Hex - Rebecca Dinerstein Knight Page 0,54

these days?” and he said, “Same as ever. Tenderness, succor, and humility.” My tea was still two hundred degrees hot and I sipped at it, razzle-dazzled. “Succor?” I couldn’t help repeating. “That’s what they call us,” he said.

“I’m a friend of your daughter’s,” I had to say then, because deception was neither tender nor humble. Succor’s definition hung about five inches outside my brain.

At that, Konstantinos Kallas opened the cheesecake vault and lifted me a slice of raspberry-topped, crumb-bottomed cheesecake so tall it could change a lightbulb.

“You weren’t so familiar for nothing.” He handed me a fork and a knife, because I’d be needing real tools.

“I have a very forgettable face.”

“Now how’s Joan.” He closed the vault and leaned on it. “She’s going through, wouldn’t you say, a hard time, a hard time,” he said.

“Hard, probably also right.”

“Well he loved her, Barry,” I couldn’t deny this, I ate my raspberry topping, “even if he was some kind of hot-air balloon.”

Joan you got your father’s bull’s-eye aim for what something is, what it’s made of, what it’s worth. But he is naturally gladder.

“It’s the school mistreated her,” he said, “they won’t say come and they won’t say go.”

“Only traffic guards say those things with any regularity.”

“I say go all the time,” said Konstantinos. Then he said it to a plate of browned home fries ready to leave the heat lamps. A waiter came and got them, took them away. “They owe her a word, one word,” he said. I said, “I agree.”

“Fact is she stopped trying when Rhea died. Her mother’s opinion mattered. Her father’s opinion is sour cream.” He shrugged his eyebrows in cozy, tired self-loathing.

“You have no idea whether she stopped trying,” I said too aggressively, his cheeks flinched into an uncomfortable half-smile, and I adjusted to, “Who could know?”

“I know, I know she cooled it down. Doing well didn’t mean so much anymore.”

I looked down at the extraordinary volume of cheesecake I’d managed to eat without even tasting it and realized I’d cooled it down. I’ve stopped trying. It’s like I’ve given up having anything other than a body. I wanted then to go out and run down the length of the stained East River, systematically fatiguing every muscle except the heart.

“What was Rhea like?”

“Smart.”

“Smart and?”

“Disappointed.”

Somewhere underground in Lawrence, Kansas, Jessica Barber’s daffodils prepared for their own birth. I had never disappointed her. I’d also never tried to do her proud. It’s because I’ve never tried that I’m bloodless. It’s because Rhea died that you’re pale.

“Rhea said academia’s for narcissists,” he wiped down the counter where a cherry had fallen, “and Barry’s a spoiled shit. She wanted Joan to do something sincere, like cure Parkinson’s, and have a child.” I looked around the diner and its eaters—solitary, cooperative, dingy—a microcosm of a city driven less by capitalism than by our collective need for approval.

“Tell her I’m here anyway,” Konstantinos said, “she doesn’t speak to me so much anymore.”

Joan maybe we haven’t been dealing with love here maybe it’s been validation. Neither of us has ever felt approved of and so we approved of each other. That’s not whole, that’s not anything.

I handed him a twenty and he handed it back to me. More eyebrows.

“I just talked to my folks for the first time in several months,” I said, and concluded, needlessly, with, “We’re all assholes.”

He didn’t like the vulgarity so much and went to clear the lady’s half-eaten eggs. I left then because I hadn’t yet told him my name and he’d have no way to tattle on me. I wasn’t trying to get in touch with you. I was trying to touch the knob on a closed door. I’ll leave him alone now too. It wasn’t a great idea.

Joan your mother’s name means ease, or flow.

She wasn’t disappointed. Who could know?

SINGH

“She can hardly stand up,” Anjali pointed at Mishti’s stomach with a spatula, “I’ve never seen her like this.”

“Mom,” said Mishti.

“She hates sitting still, she used to bite this sofa with her baby teeth.”

“Oh?”

“Now she’s a human shih tzu,” Anjali said, and I pictured that mini-beast: Mishti’s face with dense fur between the eyes.

“Let me be,” Mishti said. “Let me be a shih tzu.”

Anjali looked at me and said, “Do something.”

In this post-Joan era nobody says that to me anymore so I found it kind of welcome. I sat in the bay Mishti’s fetal posture created, the empty spot where her middle curled away, and fed her a sprig of parsley.

I said, “Where does it hurt?”

She said,