree.”

  Finally, after a long time just listening to Stevie, she says to me, “Thank you for all the cards you sent.” She means those Hallmark cards, the ones I made sure to postmark in time for birthdays, Christmas, Easter, and even Halloween. “I know I never said so, but I appreciated them.” She takes another sip of her tea and brushes a curl out of her eye. “And I’m sorry I never came to visit.”

  My first thought is that Nicki doesn’t need to apologize to me. And my second is: maybe I’m a good dad after all.

  28

  * * *

  NICKI

  Hiring Peaches has turned out to be a great thing. Okay, interesting. Okay, good. She’s running the place like a real restaurant, doing everything Jake would have done: putting together a staff, setting up accounts with food and beverage vendors, making choices in glassware, plates, forks, knives—everything. She says we are on track to open December 1. I can’t imagine how that’s going to happen, because we still have to hire the most impor­tant person: the chef.

  We’re unpacking boxes of dishware from Ikea when Peaches springs her latest brainstorm on me.

  “You’re going to find this outrageous, but I want you to say yes.”

  “No,” I say. I don’t care what “great” idea Peaches has, the answer is no. Her best ideas are usually her worst. “Your last idea was roller skates. So, just, no.”

  “You can’t say no,” Peaches says. She’s mobilizing her troops on the battle line, I can see it in her eyes. And in her shoulders. “This one’s different. It’s so good, so on-point, the minute I say it you will immediately know that it is precisely the right idea for our restaurant. And you will say yes.”

  “Is this some of that manifestation stuff you’re so into where you say it like it’s already happened? Or are you trying to hypnotize me?”

  “Both,” she says. “Just hear me out.”

  I am not going to be able to dismiss Peaches. There have been a lot of those times over the past three weeks with her. There are going to be a lot more of those times with Peaches moving forward. It’s what I knew I was getting into with her, so I might as well just surrender. Not that this makes me regret taking her on as a partner—it doesn’t. Letting Peaches get involved took this restaurant from being a project of Jake’s ego—a cool guy who wanted to open a business so he could surround himself with stylish hostesses and hot parents-about-town—to being a labor of love. Now it’s about two little girls who grew up in a really bad way coming together to save ourselves, about creating a great life together that we now get to share with other families.

  “Fine. What’s the idea?”

  “Well, you know how we’ve been having, um, challenges when it comes to staffing,” she says. This puts me on my guard, because the more time Peaches spends trying to set up an idea, the more I know she’ll go to hell and back to convince me to do it.

  “No, I don’t really know that.”

  “Well, we have.”

  “You mean about the chef? It’s not that big a deal, we’ll find one. They’re a dime a dozen, right?” I say. I’m wondering where this is going.
“Just spit it out, Peaches.”

  “We should hire your dad,” she says. “To cook.”

  My eyes go so wide I can feel the air on them. I’m trying to find an objection to this idea, but it’s been .071 seconds and I still got nothing.

  “I’m not saying no yet,” I say.

  “Good! Usually you reject things way too fast,” she says. “So, before you say no, let me tell you why this is the rightest idea you are ever going to hear me come up with—”

  I don’t actually want to say no. I actually think it’s a great idea.

  “Yes,” I say.

  But Peaches doesn’t even hear me. She just keeps talking. “See, he’s a great cook, for starters. And he doesn’t just cook anything, he cooks home food. Stuff people like to eat at home, like awesome macaroni and cheese with truffles, but that takes too long. Who’s got time for that after battling traffic on the Banfield Freeway? Not me, boy. Or stuff that’s too messy and hard, like fried chicken. Stuff like that.”

  “I said yes.”

  “I know, but you said it too fast,” she says. “I have a bunch more arguments I want to give you.” She gets that one expression on her face. “Because I’ve thought about this a lot.”

  “It’s okay, Peaches. I think it’s a great idea.”

  Peaches stares at me, slack-jawed. She slowly shakes her head from one side to another. “Excuse me, but are you Nicki Daniels?”

  I smile. “Okay, okay.”

  “No, seriously. Because the Nicki Daniels I know would put up way more of a fight over this. So I’m wondering if some kind of Roswell-type thing happened to you. Did you get abducted by aliens who took you to their planet, implanted a chip that would make you agreeable, then dropped you back off all in what seemed in human time like thirty seconds?”

  “I understand why you think that,” I say, humoring her. “But I’m fine with my dad. He needs a job. The one Alex gave him is great, but this would be better. He’s a kick-ass cook. And he has a great personality.”