“It would be the gentlemanly thing to do.”
“I’m not a gentleman and I don’t sweep fucking floors.”
“Nice.”
He quirks his head to the side like he’s going to say something else, but before he can, my dad walks through the door.
After two full days.
He lumbers in, not quite staggering, but unsteady on his feet, looking straight ahead.
Like Logan, my dad’s tall—broad—and he’s handsome in a rough, working-man kind of way. The type of guy who showers after work, not before. Or, at least, he used to be.
Now, especially when he’s coming off a bender, he tends to hunch, making him look bent and older than he is. His flannel shirt is wrinkled and dirty and his black-gray hair hangs in his eyes.
“What’s this, Ellie?” he slurs.
And the weird thing is—I hope he yells at me. Grounds me. Takes away my phone. Like a normal parent would, a regular father . . . who actually cared.
“I, uh, had some people over. It got a little crazy. I’ll clean everything up before we open tomorrow.”
He doesn’t even glance my way. Just gives a small, short nod that I notice only because I’m watching so closely.
“I’m goin’ to bed. I’ll be up to help Marty when you leave for school.”
Then he clomps between the tables and through the swinging kitchen door, to the back steps that lead to our apartment upstairs.
I bow my head and go back to cleaning the floor.
A few minutes later without looking up, I tell Logan, “You don’t have to do that, you know.”
“Don’t have to do what?”
“Worry. You’re all tense, like you think he’s going to hurt me or something. He can barely exert the energy to speak to me—he’d never hit me.”
Logan looks down at me with those deep, dark eyes, like he can see straight through me, read my mind.
“It doesn’t have to be his fists. There’s all kinds of ways to hurt people. Isn’t there?”
Usually, it doesn’t bother me. I don’t let it. But the last few days haven’t been usual. And big, giant aching tears well in my eyes.
“He hates me,” I say simply. But then a sob rattles in my chest, shaking my shoulders. “My dad hates me.”
Logan’s brows draw close together, and after a moment, he takes a deep breath. Then, with a grace that’s surprising for a guy his size, he walks over and sinks down onto the floor next to me, legs bent, forearms resting on his knees, back against the wall.
He leans in close and whispers so gently, “I don’t think that’s true.”
I shake my head and swipe my cheeks. “You don’t understand. I was sick. The night my mom was killed, I had a sore throat, cough. I kept complaining about it. The pharmacy down the block was closed for renovations, so she took the subway.”
When you grow up in a city, your parents have the mugging talk with you at a young age. The one about how no amount of money or jewelry is worth your life. So, if someone wants those things, just hand them over. They can be replaced—you can’t.
“He wrote us a letter a few years ago from prison—the guy who did it. He said he was sorry, that he didn’t mean to shoot her, that the gun just . . . went off.”
I glance up to find Logan looking and listening intently.
“I don’t know why anyone thinks stuff like that is supposed to make people feel better. That he was sorry. That he didn’t mean to do what he did. It didn’t for us. If anything, it just proved that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And that . . . if I didn’t exist, the love of my dad’s life would still be here. I’m not being dramatic—it’s just a fact. And that’s why he can’t even look at me.”
We’re quiet for a few minutes. Me, leaning back on my calves, Logan looking straight ahead.
Then he rubs his neck and asks, “You know how they say that New Jersey is the armpit of America?”
“I always thought that was shitty. I like Jersey.”
“Where I grew up—East Amboy—it’s like the taint of Wessco.”
A quick laugh busts out of my throat.
“There was this guy—Wino Willie—everyone called him that. He’d spend the whole day begging, walking the streets looking for loose change in the gutters. Then he’d buy the biggest, cheapest bottle of liquor he could get.”
The steady sound of Logan’s deep voice, the lilting accent, is calming. Soothing, like a dark lullaby.
“But he wasn’t always Wino Willie. Once, he was William. And William had a pretty wife, three little kids. They were poor, we were all poor, and they lived in a tiny, one-bedroom flat on the fourth floor of a building that was falling apart—but they were happy.”