by Ruthie Knox
She had other friends, good friends, to make up for it. She’d just missed this kind of thing. Sociable acceptance. A blank slate.
“You’ll have to explain what you mean by that.” Winston took a drink from his whiskey glass, set it down on top of the pinball table, and pulled back the plunger to release the ball.
“By what?”
“The mailman.”
“Oh, right. Sorry.” Possibly she wasn’t entirely keeping on top of the conversation. Or the situation. Don’t think. “Everybody wants to be their authentic selves, right? But it’s kind of hard, because we have these roles. Like, in our families, we have to be who they expect us to be, and if we’ve had the same friends a long time, or, like, a boyfriend since college. We get frozen by what everyone else thinks we’re like, how they expect us to act. Like my ex, Matt? I told him once in college that I didn’t like yoga. So then, years later, I’m thinking about maybe taking a yoga class and he’s all, ‘But you don’t like yoga.’ ”
“Can’t you just tell him you’ve changed your mind?”
“Sure, I can, but that’s just an example.” Allie drained her glass. The whiskey that had clung to the side slowly settled to the bottom, and she swirled the golden liquid around, trying to remember how Elvira had explained it. Things always made more sense when Elvira explained them. And then there was the fact that she was a tiny bit muddled from two rum and Cokes and…three? Was it three whiskeys?
Just little ones, though. Three, or possibly four, bitty baby whiskeys to take the edge off her long day of traveling and stress. Her trench coat was draped over the back of the chair, too, on the opposite side from Winston’s, with her hat perched on top of it and her suit jacket folded neatly beside the whiskey bottle.
The bar kept getting hotter and louder. Her cheeks were flaming, her ears kind of buzzing from the whiskey. She unbuttoned the top two buttons of her blouse, glancing down to make sure the lace of her slip didn’t show.
A woman squeezed behind Winston, passing from the bar area to the back room, where there were people playing darts and dancing to the music. Then another woman with two men, just as the pinball game made the noise that meant Winston had lost his ball.
So many people—a late night crowd now. “What time is it?”
One hand on the pinball game’s plunger, he leaned down and tapped his phone. “Half eleven.”
“But they’re still there?”
Winston craned his head over the crowd. “Yes. They haven’t moved.”
“Good. So, wait—what was I saying?”
“You couldn’t take a yoga class.”
“Right, so, I mean I could. If I wanted to go to yoga, I could just go, but the thing is, with your family and the people who know you, you’re always anticipating their reactions to stuff. You don’t want to tell them, like, ‘I’m totally into yoga now,’ if you know they think you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like yoga, because maybe then they’ll tease you for turning into a hippie, so instead you just don’t.”
“Don’t do yoga?”
“Maybe, or you don’t tell them things. You don’t do anything that they don’t already think would be something that you would do. You don’t even try doing it, and then explaining why you’ve changed, or why they were wrong about you, or why you were wrong about yourself. You can’t be authentic with them. You’re always just the role that they cast you in, or you cast yourself in. That’s what I’m saying—it’s hard to be authentic with your own people. Because if you were, you would mess absolutely everything up, and you know, you don’t want to mess anything up, sometimes even if you don’t like what would get messed up. But if you want to be your real self, or maybe you want to practice being your real self, for when you’re ready to mess everything up, you can practice on the mailman.”
“I never see my mailman. He just leaves the post in the box.”
“Or whoever delivers your packages. The UPS man. Or, in this scenario, you.”
Winston drained his glass. “I’m the mailman?”
“You’re the person who it’s easy to tell stuff to, is my point.”
“Ah. And to practice messing things up with.” He did a surprisingly rakish move with his eyebrow, but it was over so fast, she had to assume she’d imagined it. He picked up the whiskey bottle. “Another?”
“Please.”
He filled her glass with a steady hand. Either he hadn’t reached his limit yet or he was a highly competent drunk. She couldn’t decide.
The lights on the pinball machine blinked and whirled, its music competing with the rock ballad blasting from the bar stereo’s speakers. A large group squeezed by them, and Winston took a step closer.
“To the mailman,” he said.
She clinked their glasses. “Cheers.”
“Tell me something.”
She’d already told him so many things, things she couldn’t tell her dad or her sister or even Elvira.
She’d told him that for as long as she could remember, her mom disappeared. How she always knew when it was coming, because her mom would get farther and farther away, dreamy and distant, then snap at her for nothing. And one day she would get off the bus from school and find her dad in the kitchen.
Your mom’s taking some time for herself, he would tell her.
Sometimes it was just a day or two. Sometimes it was a week. Once, their mother had been gone for a month.
At night she would sneak into May’s bed and ask her big sister, When’s Mom coming back? and, Where do you think she went? and, What did I do, May?
Her sister would rub her back and tell her to be quiet. Don’t worry. Don’t think about it. Be quiet and sleep, Allie.
They weren’t the kind of trips a parent brought souvenirs home from. They were the kind Allie wasn’t supposed to ask about, because May said if they asked about it, it made their dad feel sad. May said her and Allie’s job was to be good and make it easier for him.
All of this she’d told Winston.
She’d told him how in high school she’d watched a Lifetime movie about a dad who had a secret life—two wives, two sets of kids, two entire houses in two different states—and right after that she’d started opening her mother’s mail. Credit card statements, bills, letters. Looking for clues about where she went and what she needed that she couldn’t get from her husband and her kids.
How she’d helped her mom on the computer often enough to know she always used the same password.
How the next time her mom was gone, she had logged into her bank account and drilled down into the pending transactions.
Nancy Fredericks went to Kohler, Wisconsin. On those trips, there would be hotel charges, restaurant meals, gas, shopping. Those were the trips she came home from with a new blouse or a pair of earrings, and a brightness to her that hurt Allie’s heart.
But the long trips—the bad ones, the ones she came home from with bitterness as her souvenir, the ones that led to long showers and burned dinners and endless criticism of her and her life and her choices—on those trips, she went to New York.
On those trips, there were only the plane tickets. No hotel. No restaurant bills. No gas, no shopping, nothing.
And when her mom came home from those trips, dad always slept in the basement for a long time afterward.
It was the summer she’d turned eighteen that Allie learned who her mom was meeting in New York. A guy she’d dated once when she was on-again, off-again with her dad. He was an artist who’d eventually moved to the city and talked Nancy into leaving her husband and infant daughter to be with him.
The man who was Allie’s real father.
That part, she hadn’t told Winston. He didn’t need to know everything, and she didn’t want to ruin the way he was watching her. She liked how he watched her. It had been such a long time since anyone watched her like she was important, like she meant something.
“Whatever you want to know, mailman,” she said.
For a long moment he just looked at
her, his face half-shadowed, his eyes too dark to make out their color.
Her hand rose to her throat, resting on bare skin where she’d unbuttoned her blouse. She could feel her heart beating there.
“Your mother’s a grown woman,” he said. “She’s here of her own free will, with another man who’s not your father—a man she’s presumably been in some sort of relationship with all these years. And you’ve followed her here. For the first time, after watching where she went and wondering, you’ve followed her.”
He’d told her he worked in finance. He spoke as though his mind was a vault, each sentence carefully withdrawn, checked, and counted before he handed it over.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Why.
As if she knew why. As if she’d made a plan, worked out the steps, and executed them, when in fact all that had happened was she’d dropped by to talk to her mom about some of the details of her parents’ upcoming anniversary party and found her dad in the kitchen, silently flipping through the pages of his wedding album.
Where’s mom?
She’s taking some time for herself.
And she’d known she couldn’t be good, and quiet, and stay home in Manitowoc anymore.
“I have to make her stop doing this,” she said. “I can’t stand it.”
He sipped his drink, eyes still on her.
She couldn’t be authentic, not truly, not even with this stranger.
She couldn’t tell him, My mom has to come home. Because I dumped Matt, and my sister moved to New York, and I can’t bear for even one more thing in my life to change.
She tipped her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. The whiskey burned its way down her throat, setting a tiny fire in her stomach. She had to pee. Her feet hurt. Her head felt kind of swimmy. Too much alcohol, not enough food. Not enough forethought, not enough good sense, not enough of whatever it took to keep a family together.
It wasn’t her sister May’s job to keep their family together, but May somehow always had. Her wholesome blondness, her big blue eyes, her expectation that weekends were for Packers-watching parties or the cabin. May belonged to both her mom and dad, she was theirs in a way Allie could never be, cuckoo that she was. May kept them all together effortlessly, and now that she’d left and was making her life here in New York with Ben, Allie was stuck with a job that was impossible for her to do. Stuck in a role without lines or cues. She wasn’t the one they stayed together for.
Allie had always been the one who tore them apart.
But not anymore.
“What are they doing now?” she asked with her eyes closed.
“I’ll check.”
She felt him move away. Allie took a deep breath and exhaled. She needed to ease up on the whiskey and locate some focus.
The bar was crowded enough now that she could find somewhere to observe where her mom wouldn’t see her. It was probably time to release Winston back into the stream.
He’d been fun, but she didn’t have anything to offer him. Not tonight, not in New York. Maybe if he’d strolled into her life in Manitowoc, it would be different, but—
“They’re gone.”
Her eyes flew open. “No, they’re not.”
“They are, I’m afraid.”
“You said they just ordered drinks. That was only, like, a minute ago.”
But she knew it had been longer. An hour? More? She’d lost track, and he said nothing, his face creased with concern.
She pushed away from the wall. Her pounding heart dropped into her stomach with a lurch. “You said you were watching them!”
“Allie—”
“No, you said you had this! You could see them and I couldn’t, and you told me they’d ordered drinks and they weren’t going anywhere, but now they’re gone? How can they be gone?”
A group of twenty-something Manhattanites were filing through the narrow passage from the back room, but Allie shoved them out of her way, pushing through bodies, craning to see the spot in the bar where her mother had to be even as she knew he wouldn’t lie to her, he hadn’t botched it, it had just happened.
Someone stepped on her foot as she maneuvered through the thick crowd around the bar. “Watch it!” she snapped, and she twisted sideways to pass the last person standing in her way, only to find what she’d expected.
Her mom was gone.
Again.
The ache at her breastbone felt like defeat, the catch in her throat too familiar to swallow around.
The autumn after she and Matt broke up, she would drive around the farm roads in the dark, listening to the radio and crying.
She hadn’t known before she reached this era of her life what it meant to cry—really cry. How much it hurt, and how unbelievably fucking loud it was, and how nobody wanted it. No one wanted to hear it, or to look at it, or to face the pain of it, so she’d driven in the dark and cried alone until all the extra, unbearable surplus pain had spilled over and she could go home and sleep.
But she was through with that kind of crying. She wouldn’t cry like that. Not in New York, not in this bar.
A hand fell on her shoulder, and she flinched.
“Allie.”
“Not now.”
“Allie, I’m sorry.”
She dropped her shoulder, slipping out from beneath his hand. “Just leave me alone.”
“They might still be nearby. Just outside. If they’ve lingered, talking, or perhaps they’re waiting for a cab. Shall I check?”
Behind the bar there were strings of plastic cheese lights, beer taps with the names of breweries back home, bottles of whiskey and vodka and gin, and a mirrored wall where she spotted herself among a crowd of strangers.
When she drew in a breath, she saw the hitch in her reflection’s inhale, her red cheeks, her hair a messy cloud.
I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.
Sooner or later these chains of bad decisions always ran out of momentum. What she was trying to learn was what she was supposed to do next. What May would do next, or Elvira, or even Matt. What was reasonable.
“I’ll just check outside.”
In the mirror, she watched him walk away, a dark head in a dark suit moving toward the steps that led up from the basement to the street, to Greenwich Village, to New York.
They wouldn’t be out there.
There wasn’t anything to do. She couldn’t fix it.
When he returned, his face told her everything she needed to know. He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“Still, I—”
“I shouldn’t have yelled at you. It wasn’t your responsibility. I shouldn’t have made it your job.”
Her voice had gone thin with her throat so tight.
“Come, sit down.” He caught her hand up in his and gave it a gentle tug toward the passage where they’d been hiding.
Allie let him lead her there, let him clear off the chair and sit her down, let him press her drink into her hand and hunker on one knee beside her like a suitor about to propose.
“I can’t believe I lost her,” she said.
“You can find her again.”
“No, I can’t, that’s the whole thing. I only knew from reading her email that she’d be here tonight. I don’t know anything else—not where they went, not how to find them.”
Winston cleared his throat. “I might be able to help with that.”
“That’s sweet, but there’s just nothing. There’s like, what, eight million people in this city, and they could literally be anywhere, and anyway it’s late, and I have no plan. I have my sister, but I didn’t tell her I’m here, it’s way too late to call now, I’ll have to figure out how—”
He grabbed her hand. “Allie, listen. I know something I haven’t told you. I know who he is.”
“Who who is?”
“The man your mother’s with. I know who he is.”
“I know who he is, too,
he’s Justin Olejniczak, but it doesn’t help, because—Ow!” He’d squeezed her hand too hard. She snatched it away. “What’s your deal?”
Behind his face he’d gone sharper, harder. “Who told you that name?”
“My dad, asshole.”
“Your dad knows the name of the man your mom is cheating with?”
“I don’t know what he knows. He might. I never asked him.”
Winston shook his head. “You’re going to have to explain that.”
I don’t have to explain shit to you.
It was her first instinct, the one she too often obeyed—to push him away, burn the bridge, make the impulsive decision.
But his mouth had already relaxed from the thin, hard line of a moment earlier. He was kneeling on the floor of a dirty bar in an expensive suit because he wanted to help her, and he didn’t deserve for her to dump on him just because she was having what ranked as one of the top-three worst moments of her life.
Just because she didn’t want to tell him how she knew what she knew. What she’d known since the number-one worst moment of her life.
She blew out a breath. “He’s my father. Justin Olejniczak. That’s my real father’s name. My birth father, I guess I’m supposed to say, not my ‘real’ father, because my real father’s the one who told me the summer after I graduated high school that he wasn’t actually my dad.”
Winston went very still, his eyes focused on a spot somewhere past her right ear. “That man—the man with your mother.”
“Yeah.”
“He’s your father.”
“He’s my birth father. My father in haploid cell, only. Not even in name.”
And then Winston didn’t say anything, and Allie looked at the pinball machine, the lights and colors, the looping music, and put her hand over her heart, surprised.
She’d never told anyone before.
Not her sister, not Sal at the antique shop, not Matt, not Elvira. She’d wanted to, sometimes—to shout at May when she was angry, You’re not even my sister! Or to scream it into the crowd at the Badgers stadium, everyone cheering for the touchdown while she yelled the truth to no one at all.
But she never did it, because when her dad sat her down that summer and choked out her family’s deepest secret, he’d made her complicit in the lies.
