Page 6 of Pipe Dreams
He stole a glance at her face in profile. Every day she looked more like Shelly. She had the same curls in her red-brown hair. And she bit her lip when she was concentrating, just like her mother had.
Poor, doomed Shelly. Married the day after high school graduation to a guy who did not know what the fuck he was doing. A mother at nineteen. A hockey wife who movedfrom their home town in Ontario to Quebec and then to Long Island at the whim of the teams who traded him.
Dead before her thirty-first birthday. Her last words were, “Take care of our baby.”
Mike tapped the steering wheel with his thumbs.I’ve got her, he promised Shelly silently. To his daughter he said, “Be good for Hans while I’m away.”
“I’m always good for Hans.”
That was fairly accurate. “Haul yourself out of bed in the morning, though, so he doesn’t have to beg.”
“Sure,” she said, face still in her phone. “I’ll get up on time so he doesn’t go all queen on me. That’s his phrase,” she said before he could object.
He laughed, because it did sound like Hans, their live-in violin teacher and nanny. Ormanny, as Elsa called him.
“Why can’t I just come to D.C. with you, anyway? It’s the play-offs!”
“There’s this thing called school.”
“I went to Nashville with you in third grade.”
“That was different. You were just a little kid, and we’d made it to the third round.”
“So if you make it to the third round again, I want to travel.”
“We’ll see. How’s the homework situation tonight?”
“Evil, evil, evil.”
“That good, huh?”
“Fucking algebra.”
“Elsa. No f-bombs. They haven’t assigned you to a tutor?”
“Nope! Thank God.” His daughter hated math. She and her mother had spent some very long nights at the kitchen table, Shelly explaining how to add fractions or whatever for the tenth time, Elsa crying that she couldn’t do it. Shelly arguing that she wasn’t trying hard enough.
He always conveniently removed himself from those battles. But now all the parenting problems were his alone. Teaching his daughter algebra was far above his pay grade,but he knew Shelly wouldn’t want her death to be the reason that their daughter never learned math. So he movedmath tutorto the top of his lengthy worry list.
The short trip home took twenty minutes in stop-and-start traffic, but he wouldn’t have minded if it took even longer, since Elsa had to talk to him while they were in the car together. Once they reached their brownstone she would disappear into her bedroom, headphones on.
“What else did I miss?” he asked, braking for yet another red light.
“Hans and Justin and I went to that new sushi place on Clark Street. You have to come with us next time. I ate octopus tentacles just to gross out Hans.”
Beacon snorted. “Did they have anything he liked?”
“He said the tempura was killer.”
“Good to know.” Their babysitter indulged Elsa too much. It was hard to say no to a grieving seventh grader. Beacon couldn’t seem to say it, either.
“One icky thing happened.”
“Yeah?”
“When we were walking home these boys were awful to Hans and Justin.”
Uh-oh. “Awful how?”
