Madly (New York 2)

e-watching and eating overpriced Popsicles and drinking craft beer.

The sky was the kind of intense blue that went with clear, laser-beam heat, but up on the High Line there were musicians playing guitar and cello, babies in strollers, and everywhere a landscape of faces and skin and bodies so different from the human landscape of Manitowoc that she couldn’t think about it, because it made her want to cry.

She understood why May had moved to New York, she really did. The people, the energy, the diversity—it was wonderful. But Allie couldn’t look at a crowd without checking every face against the possibility it might be her mother, and walking alongside Winston required her to actively suppress the part of her that wanted to ask him what he knew, ask him to help, ask him ask him ask him.

Earlier, with Jean, they’d done some Internet research on their phones, trying to figure out if there was a way Winston might be able to arrange a meeting between Justice and Allie without risk. But the more they’d looked into it, the clearer it had been that Winston could very easily get in trouble for helping her.

He had a daughter.

Allie couldn’t ask him. She just couldn’t.

“Would you like a taste?” Winston asked. She held out her hand for his Popsicle.

He’d done his cuff-link ritual, placing them carefully in his shirt pocket and rolling up his sleeves. The sun showed up all the silver in his short salt-and-pepper hair, lit the lines at the corners of his eyes and beside his mouth, but it only made her like him more to see this evidence that he’d had a life before she knew him, a history that brought him across the ocean to New York, to the High Line, with her.

She bit off a bite of pomegranate ice and sighed. “That’s delicious.”

“Mind you don’t drip on your dress.”

She held it away from her, pulling her legs and stomach back. “You better take it. The dress is vintage, and if I stain it, I can’t sell it.”

“It’s lovely.”

“Right? I found it at an estate sale in Milwaukee. This woman had been a big arts booster, and she had rooms full of clothes and furs, almost all of it in good shape. I had an insider who let me look over everything before the sale, and I cleaned up.”

Winston’s expression betrayed his curiosity. “You sell vintage clothing, then?”

“I sell vintage everything, but yeah, a lot of clothes and jewelry. I have a website for that stuff that’s been around about…eight years? Ish? So it’s got a pretty good reputation, and then I’ve got the Etsy shop, eBay, my Instagram, all that.”

They passed what must have been a factory building once, its glass panes gleaming in the setting sunlight. They walked slowly, caught between a young family in front of them with a toddler and a group of teenagers behind them, but the pace felt right for the night—less like walking and more like the promenade she’d read about Italians doing, where they went outside after their long afternoon naps and strolled around, the cooling air on their skin, greeting their neighbors, voices twining together to welcome the night.

He took her bare Popsicle stick and tossed it with his own into a trash can. “How did you settle on that?”

“I didn’t really settle on it, it just sort of happened. When I was a kid, I loved this big antique shop out by the interstate, Sal’s. Sal was the old guy who owned it, and I’d pester my dad into driving me there on weekends so I could spend, like, some whole afternoon poking through jars of buttons or letterpress type or wax records. Sal was a hoarder, and it was kind of a huge space. I liked it so much there.”

“What about it?”

He reached out and took her hand in his. It felt natural, even as she couldn’t not notice it. He’s holding my hand.

“Um, I’m not sure, the smell of it, for one thing. You know that antique shop smell, like old crumbling books and dust and clothes and a little bit of mothballs? I liked that smell so much. Still do. And I guess, for me, there’s some kind of romance to the things that survive, because everything has a story, even if we don’t know what it is. I loved making the stories up, like, who used to have this toy rolling pin, what she looked like, what her mom was like, if she had any pets. May thought it was the most boring place in the world, but Sal understood me.”

“You were friends.”

“Yeah. It’s kind of sad, actually, because he died when I was in college, and it wasn’t until I came home on break that I found out he was gone. No one had thought to tell me. I was so angry. Terribly, terribly hurt, that I’d missed having a chance to say goodbye to him, and that I’d missed…I don’t know. Knowing he was my friend, for real. And everything about the end.”

Winston squeezed her hand. “Let’s rest a bit.” He steered her toward a small lawn, thick grass the color of his tie, and found them a place among the couples and families and singles reading books or absorbed in their phones.

Allie laid back in the grass, arms above her head, so she could look at the sky. Her heart always got heavy thinking of Sal—what he’d given her, what she’d learned from him.

“He didn’t have any kids, just this kind of terrible bunch of nieces and nephews and second cousins, none of whom ever came to visit. And I got a call from his lawyer’s office asking me to come in, and it turned out he’d left me all his stuff. Not the property his antique mall was on, which had been in his family forever, used to be their farm, but all the antiques in his shop and a four-story stone building downtown that used to be a department store but had sat empty for years. It turned out he’d bought it for me years earlier. I was twenty when he died.”

“That must have been overwhelming.”

“Yeah, but it was great, too. I can still remember the first time I went to an estate sale on my own, after Sal had died. We’d been to so many, but it was always him telling me what was worth buying, what a good price was, and I was just this kid who didn’t belong there. Once the bidding started, that was when I realized how much I knew—and that was the best feeling, I think maybe one of the best days I’ve ever had.”

She sat up, wanting to see his face. She felt tender talking about her work. It wasn’t something her family asked questions about or understood particularly well, and she’d learned to keep it to herself if she wanted to avoid getting a lecture from her mother about how much steadier it would be to have a job with insurance and a salary.

With Matt, it had been the opposite problem—too many questions, too many opinions. His ownership of her work had made her want to hide it away.