He cleaned at times of peril, when he was mad, miserable, or processing.
Or all three.
For a break-in, we hadn’t sustained much damage. The bathroom mirror could be replaced, right? But we didn’t even use it that much. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world. The worst thing in the world had already happened.
“Did you want me to call it in?” I said.
Could he hear me? I watched his shoulders grinding at the sink. He could hear me.
Can you be okay with it? he’d asked. And I hadn’t answered.
I went to get the broom.
Sweeping the hall back toward the pub, I remembered a hundred days just like this one, helping Alex open or close the bar, sometimes just to be near him, to be part of his life. People had tried to intervene, but it had always been the two of us.
Forgive me for freaking out that someone else had nosed into our family, without me realizing.
I would figure it out. I had dealt with change over and over again as a kid. Not willingly, and not well.Alexwas the one who had trouble with surprise. So maybe I’d become more like him over the years. Marisa had made me one way, and then Alex had made me another. Was I somehow a product of both of them? It felt weird to think of myself that way. As a product of the two of them. Alex was not my bio dad; that has always been made clear. But it was also weird to think of myself as a product. As a result, instead of something in progress. I felt very much still in progress.
I swept along the stage, everything in me pulling toward that spotlight.
Man, IhopedI was still in progress.
I swept around the legs of the tables and started pulling the chairs down. As chair legs scraped noisily into place, Alex lifted his head and our eyes met briefly through the pass-through, an acknowledgment of something, without words.
I had some say in who I was, what I became, didn’t I? Who did I want to be?
Petty and small in the face of someone else’s big happiness?
A spangled girl, brash and big-mouthing about thetruth, when everything about her was constructed for an audience?
Was I no closer to the person I wanted to be than I was twenty years ago when I’d slipped that butter knife off Alex’s kitchen table into my pocket?
I was sweeping under the corner booth, noticing the red café curtains in the window were still tied in a knot, when I saw something poking out from between the seat cushions.
Ah, the Capone hoard, at last.
Usually the only thing to be found stuffed between these cushions were crumbs, but I’d found a pair of women’s underwear there once. People could be messy in so many ways.
This whatever-it-was was red, and the booth leather was red, so I almost hadn’t spotted it in the shadows under the table. It was really shoved in. I wrestled it out, plenty of crumbs in the bargain.
It was a flat, squarish package, in red Christmas paper that had seen better days. The paper was dotted with little white snowflakes. With a crushed stick-on bow.
Alex stood at the bar. “Something for lost and found?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I mean… I don’t think so. I think this is… I think this is for me. From Marisa.”
He walked over and we both stared at the package. “She must have been visited by three ghosts,” he said.
“I think she might be… sorry?”
“That is a dangerous position to take,” Alex said.
Buddy, I knew it. I looked up at him, then away.
“The police came by,” he said.
“Yeah, I know.”
