The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry(14)

“I’m not a religious man, Chief Lambiase. I don’t believe in fate. My wife. She believed in fate.”

At that moment, Maya wakes and holds out her arms to A.J. He closes the drawer of the cash register and takes her from Lambiase. Lambiase thinks he hears the little girl call A.J. “Daddy.”

“Ugh, I keep telling her not to call me that,” A.J. says. “But she won’t listen.”

“Kids get ideas,” Lambiase says.

“You want a glass of something?”

“Sure. Why not?”

A.J. locks the front door of the store and heads up the stairs. He sets Maya on the futon and goes out to the main room of the house.

“I can’t keep a baby,” A.J. says firmly. “I haven’t slept in two nights. She’s a terrorist! She wakes up at, like, insane times. Three forty-five in the morning seems to be when her day begins. I live alone. I’m poor. You can’t raise a baby on books alone.”

“True,” Lambiase says.

“I’m barely keeping myself together,” A.J. continues. “She’s worse than a puppy. And a man like me shouldn’t even have a puppy. She’s not potty-trained, and I have no idea how to do that kind of thing or any of the related matters either. Plus, I’ve never really liked babies. I like Maya, but . . . Conversation with her lacks to say the least. We talk about Elmo, and I can’t stand him, by the way, but other than that, it’s mainly about her. She’s totally self-centered.”

“Babies do tend to be that way,” Lambiase says. “The conversation will probably improve when she knows more words.”

“And she always wants to read the same book. And it’s, like, the crappiest board book. The Monster at the End of This Book?”

Lambiase says he hasn’t heard of it.

“Well, believe you me. She’s got terrible taste in books.” A.J. laughs.

Lambiase nods and drinks his wine. “Nobody’s saying you have to keep her.”

“Yeah, yeah, of course. But do you think I could have some sort of say in where she ended up? She’s an awfully smart little thing. Like she already knows the alphabet and I even got her to understand alphabetical order. I’d hate to see her land with some jerks who didn’t appreciate that. As I was saying before, I don’t believe in fate. But I do feel a sense of responsibility toward her. That young woman did leave her in my care.”

“That young woman was out of her mind,” Lambiase says. “She was an hour away from drowning herself.”

“Yeah.” A.J. frowns. “You’re right.” A cry from the other room. A.J. excuses himself. “I should just go check on her,” he says.

BY THE END of the weekend, Maya is in need of a bath. Though he would rather leave such an intimate activity to the state of Massachusetts, A.J. doesn’t want to surrender her to social services looking like a miniature Miss Havisham. It takes A.J. several Google searches to determine bathing protocol: appropriate temperature bath water two-year-old; can a two-year-old use grown-up shampoo?; how does a father go about cleaning a two-year-old girl’s private parts without being a pervert?; how high to fill tub—toddler; how to prevent a two-year-old from accidentally drowning in tub; general rules for bath safety, and so on.

He washes Maya’s hair with hemp-based shampoo that used to belong to Nic. Long after he had donated or thrown away everything else of his wife’s, he could not quite bring himself to discard her bath products.

A.J. rinses her hair, and Maya begins to sing.

“What is that you’re singing?”

“Song,” she says.

“What song is that?”

“La la. Booya. La la.”

A.J. laughs. “Yeah, that’s gibberish to me, Maya.”

She splashes him.

“Mama?” she asks after a while.

“No, I’m not your mother,” A.J. says.

“Gone,” Maya says.

“Yes,” A.J. says. “She probably isn’t coming back.”

Maya thinks about this and then nods. “You sing.”

“I’d rather not.”

“Sing,” she says.

The girl has lost her mother. He supposes it’s the least he can do.

There is no time to Google appropriate songs for babies. Before he met his wife, A.J. had sung second tenor for the Footnotes, Princeton’s all-male a cappella group. When A.J. fell for Nic, it was the Footnotes who had suffered, and after a semester of missed rehearsals he had been axed from the group. He thinks back to the last Footnotes show, which had been a tribute to eighties music. For his bathtub performance, he follows the program pretty closely, beginning with “99 Luftballons” then segueing into “Get out of My Dreams, Get into My Car.” For the finale, “Love in an Elevator.” He only feels mildly foolish.

She claps when he is finished. “Again,” she commands. “Again.”

“That show runs one performance.” He lifts her out of the tub and then he towels her off, wiping between each perfect toe.

“Luftballon,” Maya says. “Luft you.”

“What?”

“Love you,” she says.

“You’re clearly responding to the power of a cappella.”

She nods. “Love you.”