Free This Is Where We Live by Janelle Brown Page B

tables was not only consuming six liters of exhaust with their turkey burgers but would have to shout over the sounds of the traffic to be heard. And yet here Jeremy sat, having chosen this particular curbside table himself. The last few years back in Los Angeles had addled his brain; he had shed the New Yorker’s cynical shell that he had once worked so hard to cultivate. He believed in outdoor dining now. He believed in soy lattes. He wore shorts and flip-flops. He had even acquired a convertible, a dented European mid-century gas guzzler in sparkly green, and drove it with the top down even in the middle of winter. When his friends from New York came to visit, they made fun of him, said he’d gone soft and suburban, but in their stinging gibes he could detect a pang of envy, similar to the pang he sometimes felt when he listened to them talking about the benders they’d been on the week before, the random girls they’d hooked up with, the shows they’d been to at McCarren Pool.
    “Marital troubles,” Max offered, as an opening statement.
    “Wait. You got married again?”
    “No. You. You have marital troubles.”
    Jeremy looked down at his paper place mat, where the previous occupant had doodled a purple daisy in stubby crayon. He aligned the paper with the edge of the table, seeking some kind of manageable order to counterbalance a conversation that had—as always with his father—immediately veered off course. “No! Things with Claudia are great. Why did you say that?”
    “An invitation to lunch is an invitation to unload,” Max said. He bared a wolfish smile for the waitress who was delivering their meals—flax-seed omelet and green tea for him, BLT and a boba tea for Jeremy. “Happy conversations happen over alcohol or sugar. Lunch is a virtuous sort of meal, problems that need to be witnessed in the stark light of day and all that.”
    Jeremy shifted uncomfortably in his chair, fumbling a piece of bacon out of the sandwich as a delay tactic. He hadn’t wanted to go there yet. He wasn’t sure he was even going to tell his father at all. He’d called Max last night out of an impulsive, abstract desire for the presence of some sort of parental figure, and since Jillian wasn’t around anymore Max would have to do. The minute he’d made the date, he’d regretted it. You didn’t come to Max for solace of any sort—get-togethers with his father tended to be terse affairs, bracketed by Max’s aimless self-satisfaction and Jeremy’s uncharacteristic impatience—which was probably why Jeremy hadn’t made real plans with his father in almost six months.
    But looking at Max, now, he had a sudden epiphany. There was a ridiculously easy—if somewhat personally painful—solution to this problem, one Claudia hadn’t even jotted down in her notebook. Why hadn’t he thought of this sooner?
    “I need to borrow some money,” he blurted, “Claudia and I. Our mortgage went up and we need to find some more money fast or we’ll lose the house.”
    Max threw his head back and released a wheezy whoop of glee, walloping the table with one fist for emphasis. “They got you on the house, did they? Why do you think I never bought one? Did I not teach you a thing?”
    Jeremy didn’t answer. He stared into the opaque depths of his boba tea, a drink he had chosen not because it tasted that good but because of its interactive appeal. It was not just a drink; it was a toy. He sucked hard, and a little nugget of tapioca shot up the straw to land on his tongue. It had the texture of dried glue, and he chewed on it vigorously, annoyed.
    Max eyed him more soberly. “I taught you how to roll a joint. I remember that. You were fourteen and your mother nearly had a heart attack when you told her, you little snitch.”
    “And clearly that skill has been improving the quality of my life ever since,” Jeremy said, failing to properly muster the appropriate sarcasm. It was true that his ability to roll perfect joints had