Free Any Place I Hang My Hat by Susan Isaacs Page B

and getting those fat leg veins. For her, doing nothing was something.”
    “Do I look like her?”
    “I don’t know. Not really. You’re kind of her color, but her hair was redder than yours. And you got her littleness. But it’s like this. Once she took a hike, and Lil brought you up to see me on some visiting days, I made up my mind not to see Phyllis in you. Anyhow, you look more like my sister, which is better than looking like Phyllis. I mean, Linda’s a good-looking girl.”
    That was true, but I looked nothing like her. Aunt Linda’s hair was black and glossy, her eyes bittersweet-chocolate brown rather than hazel, her body willowy, much more supermodel than soccer defense. She had a peaches-and-cream complexion and I did not. I was passably pretty. My aunt was a knockout.
    “Did Aunt Linda and Uncle Sparky like her?”
    “Linda didn’t marry Sparky till later. I guess he knew her though, ‘cause they were going together since they were like two or something.”
    “So what did they think of my mother?” Chicky gave me his combination shrug and eyebrow lift that meant Do I have to waste breath giving you an answer? I looked down at my sadly chipped thumbnail in an attempt to calm myself. What if I couldn’t get him to say any more? What if he got up and left? I was on the verge of panic. If my brain could have been depicted on Nova, viewers would have seen colossal bunker-buster-bomb-size explosions instead of the normal sparks of neural activity.
    I wound up giving myself a pep talk like those cloying monologues in lousy young adult fiction in which the feisty narrator peers at herself in a mirror and begins: “Okay, Self …” I said to myself: Okay, I’m a journalist. I don’t want to give my father time to ask himself, What the hell am I doing here, giving the precise information I never wanted anyone to know? I needed time to ask the questions that would elicit the information I wanted. “What part of Brooklyn did she live in?”
    “The rich part.”
    “Brooklyn Heights?” I asked, although the house Chicky had described didn’t sound like the elegant town houses of the Heights. Getting a blink as an answer, I went on: “Was it just on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge?”
    “No, it was like twenty, thirty minutes in. So maybe like somewhere in the middle. Who the hell can remember? It was a million years ago.”
    “Do you remember how you got there?”
    “Yeah, Phyllis said, ‘Make a right, make a left,’ until we got there.”
    “What was the name of her street?” I got a shrug. “Do you remember the name of the neighborhood? Like Canarsie, Flatbush, Brighton Beach?”
    “No, Brooklyn, the Bronx … they’re Alaska. You know. Foreign.”
    “What were her parents’ names?”
    “Joe, Marty, Betty, Sue. I mean, those may not be the names, but they were probably names sorta like that. Nothing too weird.”
    “Do you happen to recall her mother’s maiden name?”
    “No. What are you? Sherlock or something?”
    “No, I’m your daughter collecting on her thirtieth-birthday present. So tell me what happened the day you went to the jewelry store.” My ice cream now was completely melted, and, having skipped supper (or dinner, as Grandma Lil would have corrected me), I was getting intoxicated by the aroma of hamburgers, sautéing onions, and french fries. I didn’t want to order anything more because Chicky always grabbed the check. I sensed Fern kept him short on money, long on dependency. “What happened?”
    “So Phyllis says she just wants to look at platinum wedding rings. So I said, ‘That’s stupid because then you’ll feel bad I can’t buy you one now.’ So she swears she won’t and it would be fun to just look and see what’s there. Okay? We go to this place on Forty-seventh Street, that diamond street, right? Why she picks this place I don’t know, they all look the same, but we go in. We have to leave your little thing, baby carriage, outside and some guy