My eyes well as I smile at his smile in this photo. It looks so real. It’s a smile I haven’t seen in years, and I can’t understand that even when I try. Which is why I keep coming back to this snapshot—and a few others, which are tucked into my baby book in my room. Years ago, my father used to spend time with Isa’s regularly. The men in this photo were his friends. And now they aren’t. Years ago, my father was an attorney for Isa’s, and now he isn’t.
A few years ago, something changed. And then that one time I asked about Mr. Arnoldi, my mother told me not to again.
“Ever?” I’d pressed, being a pest.
“Not around your father,” she’d said.
Sometime shortly after, Becca started to decline, and Mom told me my father was dealing with “challenges at work.” Over the months that followed, Dad was home less and less, until finally, we only saw him at dinner—if then.
It’s still like that.
I don’t understand. Maybe I don’t need to, but the whole thing makes me sad. Both my parents seem to have their own lives, sans kids.
I look at the picture of Becca on my father’s desk. It’s a tiny snapshot—just her face—before I leave. I grab my backpack from the chair outside the library door and slip it on. Then I hurry down the hardwood hall, hating that I wasted even one second that I could have spent with Becca.LucaI thought of fucking off today, but here I am—ass parked on the old, familiar F train. Jane in Pink has her usual falafel breakfast clutched against her pale pink blazer, so that’s mostly what I smell as I pull out a paperback and shift against the hard plastic seat.
The train starts down the tracks, and Jane starts on her damn falafel. I don’t know how she eats it standing up, but that’s how she rolls. I’d put her at 50, maybe, with coppery red hair and sharp brown eyes. I admire the way she won’t wear anything but pink, but I wish she’d start eating that goddamn falafel before she gets on. Every weekday, makes my stomach growl till we pull into Jay Street.
Red Hook people mostly work on this side of the bridge, but there’s a few who get on C train with me at Jay and head toward Wall Street. Jane’s not one of them, but still, I think she sort of knows me; I’ve been taking this train on school days since the start of last year.
When I slip my book into my backpack and stand up at Jay, Jane’s eyes flicker to my face.
Yeah, yeah. I quirk a brow up for her, and her gaze plummets to the remains of her falafel.
Yep, that’s what I thought. It’s okay, Jane. Ugly ass black eye, but it’ll be gone in no time.
The C is cleaner than the F train. They clean it with something that smells like lemons. The scent is strongest in the mornings and more muted when I get back on the C at Chambers after school.
I should probably stand up on the C, since it’s a longer ride with more old people, but turns out I can’t. I hardly ever rode a train till junior year, when I started at my new school, and I found out fast trains make me dizzy as shit.
If I sit still and focus on reading, it’s a little better. Today, I’ve got a Stephen King book, and it does its job. I forget I’m on a train till we’re approaching Fulton. Back into fiction land until Chambers, and that’s my stop. I slip the book into a slot inside my backpack and keep my head down as I step off the train and start toward the street.
I can feel the looks I’m getting as I pass the crowd that’s heading into the station. I tell myself it doesn’t matter. A week or so, and the eye will fade from ugly purple black to greenish yellow, and it won’t be such a flashing light.
I stop as soon as I get into the sunlight, set my backpack on a bench, and pull out a ball cap my pal Missanelli gave me. Dude wants me to go out for the baseball team, but I don’t think that’s gonna work. Not with what I’ve got going this summer.
Don’t think about that shit right now.
I fit the ball cap onto my head. It’s deep purple with twin interlocked “M”s in gold thread on the front. With the cap on and my chin tucked, I don’t get as many looks. It’s a sunny day, and the cap’s bill casts a shadow over my eyes. Plus, shit’s busy.
Chambers Street always is. Guys unloading frozen cuts of pork from delivery trucks, people hawking stuff from stuff stands, all the shop doors swinging, cool air wafting out onto the sidewalk. Lots of people walking to work, and a few people pedaling. It’s early October and the leaves are just starting to turn, with streaks of gold near their tips and spots of brown creeping along rich green facades. It’s a perfect fifty-seven degrees this morning, according to a digital sign above a store’s awning.