Madly (New York 2)

The words sat there, an admission he hadn’t particularly wanted to make to this woman from a town in Wisconsin whose name he could not spell, whose rural lanes and hedges he couldn’t begin to imagine.

“You don’t really live here.”

“Beatrice needed a parent close by.”

His use of the past tense didn’t escape him. He wondered if Allie had noticed.

They drank their coffee in silence. Winston tried to remember what had made him think it wise to make a list with this woman, to check off one emotional and sexual dare after another until he reached this terrifically vulnerable moment of understanding what he’d done.

He hadn’t thought it wise. He hadn’t thought.

He didn’t live here, and neither did Allie. Whatever happened next, whether he helped her or not, she would leave, and he would be left to muddle through this bit of his life as he’d been doing. Only now he’d know exactly what it meant to be doing it alone.

“I own a bowling alley,” she said. “In Manitowoc.”

“Is it profitable?”

“It closed down. I haven’t reopened it yet. I’

m trying to decide what to do with it, but it was so cheap, and no one else wanted it. I also own an empty grocery store, a minimall—that actually has tenants in it, and makes pretty good money—a couple of farms. A big empty office building that used to belong to the nuclear power plant. And—” She counted on her fingers, one, two, three, four, five, six. “—seven different storefronts on the same block as mine. Some of them have apartments above.”

“That’s a significant amount of property for a young woman.”

It was Allie’s turn to shrug. “The first time it was kind of an accident—I just heard this storefront was for sale, and I knew I had enough money saved up to buy it, so I asked my dad if he thought I should and then just went for it. But after I owned a few, people started coming to me when they had something to sell, and I like it.”

She turned, hiking a knee up onto the seat and laying her shinbone across the cushion, her foot dangling over the edge. “I buy a lot of stuff—antiques, artifacts, clothes—and I buy a lot of property, and some of it ends up in my house, on my walls, on my own body. Some of it I find new homes for. Or I figure out something to do with it that’s different, like turning a bowling alley into a roller rink that’s also a community center where people can rent out rooms for meetings and parties.”

“Every place needs someone with that sort of vision. Wisconsin is lucky to have you.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think I was ever doing any of it for them. I’m starting to think I was just planting flags, you know, so they couldn’t make me leave. Like, ‘This one is mine,’ and ‘This one is mine,’ and ‘This one is mine, too, motherfuckers.’?”

Winston thought of London.

He’d love to show it to Allie. His flat. His favorite restaurant and coffeehouse, his office, the train he took to the house in the countryside where he’d been raised.

He couldn’t show her, because he wasn’t there anymore. He was nowhere.

“Why would they make you leave?”

“Whatcha mean?”

“You said that you bought all of these properties so that they couldn’t make you leave.”

He felt a little bad, because asking her meant that she looked as vulnerable as he was feeling.

“I think—It’s stupid, probably, but if I own Manitowoc, then I am Manitowoc. And if I am Manitowoc, then I’m a Fredericks. For sure. You know, all these people have to come to me, every month, for rents and improvements. To me. You probably think this is some kind of pathological complex.”

“I think you’re making a place for yourself in the world.”

“Winston?” She touched his arm, looked around the apartment, then at him, directly. “Possession and improvement of where you’ve found yourself probably isn’t a betrayal of where you think you belong.”

“True, I’m certain,” he said. Because she expected him to say something, and it didn’t matter what he said.

She would leave.

He could feel her looking at him, monitoring him. He could have this conversation she was trying to have about home. He simply didn’t want to. He’d rather let the sun and coffee burn the frayed edges off of both of them.

“Holla, queens!” Through the patio doors, at the far end of the flat, Winston spied a swirl of color and movement that could only be his daughter. “If anybody’s naked, take whatever time you need to get things covered up. I’m just going to be in the kitchen, helping myself to a cup of coffee. I’ll even keep my earbuds in, so if you—”