the wedding’s off? What about Lincoln and Teddy? Why all the secrecy?). But every single one had gone unanswered. Something seemed to be troubling her, but all he could get out of her was that he’d understand everything in the fullness of time.
“When would I have visited Bar Harbor?” he snorted.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Where’d your parents take you on vacation when you were a kid?”
“We went to the lake.”
“Which lake?”
“See, that’s the thing, poor little rich girl. When I was a kid I thought there was just the one. We’d go for a week in August. Sometimes two, if we were flush. Everybody from the neighborhood vacationed there.”
She squinted at him. “So…when you went on vacation, you saw the same people you saw the rest of the year? On the street where you lived?”
“People stop and stare,” Mickey warbled, “they don’t bother me…’cause there’s nowhere on this earth that I would rather be…”
How long would it be before she understood, he wondered—this thing, his life before Minerva, that he was forever trying and failing to explain. Even Teddy and Lincoln—neither of whom came from money, though Lincoln’s family was pretty comfortable—seemed to have a hard time grasping why he clung to certain ideas so stubbornly. They’d been incredulous, for instance, when he chose to remain in the kitchen scrubbing pots when he could’ve been a face man swanning around in the dining room. How did one explain the Acropolis, a West Haven diner and his real first job—yeah, scrubbing pots—where Nestor, the owner, paid him under the table? Just a few hours after school and a few more on weekends. Each day an abundance of pots and pans awaited him on the long drainboard where they’d been sitting, crusting up, since lunch. Over the next two hours he’d slowly plow through them, imagining what that Fender Stratocaster he’d had his eye on for a while would feel like slung over his shoulder, the frets along its sleek neck smooth beneath his callused fingers. Aware that his parents wouldn’t approve of a job after school when he was supposedly getting his grades up, he told them he’d joined a Catholic Youth study group, not the kind of lie that he judged would keep him out of heaven. But back then his old man was suspicious of everything that came out of Mickey’s mouth, and one day when he finished up in back, he found Michael Sr. seated at the counter, eating a piece of cheesecake. When he indicated the vacant stool next to him, Mickey slid onto it. “You want a soda?” his father said. “You look all sweaty.” When the Coke arrived, his father said, “So what’s this all about?”
“A guitar,” Mickey confessed.
“You already got a guitar.”
“This is a better one.”
His father’s eyes narrowed. Dangerous territory, this. “The one we got you last Christmas isn’t good enough?” An off-brand Nu-Tone, with a bowed neck and raised frets that buzzed and barked.
“Think of it…as a tool,” Mickey explained, pleased to locate an analogy his old man might accept. A man’s no better than his tools was one of his favorite sayings.
“Okay,” his father said, willing, for the moment, to concede the point, “but there’s this other thing.”
“What other thing?”
“You lied to your mother.”
This was his father in a nutshell. Whenever Mickey got caught doing something he shouldn’t, it was always his mother he was disappointing, not both of them. As if his father had long ago written him off as a lost cause.
“You told her you were in study hall or some horseshit. Sorry,” he added, because the waitress had appeared just then to warm up his coffee.
“You gonna tell Mom about that cheesecake?” Mickey said. Because his father’s last visit to the doctor had revealed both high blood pressure and elevated blood-sugar levels. Since he’d been instructed to lose weight, sweets were no longer on his diet, except for Sunday mornings when they made a special trip to Wooster Street for Italian pastries.
His father appealed to the waitress, who looked like she might be a diabetes candidate herself. “Do you believe the mouth on this kid?”
“These days, they all got ’em,” she replied, winking at Mickey.
“His is gonna be the death of him,” his father said, slapping a twenty on the counter.
Outside in the car, Mickey said, “So I can keep the job?”
“For now,” his father said, “granted your mother agrees. Is Nestor treating you right?”