They stared at each other for a few moments. “You want to get married.”
“Fine,” he said, “I want to get married.”
“Fine.” She walked back and sat on the sofa.
“Good,” he replied, walking over and sitting next to her. They sat there, next to each other, both staring straight ahead, not saying anything for several minutes. Then he picked up his beer and took a sip. “So, we’re gonna have a baby,” he said, still not looking at her.
“And we’re gonna get married,” she added.
“I’ll be in my seventies when this kid graduates college,” he said, his voice flat.
“If you’re expecting me to wear some big frilly white dress and walk down an aisle somewhere, you can forget it,” she replied.
“My seventies,” he repeated. He took another sip of his beer.
She looked over at him, studying his face. Then she reached over and slid her arm under his, grasping his hand. “You’ll be a better father in your seventies than any other man I’ve ever known at any age.”
He squeezed her hand, then turned to look at her. “You’ll look beautiful no matter what you wear,” he said.
They sat there for a long time, both of them struggling to adjust to the sudden, tectonic shift in their worlds. Neither of them was particularly comfortable with change, and Lissa knew that this was a bigger change in Kozlowski’s life than he could ever have anticipated. But she also knew that he would handle it. As much as he hated change, he was the most reliable man she had ever met.
As she considered the changes to her own life, a strange feeling came over her. It was a feeling with which she had little experience, and it overwhelmed her as she tried to put her finger on what it was. It took several moments, but at last she figured it out: for the first time in her life she felt totally, utterly happy.
Sally wasn’t used to the quiet. She’d spent her life in neighborhoods where the noise never died. There was a constant stream of yelling and slamming doors and sirens. There was always a bar nearby that violated last call, and her mother was always one of the last to leave, often just coherent enough to find her way home. Sally couldn’t remember a night when her sleep wasn’t interrupted.
In Finn’s apartment near the top of Bunker Hill at night, though, there was no noise. Every once in a while a car would drive by, but the cars on the hill had decent mufflers and never backfired, so she had to strain to hear them. There was no screaming, and people kept their televisions low enough that their neighbors didn’t have to listen to the show on next door. She found the silence disconcerting. Left alone with her thoughts she felt physical discomfort, as if she were lying in a pool of insects crawling over her skin, around her eyes and ears, into her skull.
She sat up in bed. Finn was downstairs, and she was alone in the guest room. She stood up and walked over to her duffel, reached inside, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. There was a fire escape landing outside her window; she opened the screen and stepped out onto it. Sitting down, she pulled out a cigarette and struck a match. She took a drag as she thought about her predicament. Notwithstanding the kindness her father’s lawyer had shown her, she was still pretty sure she was fucked.
She’d had a glimmer of hope a year before, when her mother left her with Devon. She’d felt deserted, but she was old enough to recognize that her mother had sunk so low that she wasn’t able to function. Sally had been taking care of herself for a couple of years by then, and had already come to terms with the fact that her mother loved her drugs more than she loved her daughter.
When her mother announced that Sally was going to go to live with her father, Sally was shocked. Her mother had never mentioned her father before. Sally had grown up under the impression that her mother wasn’t entirely sure who her father was. That wouldn’t have surprised Sally; monogamy didn’t seem to be an instinct her mother possessed. Not even on a weekly basis. Sometimes, Sally feared, not on a nightly basis.
And so, when her mother announced that she was taking Sally to live with her father, Sally allowed herself to hope. For just a split second, she indulged in the fairy tale all unhappy children hold in their hearts. She let herself believe that she was a part of something greater. She let herself envision her father as a lost prince who would deliver her from her life of squalor and fear.
Devon hadn’t quite fulfilled her dreams.
It wasn’t his fault, she knew. Sally’s mother had never told Devon about her. They showed up that morning on Devon’s stoop, and Devon had come to the door warily. Sally wondered what had transpired between the two of them for her not to tell him he had a daughter, and for him to approach the door that day with such trepidation. They never told her, though.
The introductions were short. “She’s yours,” her mother said. “Her name’s Sally.”
Devon had just stood there, his mouth open, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his lips. He was wearing a dirty T-shirt and he hadn’t shaved in days. Neither one of them knew what to say. For a moment, Sally thought he was going to slam the door in their faces. She wouldn’t have blamed him, either. He didn’t, though. After a healthy pause, he said, “I’m Devon.”
To his credit, he never complained about taking her in. Most guys would have, Sally knew. Most guys would have at least asked for a paternity test. That was never an issue with Devon, though. He seemed to accept instinctively the fact that Sally was his daughter. In some ways, he even seemed excited about the prospect. He treated her with a sort of fearful awe. She supposed it was something approaching love, but she had little with which to compare it to verify her suspicion.
All the love in the world, though, couldn’t improve their living conditions. It was a step up from her mother’s situation, but then a step up from crack houses wasn’t exactly the Ritz. She gathered quickly from his schedule that Devon didn’t have any legal employment, and she deduced that he was a thief. She asked him about it once, and he didn’t even try to lie. That didn’t bother her; in her experience, theft seemed a minor sin. She just wished he was a better thief; he was barely making enough to feed them and pay the rent. Every once in a while she would catch him looking at her with what she could only describe as shame in his eyes. As if he was failing her. Maybe he was, a little, but she was safe and dry. She’d learned not to hope for more.
Recently, that look had begun to recede from his eyes. He’d seemed more confident; optimistic, even. Once again, she had allowed herself to believe that maybe-just maybe-better things were on the way. Now he was in jail. She vowed never to feel hope again. It was a promise she’d made before, but seemed unable to keep. Hope was crack to her; she couldn’t seem to give it up no matter how hard she tried.
She took another drag off her cigarette just as the silhouette of a head appeared in the window to her room, making her flinch. “You scared me,” she said.
Finn poked his head out the window. “I scared you? I came up to see if you needed anything and found the room empty; talk about scared. What are you doing?”
She considered lying, but decided against it. She held her cigarette up in view.
“You shouldn’t smoke,” Finn said.
“You’re not my father,” she replied. It came out with a harsher edge than she intended. “ Devon lets me smoke,” she explained. “My mother was too fucked up to care one way or another.”
Finn climbed out onto the fire escape. It was an awkward fit out the window for a grown man. Once outside, he stood up and looked around. “I’ve never been out here,” he said. She looked around. The window was located on the back side of the building, and the fire escape looked sideways on the hill. Down below she could see the street and the upscale brownstones across the way.