Free Any Place I Hang My Hat by Susan Isaacs

believed to be haute Wasp: heavy wool hunting jacket, pearls, tweed skirt. What she actually looked like was Mamie Eisenhower on a really bad day in 1953. But I was okay with it. She could say, “Awwwwfly glod to meet you,” when I introduced her to my teachers. I did not die of mortification. My father could come up for commencement at Harvard and, after the academic robes came off, call my friends “sweetheart” while looking them up and down like a pimp sizing up a new girl for his stable. And I could live with it.
    But now, his terrifying everyone in the diner was something else. During the total of eighteen years and three months he’d served in the slammer, what might have been a native surliness had grown to rage whenever he felt under pressure. I had to stop it. I banged a fist on the table. It didn’t make much sound, but it got his attention. “Chicky! Get a grip.” He could go either way, I guessed: calm down or jump up and grab the shirt of the guy behind the counter, bellowing for a check. I glanced at the counterman, then back to my father. “If I were he, Chicky, I’d be thinking about pressing the alarm button under the cash register drawer and getting the cops here.” All I got was the glare a badass kid gives the teacher. “Calm down.”
    “I’m calm,” he said, a little too loud. At that point, however, his slit eyes blinked. It was a minute before he spoke. “All right. I’m okay now.”
    “Good.”
    “Sorry if I scared you.”
    “You didn’t,” I told him. “I know you too well. Now, tell me about my mother.”
    “If that’s what you want. It was like this.” He paused, closing his eyes for a moment to look at the past. “Phyllis was big into platinum. For the Maryland thing, I bought her real gold, kind of a skinny little ring, but I told her, ‘Listen, I’ll get you, like, one of those really fat platinum wedding bands—’ You know, Amy. Those ones that go from the knuckle up to the next knuckle. Anyhow I said I’d get it for her for a first-anniversary present. I mean, I already was into this loan shark Mitchy for two thou for the honeymoon and then I had to up it to three when we were in Puerto Rico because I got her pearls. So meanwhile, we were going out almost every night with this connected guy, Angie, Angelo was his real name, plus his girlfriend and some of their friends because Phyllis … she had this thing about, kinda mob guys. Like a groupie, except for the Mafia instead of a band. The only problem was I was working this legit job in the garage. The pay wasn’t bad, but hey, like I told you, we were living in this dump with the mattress on the floor because who the hell had money for furniture what with pearls and cocktail lounges. Right?”
    “Right.”
    “Plus we were staying out late and I overslept sometimes and my boss was getting hot under the collar about it. Said I was a damn good mechanic, but if I couldn’t show up on time I wasn’t any use to him.”
    I’d been stacking packets, and sugar was beating Sweet’n Low, but now I stopped. “What was there about mob guys that she found so attractive?”
    “Who the hell knows.” I waited. “Maybe a power trip. Like they could push people around.” He looked dubious about his own explanation. “It could be the bad guy thing. Like the way at the beginning, when she got this large charge from me stealing cars.”
    “She wasn’t concerned about getting into trouble with a stolen car if you got pulled over by a cop?” My father, I’d always thought, was somewhat unendowed in the superego department. I had hoped my mother was not.
    He emitted a single heh, barely a chuckle. “Funny you should say that. With Phyllis, it was like she never ever thought anything could really happen to her. Even if we got pulled over, she probably would’ve figured the cop would arrest me and make a date with her. And the weird thing is, I bet you a million bucks that’s what would happen.”
    Any second,