30.

“Whoa!” I yelled into Florence’s empty apartment. Ian’s umbilical cord stump had popped off as I bathed him in the battered porcelain sink. It fell onto the floor and I picked it up and looked at the TV and there was footage of a submarine coasting along the bottom of the ocean, sand puffing out of its way. I dipped a Q-tip in alcohol and rubbed it around Ian’s belly button like the doctor said, which made him scream his nuts off. I picked him up, featherlight and sweaty, and walked around the room, wondering what Will was doing at his job. Was he sitting at a desk, holding a pencil? Was he doodling a baby’s head with a curly sprig on top? The air conditioner was barely working and we were smack in the middle of a heat wave. Was he relieved to be out of our house?

Ian fell asleep and I spotted the yellow, rolled-up bikini bottom sitting on the second shelf of the side table. It felt like a million years since I’d touched it. The last time I worked on it, I didn’t have a baby, I thought. I set Ian down in the crook of the sofa bed and silently picked up the bikini. It was time to start the top, so I cast on fifteen chains, like the instructions said, which would be the bottom right triangle. I told myself the top would be easier compared to the bottom because it was triangles, which meant dropping stitches instead of gathering them into a circle. I sat for hours while Ian slept, the bed creaking underneath when I uncrossed my legs, and thought about all the people in the world who had crocheted who were now dead. I felt a sense of connection with all those dead people, with my dead grandmother sitting on another couch in another house in another time with her large, star-patterned, mustard-colored blanket. I wondered what she’d been thinking about as she’d crocheted my bikini. Did she worry about her son, my dad? Did she worry that his life was out of control? That he drank too much and that his wife was a shrew? My grandmother hated my mother. Why did she hate her so much? As I worked, I noticed that my stitches were becoming more even and less lopsided. I was getting better at it, and it felt like the only thing in the world I was getting better at. The rest of the time, I was in a haze, unable to get out the door.

In the movie on TV there was a blond girl with a ponytail and bangs cut very sharply across her forehead, exactly the way Mom used to wear it when I was younger. It reminded me of Mom sitting in a seafood place on the Charter Island harbor with me and Dad when I was younger, around the time Dad had come back from “drying out” in Arizona. I remembered, out of nowhere, I’d asked them where I was conceived. Dad was sitting across from me, but I looked at Mom when I’d asked. “My friend Sherry was conceived in Mexico,” I’d said. “That’s why she loves Mexican food. Where was I conceived?”

Mom pretended to choke on her popcorn, shocked.

“Interesting question,” she’d said. She was about to launch into something, but Dad interrupted.

“Fiona, not appropriate,” he’d said.

“What’s not appropriate?” she’d asked. The familiar dynamic: Dad gruff, Mom innocent.

He shook his head and said nothing.

“What’s not appropriate?” she asked, louder.

“She’s twelve,” Dad said, not looking at me.

“Oh Ted, relax,” Mom said, dismissing him with as few words as possible. She picked a single piece of popcorn from the basket, crunched and turned to me.

“I was managing the Kettle, my first job in charge, so I was the big stuff, and I knew it and Daddy knew it. He showed up every night. Didn’t you, Daddy?” She looked at him, but his eyes were up at the bar TV.

“He would come when he was done with work, at around eleven or midnight, and he always stayed till the last set. In the beginning I thought it was his abiding, unrequited passion for music, you know, the poor, trapped artist inside the banker thing, but soon I realized it was really just a ploy to catch me as things wound down for the night.”

A trace of a smile crossed Dad’s face, but he stayed on the TV.

“Anyway, he’d gotten into the habit of waiting for me to close up, very gentlemanly. And then he’d take me home to his place on Warren Street. I was afraid of his lift. It had one of those metal accordion doors, and Daddy would start kissing me and I worried I’d get my hair caught or lose a finger on the way up.”

“Fiona, can we leave it?” His chin burrowed into his hand. His other hand rubbed his graying, wiry sideburns. He’d let his hair grow out while he was gone.

“She asked, so I’m telling her,” Mom said. “What’s the problem with that?”

He leaned hard on the table, the weight of his elbow bringing it toward him.

“I don’t think it’s necessary for her to hear the gory details at this stage.”

“Gory? Lighten up, Ted.” She leaned toward him, her hair falling across her eyes. For a second I thought she was going to kiss him. “Please don’t let this little rehab stint deplete what’s left of your sense of humor. Please. Reformed is one thing. Puritanical, another entirely.”

“Humor has very little to do with it,” he said. “Can you wait on anything? Can you let anything wait?” He was talking in a way where the corners of his mouth seemed to be trying to seal his lips shut. It was something his mouth did when he drank, which confused me because he’d just stopped.

“You’re right, Ted, I should just continue waiting. That’s what I should do.” She picked up the big menu and closed herself behind a pissed-off tent, where she remained, it seemed, until the end. They split less than a year later.

By the time the movie ended, my neck was killing me from hunching over the yarn. I took Ian out for a walk in the scorching August heat, and Vanessa and everyone else from my old life were like ghosts in my head, conversing and vivid, floating and following my every move. A truck emblazoned with the words Halal—Schwarma Kabob emblazoned on it stopped at the corner. I laughed with imaginary Vanessa, who by then was at freshman orientation at Vassar—“What the hell is a schwarma?” I imagined her teasing me: “You’ve lived in New York City your entire life and you don’t know what a schwarma is?”