Page 13 of Loverboy
“Why? She hired someone else?”
“No. But I can’t do this job. I can’t fake it.”
“Dude,” Max says sternly. “You broke into a drug kingpin’s safe with nothing but a cell phone and a set of screwdrivers. You hacked into a Russian mobster’s bank account on a first-generation iPod. Don’t even try to tell me you can’t figure out how to work an espresso machine.”
I groan so loudly that a passing hipster’s rescue pug lets out a yip of surprise. “It’s not just the mechanics. I could probably figure that out. It’s the pretentious coffee vocabulary. I’ve got, like, thirty-six hours to learn how to be a smug asshole?”
“Don’t trash talk coffee culture,” Max grumbles. “Some of my best friends are espresso products. Take the evening to rest up, and then get your butt into the office at 0900. I’m going to fix this.”
“What if we rented a room in the building across the street?” I suggest, looking up at the row of old brick facades. “I could stake the place out the old-fashioned way.”
“We’re trying this my way first,” Max thunders. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
Then he hangs up on me.
4
Posy
“I…will...cats…it,”my five-year-old nephew slowly reads from a book in my lap. Then he squirms on the sofa beside me.
“What's that third word?” I ask. “Sound it out. What sound does 'ch' say?”
“Catch,” he says slowly. "I willcatchit.”
"Excellent," I praise him as I turn the page.
This is a typical evening for me—helping Aaron practice reading, while my sister shoots us worried glances from her seat at our kitchen table. And since I wake up so early, my bedtime is barely later than my five-year-old nephew’s.
Aaron slides his pajama-covered rear down the sofa, kicks the coffee table, then wiggles himself into a vertical position again. Reading is whole body work, apparently.
I take a sip of my wine while he slowly reads all five words from the next page.
The tutoring is a favor I offered to my sister after my father’s latest crack about Aaron's reading skills during one of our rare visits to his mansion. My father is a celebrated restauranteur, as well as a successful businessman.
He's also an evil shithead. It took me more than twenty years to realize that, and an additional decade to stop caring what he thinks of my life choices. But I'm finally free of him.
Mostly free, anyway. Ginny and I still struggle sometimes, although with different sets of daddy issues. Ginny is severely dyslexic, and our father never missed a chance to make her feel stupid. She spent her teen years acting out, trying to prove to him that she couldn't be controlled.
I took the opposite strategy—spending lots of energy trying to please that man so he'd notice me and love me. It didn't work. But it did start me down the path of a career I hated, and also led me to marry the wrong man.
My ex and I have been apart for a year now. My father refers to my divorce as my "greatest failure." As if my life were a string of them. I graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University! I was a VP at a Fortune 500 company!
None of that matters to him. He sees me as a divorcée and a failed banker. It was actually daddy’s red-faced sermon over my divorce that served as a final wakeup call. Instead of comforting me, he told me I’d thrown away the only good man who’d ever bother with me.
That was the day that I finally saw our father-daughter relationship clearly, and it was a real wakeup call. I’d spent my entire life trying to impress men who were not worth the trouble.
So I started to make some changes. I mostly cut my father out of my life. If it weren’t for Aaron and Ginny, I’d never show my face in his home again.
That wasn’t my only act of bravery, either. I also quit my dull job, cutting out another thing in my life that made me feel small. Then I opened my pie shop on the ground floor of this building—the one asset I retained after my divorce. The second and third floors were already rented out when I inherited the building. The vacant apartment—spanning the fourth and fifth floors with two big bedrooms and a roof terrace—I kept for me, my sister, and her child.
We’re a strange little family of three. Ginny is an artist and a yoga instructor. She also works in my pie shop when Aaron is at school.
As for me, I rarely leave the corner of Prince and Mercer Streets. I get up too early, work too much, and see too little of the sky. But I make all my own choices. And I make excellent pies.
“THE END!” Aaron shouts. Then he slams the book closed.
“That was great. One more?” I ask.
