My Last Innocent Year(47)

Abe had his hands wrapped around his mug like he was trying to get warm. Something about the pose infused me with tenderness, but it was quickly snuffed out by anger. For more than a year, maybe two, he’d known about the money and not told me. I pictured everything I’d done in that time, turning down extra shifts at the information desk to go to Kmart with Debra or the local truck stop for a plate of toast and eggs. Movies with Kelsey and Jason, late-night pizzas and Thai food, stacks of hardcover books from the campus bookstore—all while the debt accumulated, dollars and cents piling up like snow. What would I have done differently if I’d known about the money? What would I have said yes to? What would I have said no to? It occurred to me, briefly, that this might have been why Abe hadn’t told me, but I wasn’t sure I liked it better this way, and I wasn’t in the mood to be generous.

“I didn’t have to go to Wilder, remember? You were the one who wanted that. Other schools gave me more money, but you said, no. Go to Wilder. You said it was your dream, that it was Mom’s dream. You lied to me.”

“I don’t know what else to tell you,” Abe said tightly. “Maybe one day you’ll have a child and you’ll understand.” He stood up. “You’ll have to meet with the financial aid office when you get back.” He said some things about grace periods and credit scores, what it would mean if I wanted to buy a house one day, what would happen if I defaulted. I heard him, but I wasn’t listening. Or maybe I was listening, and I just couldn’t follow.

Abe went to bed, but I stayed in the kitchen for a long time, watching the second hand move across the face of my watch. It had belonged to my mother, one of the things she’d bought herself with money she’d made selling her paintings. Her earnings traded in for jewelry, pretty plates, fancy soaps, little things to cheer herself. Abe was furious when he found out how much she’d spent on the sterling silver watch with a mother-of-pearl face: nearly eight hundred dollars. A terrible extravagance, he said. Didn’t she know there were braces to pay for and college? He demanded she return it, but she refused. One night near the end, when it had become clear she would not survive, she called me into her room and pressed the watch into my hand. “I want you to have this,” she said, “so you remember that it’s okay to want things.” She made me promise never to sell it.

I walked into the living room and remembered the summer she died, right before I left for Wilder. When it was all over, Abe stayed in his room, coming out only to get food from the kitchen, where a parade of women left a continuously replenished supply. Manny handled everything at the store, and I was alone and rudderless. A few of my high school friends were still around, but no one knew what to say to me, and I didn’t want to talk to them either. The only person I wanted to talk to was Abe. Whenever I heard him come out of his bedroom, I would place myself in his path. Talk to me, I wanted to say but never did. When he finally emerged after eight days, he bagged up my mother’s things, and when he was done, he put on his apron and went back to work.

A few days before I was scheduled to leave for school, I found him in the living room reading the newspaper. My mother had been dead three weeks and we were wobbly, like a table missing a leg. I practically ran into the room, sat down on the coffee table, our knees only inches apart. I was so close I could have reached out and touched him.

“Maybe I shouldn’t go,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“To Wilder. Maybe I shouldn’t go.”

“Of course you should go. Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I could take a year off, go next year.”

“No,” he said. “You are not going to put your life on hold.”

“There are other schools. Less expensive ones. Maybe I shouldn’t be so far away.”

He lowered the newspaper. “Isabel, you’ve suffered a terrible loss. I wish I could change that. I can’t. But I can tell you this: Go. Live your life. Get away from all this. Believe me, you won’t miss it.”

“What if I don’t like the people?” I said.

“People are people. And what would be so bad about meeting different kinds?”

We drove up to Wilder at the end of the month, the car so full of stuff we couldn’t see out the back. I cried the whole way, everything I’d hated about New York suddenly wrapped in a patina of loveliness: the subway tunnels that smelled like piss, the roaches that skittered across the sidewalk in the dark, even Rosen’s. I sniffed my nails, hair, and skin, searching for the smell of lox and brine, the one I’d always tried to wash away. When we pulled off the interstate, Wilder appeared before us, rising up out of nowhere like a fairy village or a mirage. We parked in front of my dorm, carried in boxes, hung posters, made the bed. Then I waved goodbye to my father and began again, just like he told me to. Forgetting what I’d left behind, which was everything, and nothing.





15





I started my job search when I got back, did what I was supposed to: pored over listings in the Career Services office and sent my résumé to any job that had anything to do with writing. Accessories assistant at a fashion magazine. Assistant marketing manager at an academic publisher. Grant writer at an environmental nonprofit. While I was home, I’d bumped into a girl I’d gone to high school with who worked at a magazine called Get Out! and had just been promoted. They were looking for someone to take her old job, she said, so I gave her a copy of my résumé. None of the jobs sounded terribly interesting, and none paid enough to cover my share of rent on the apartments Kelsey was looking at, but I decided to worry about that later. Abe and I patched things over before I left, and I promised him I would find something, but in my heart, I was staying here, with Connelly. So even though I followed the footprints, I wasn’t really on the trail.