“Downstairs?”
“The bodega. They sell beer. I saw the signs in the window and everything.”
So we walked downstairs to the bodega. I bought two sixes from Willie Shahid—though I didn’t know his name yet. Meghan looked like she was having a grand old time, buying beer in Frankford. Meanwhile, I worried some crackhead in a ski mask was going to pop in, wave a gun around and ask for the keys to the late-model Prius parked in the hospital garage up the street.
I was also mildly alarmed when the tab for two sixes of Yuengling came to $18, leaving me with about five bucks until my final paycheck was direct deposited the next day. But hey, the lady wanted to get her beer on. Tonight, money was no object.
Tonight, we were toasting my sad return home.
About an hour later I’d killed four of the Yuenglings and lined the empties up on top of Grandpop Henry’s massive cherrywood desk. Meghan, first beer still in hand, was on the floor going through his stuff without shyness or apology.
“I’m a snoop.”
There wasn’t much to Apartment 3-A—just a big room with a bathroom off to one side, a small closet on the other. A rusty radiator in the corner for all your heating needs. A desktop circulating fan for cooling, which would do jack shit once summer really got under way. A small kitchenette with a miniature oven barely big enough for a TV dinner and a quarter-sized fridge that could accommodate beer or food, but not both at the same time.
Grandpop Henry moved here in 2002, but I’d never visited. I feel a little guilty about that—but then again, I also didn’t go out of my way to return to Frankford either.
Every few minutes the thunder of the Frankford El smashed through the silence, and through the dirty front windows you could see the rushing silver of the train cars as they ground to a halt at the Margaret Street station, then, after a ten-second delay, started moving again, and the rumble would build to a deafening crescendo that bounced off the fronts of the buildings all the way down to the next station.
The place was reasonably clean—no nicotine buildup on the walls, no grease caked on the ceiling of the kitchenette. Grandpop Henry, it seemed, owned only two pieces of furniture: a big houndstooth couch and the big cherrywood desk. No bed, no kitchen table, no chairs. Guess when it comes down to it, all you needed was something to sit on and something to put things on.
Still, the room was cluttered, a ridiculous amount of floor space devoted to cardboard boxes, plastic milk crates and shoe boxes crammed with papers. This was what Meghan picked through.
“What does your grandfather do for a living?”
“He’s retired. But he used to be a night watchman at a hospital. My mom told me he liked the hours, the lack of conscious people.”
“Huh.”
“What’s the huh for?”
“He’s got a lot of papers here. Newspaper clippings, genealogy charts, handwritten notes. A lot of medical reports, it looks like. I thought maybe he was a journalist or something. Like you.”
“My grandpop? I don’t think he was much of a reader.”
“Hmmm.”
After a while Meghan showed me a yellowed envelope.
“Henryk Wadcheck?”
She mispronounced it the way most people do: wad-chek. As in, check your wad. The kids in grade school figured it out pretty quick.
“My grandfather’s name. It’s Polish. And pronounced vahd-chek.”
“My, that’s veeeered. So wait—is that your last name?”
“Technically.”
“Your name is Mickey Wadcheck? How did I not know this?”
“My dad played music under the name Anthony Wade. So I adopted Wade for my byline. You would, too, if you had a name like vahd-chek.”
Meghan smiled.
“You know I’m totally calling you Mr. Wadcheck from now on.”
“Please don’t.”
Bad enough I have “Mickey” for a handle. The name on my birth certificate is “Mick,” in honor of Messrs. Jagger and Ronson, two of my dad’s musician heroes. You can’t call a five-year-old “Mick,” of course, so it soon became “Mickey.” And my classmates right away thought of the mouse. My childhood was full of M-I-C (see you real soon…gaywad!) jokes, not to mention that horrible stretch in 1982 when Toni Basil totally friggin’ ruined my life. I was ten, and I swore a blood oath to crush the skull of the next person to tell me I was so fine, so fine I blew their mind. The only person who had it worse that year was a classmate named Eileen, who didn’t understand why her leering male classmates were suddenly talking about coming on her.
“Oh my God—will you look at this.”
Meghan crawled over and handed me a photo of a man in a WWII-era military uniform. My grandpop.
“He looks just like you, Mr. Wadcheck!”
“Don’t call me that. And yeah, I’ve been told there’s a resemblance, but I don’t see it. Maybe if you saw him in person…”
“Bah. You’re a dead ringer.”
I twisted open another Yuengling as Meghan picked through another box, sitting on the floor, legs crossed, shoeless. I liked the way her blond hair dangled in front of her face and it didn’t seem to bother her in the least.
“Did you two used to spend a lot of time together?”
“Not really. Grandpop Henry’s always been a little weird. Kind of gruff, spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child kind of guy. Imagine Walter Matthau in Grumpy Old Men.”
“I thought you two might be close, considering…”
She left that hanging midair, waiting for me to finish: what had happened to my father.
Late one night at McGillin’s Ale House, the oldest continuously operating bar in Philly, I’d told her about what had happened to my dad. She didn’t press, I didn’t elaborate. It had never come up again, until now.
I took another pull from my beer.
“Yeah, well, no. I see my grandmother a lot.”
“Define a lot.”
“Holidays? I see her for at least one or two of the important ones.”
“Thought as much. So they’re divorced?”
“A long time ago. My dad was ten or eleven, I think.”
I regretted bringing my dad up, because whenever I thought about him with alcohol in my system, I started getting pissed off and morose. And I didn’t want to be pissed off or morose in front of Meghan.
I tried to lighten the mood.
“So to recap: I’m jobless. I live in a bad neighborhood. And I don’t have much in the way of male role models.”
Meghan smiled, leaning up and touching my face. I loved the feel of her fingertips. They were cool and warm at the same time.
“And yet, you’re such a gentleman, Mr. Wadcheck.”
“Please don’t call me Mr. Wadcheck.”
We sat there together, pretty much easygoing quiet, for another hour or so. I finished two more beers and wondered how long I’d be stuck in this dump. This time Meghan and I were enjoying together was unlikely to happen again. I wouldn’t ask her to drive to Frankford again. Not in a million years.
So if I wanted to hang out with her again I’d have to take the El back down to Rittenhouse Square. And until I found a job, I couldn’t see myself doing that. What was I going to do, buy her a dog and ask her to sit with me by the little bronze goat in the park?
A few minutes before midnight, just as I was really starting to dread the idea of walking Meghan down Frankford Avenue back to her car, she blindsided me.
“Hey, you mind if I crash here for the night?”
My stomach did a happy little flip. But I played it cool.
“Yeah, sure. I mean, no, I don’t mind. That would be great. Really great.”