The Things You Kiss Goodbye (15 page)

“Rent? What? Where do you live?”

“I live at my ma’s for the moment. But I’m talking about the check for the shop, for
this
place. Unit 37.”

I looked around me, trying to take it in. “Bampas owns Unit 37?”

“Yeah, right,” Cowboy laughed at me. “Just this
one
unit.”
Then I realized how stupid I was being. Surely he meant that my father owned the whole industrial park. “Cripes, Beta, your father is a powerful man—self-made, too, the way he tells it.” Cowboy slowed down as something dawned on him. “And boy, would he ever
not
like you hanging around me.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, though I suppose I already knew.

Cowboy turned his palms up and looked around the garage. “I work
here. A
nd that’s just for starters.”

“You have a business. A
bona fide
business. And my father’s not a snob,” I said. I felt like I should tell Cowboy how Bampas did dishes in his own restaurant on holidays, and that he tended his own roses at home, carried rabbit manure in his hands. . . .

“No. I didn’t say he was.” He let a beat go by while he looked at me. “Where I work is the least of it. You know what I’m talking about,” he said.

“You mean that ‘jailbait’ thing? There’s nothing inappropriate going on.” I shrugged. “I haven’t even seen you that much. . . .” I let it trail.

Neither of us spoke for a moment.

“Funny.” Cowboy looked at me sideways. “I hadn’t pegged you for . . . hmm . . .”

“For what?”

“I was going to say that I hadn’t pegged you for a rich kid.
Sorry, that’s rude. Come to find out, your daddy owns half the town.”

“Half the—what?
What?
” I shook my head.

“You do know that, don’t you?”

I opened my mouth, then closed it. I took my Steam & Bean prints back from Cowboy. “Y-yeah . . . I know. I know what he does.” I stood there tucking and re-tucking the papers into my pack, then messing with the zipper.

“Hey, did I say something wrong? I’m sorry.”

“No.” I shook my head. “I—I just have to go.” I turned away.

“Beta!” Cowboy called to me. “I’m sorry!”

I put my hand up, faked a grin his way, and called back, “Thanks for letting me hang.” Then I booked out of there, or tried. My knee made me slow.

I felt terrible. I even started to cry as I walked a wide, uncomfortable block around the school. Here I was killing time—time that I could have spent with Cowboy. Oh, so stupid. And over what? A Bampas factoid.
Half the town
. But Cowboy had said it so casually, as if everyone knew it. Well, not me, and how had I missed it? I flashed on the many times we had stopped at empty buildings while Bampas checked on this or that. Like the day at 66 Green Street, though apparently that was the least of all the places.

“My God, you are dense!” I told myself.

There were offices over the restaurant, and I think he had something going with the apartment buildings on either side of that. Oh, and there’d been buzz about the renovation of an old mill building. We were often interrupted when we dined at Loreena’s. There were men, vaguely familiar to me, who would slide a chair up next to Bampas and tell him about a building or a business he might be interested in. I always thought Bampas was being polite the way he’d say, “Oh, yes. I’d like to see it.” I thought it was his way of getting rid of them. Guess not. Guess he bought a lot of those buildings.

In my bedroom, I opened my backpack to look over my homework. The Steam & Bean project stared up at me. I stared back. I thought about how Cowboy had been admiring the pages and then the next thing I knew we were talking about my father.

I wanted Bampas to see what I’d done with 66 Green Street. This was some of my best work yet, and didn’t it scrape up against the sort of things that he did and thought about all day long? If he could see that I was serious, maybe we could talk about art school.

I took the pages to the dinner table with me that evening. “Bampas,” I said. (Bampas, who owns half this town . . . ) “May I show you something?”

He took the papers. He slipped them one behind the other as he looked. “Very nice,” he said. “Look at your sister’s
artwork.” He waved the papers at Favian and Avel in a perfunctory sort of way.

“I got an A on the project, Bampas,” I told him. I saw Momma give me a nod.

“That’s good. Good girl. You should have A’s for art classes,” Bampas said.

“A is for art,” Avel quipped. He and Favian both craned to see the pages.

“Oh, it’s A-
plus
,” Favian noted. “That sign is for
plus
, it is really cool.”

We all laughed, even Bampas.

“It’ll be a good portfolio piece,” I said. I lost my nerve about mentioning art school but I thought of something else to say. “Did you see the address, Bampas? It’s 66 Green Street? You and I stopped there—”

“Near the high school,” he mumbled.

“One of
your
buildings,” I said. I thought he might look up and wonder how I knew that, but he didn’t. “Well, it’s just an assignment, but I had the idea that a coffee shop would do well there—something with a little more to offer than the usual. Do you think so?”

My father dished some of my mother’s fish and rice with grape leaves onto a plate and passed it down the table to her. “Yes,” he said.

I was right!

“Possibly. But not like this,” he said. He paused, serving spoon in hand, and browsed my menu page again briefly. He shook his head. “You cannot sell fine Greek pastries and expensive coffees to high school students, Bettina.” He continued serving our meal.

I remembered my baklava debacle, the cheese pastries that had finally gone home with Tony Colletti, who could appreciate them. Maybe Bampas was right.

“Well, then it needs tweaking. What about lattes? Ice-cream bars, gelato?” I said. “I think high school kids would go to a place based on my idea, Bampas. I’d go.”

“And you are not everyone, Bettina.” He pulled in his chin and shook his head.

“Well, maybe not, but—

“Att-att!” My father raised a finger at me.
“Siopi,”
he said. I looked at his fingertip, then his eyes, then down at my own plate. He reached toward my mother, then the bottle of red in his hand. “Some wine, Loreena? This is a good one. Very buttery.” He paused to look at the label on the bottle.

“Yes, Dinos, thank you,” Momma said. “It’s beautiful work, Bettina,” she added, and I suppose she was looking at me while I pushed at my fish with my fork.

“I’m adding this wine to the list at Loreena’s Downtown,” Bampas went on.

While I picked at my food, a green pea came rolling
across the tablecloth and bumped into my plate. I looked up at Favian, the shooter. Avel, the audience, let out a giggle. I gave them both a smirk. I imagined gathering them up after supper for a conference.

Hey, your bampas owns half the town. Did you know?

They probably didn’t know, not yet. But Bampas would be different with the boys than he’d been with me, I guessed.

Another pea rolled past my place at the table and fell to the floor. Favian and Avel cracked up. I put a finger to my lips and opened my eyes wide at them. They were about to get in trouble.

Sitting there, under fire of green peas, a thought came out of the air:
You can get an A-plus and still fail
.

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I
WAS AFRAID OF WHAT
C
OWBOY WOULD THINK OF ME
, leaving the way I had. So, the next morning before school, I went to Unit 37 again, two coffees in my hands.

“Ah, Beta. Bless you!” Cowboy dropped the hood on the ’57 Chevy. He smiled and I felt my heart swell so much I was sure he’d see it at my throat. He’d been working on that same car yesterday—quietly cussing to himself underneath it. I thought it must be a lost cause. But Cowboy didn’t give up easily on old cars, especially not the silver Chevy. That one belonged to him, he had told me.

I set the coffees on the workbench and sat down on the edge of a couple of stacked-up tires close to where he was
working. “I guess I confess,” I said. “I didn’t really know about my father before you told me.”

Cowboy wiped his hands on his shop towel, pushed his dolly over with one foot, and sat down in front of me. “I’m sorry,” he said. I half expected him to take my chin in his hands. But the great thing—
one
of the great things—about Cowboy was that he didn’t condescend.

“Or if I did know . . . well, you completed the picture for me.” I swallowed hard and focused on a grease spot on the floor. “I know that his restaurant does well. I’ve even seen him deal.” I shrugged. “We always have what we need. I know he helps other people. . . . He’s like a human ATM, although—ha!—he’d never use one. He wants to go inside the bank and see a person to make his transactions.”

“Yeah . . .” Cowboy seemed to get that. “He wanted to meet me in person before he’d rent this space to me. Most of the other places I looked at, the owner sent an agent.”

“Well, Bampas will always choose the old way of doing things. Anyway, I don’t even know why it bothered me,” I said. “But can I ask you, how did you know?”

“Newspapers. I don’t read everything but I read the land records pretty often. His name is always there—buying this and selling that. He’s got apartments and renovation projects—all of it. Vasilis Inc. is one of the city’s largest taxpayers.”

“So why didn’t
I
know?” I mused.

“You’re a kid,” he said, and he must have seen me wilt. “I don’t mean it like that, Beta. It’s just—you’re not supposed to care about this stuff. Look, he’s a good guy. He sent work my way when I opened up here. It’s not like you just found out that he’s a drunk or a drug dealer.” Cowboy was always a little deadpan. He shook my shoulder gently, and I tried to nod my head.

“He’s been stopping at these empty buildings all my life. A while ago I was with him, and I asked him about a place—actually, it was that potbelly building that I based my fake coffee shop on—and he just said,
‘Never mind, Bettina.’
” I mocked my father’s voice, his accent. Cowboy laughed a little. “He doesn’t include me,” I said.

Cowboy shrugged. “Because you’re his daughter. He probably thinks about other things when he’s around you,” Cowboy said. I looked at him, puzzled. “Does he know about your boyfriend?” he asked.

“He thinks he does,” I said. Then I realized how true it was, and I wished I hadn’t said it.

“If he really knew him, he’d have the kid on a spit by now.”

My core went rubbery. I didn’t like hearing Cowboy talk about Brady.

“By the way, how’s your knee?” Cowboy asked.

“Improving,” I said, but I didn’t look him in the eye. I stood up and checked the clock. “Oh, no! Is that right? I’m going be late. And I have a load of tardies already. I think I’m due for a detention.” I shouldered my backpack.

“Yeah, probably because you bring me coffees. Here, let’s try this.” Cowboy dragged out an invoice pad. He wrote so slowly. I waited. He held the slip out to me. “It just says that you’re late because you had trouble peeling a tattoo.”

“Very funny,” I said. I felt slightly self-conscious of the skeletal bird on the inside of my wrist. “Beta, I’m kidding. Here, take it. It’s worth a try,” he said.

I looked at the invoice, which had the same logo as his shop sign printed at the top. He’d actually written:

Bettina Vasilis stopped at my place of business Unit 37 Hammer Hill Industrial Park to give me a key from Dinos Vasilis owner of the property
.

What a joke. My father would never give me a key to anything. Yet there it was, stated in triplicate on Cowboy’s invoice pad. (I couldn’t help noticing that it was a wicked run-on sentence.) He had signed it with three initials:
SWS
.

On my way across the playing fields, I took one more look at the would-be excuse and jammed it into my pocket. I wasn’t going to try to use it. If the school checked it out with
my parents, it’d screw up everything.

I sat in detention that afternoon, glad to be free of the Not-So-Cheerleaders. I rested my knee, and considered what to do about the squad now that I’d overheard them trashing me. But that draining discussion with Brady was still fresh in my mind. I had little doubt that he was still stressed over basketball. But he was trying hard with us; he’d been sweet and solicitous. If I quit the squad now it would seem like I’d just set out to piss him off. Also, without cheerleading, Momma and Bampas would have me riding home on the bus again after school every day. Miserable as it was, staying on the squad preserved my freedom.

The detention clock ticked. I pulled the invoice out of my pocket again. I held it to my nose and sniffed, wanting the scent of the shop to fill me. Cowboy hadn’t signed his name. Just SWS. Maybe because it was a bit of a game between us. I didn’t know his real name, and he’d only recently learned all of mine. But the letters must be his initials. What could SWS stand for?

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

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R
EGINA
C
OLLETTI WAS UP AND COOKING
. T
ONY AND
I both knew it the minute we reached the bottom of the stairs. He stopped and sniffed. I did the same.

“Pasta fagioli,” we both said it at once.

“She must be having a really good day,” Tony added.

In her kitchen, Regina sat on a stool next to the stove. She pushed a wooden spoon around the inside of a saucepan.

“Ah, good,” she said when she saw us. “Tony, carry that pasta to the sink and pour off the water. Bettina, take that knife. Mince that basil.” She pointed to a cutting board on the table. “Grate us a nice little mound of that Parmesan, too.”

“Nonna, what meal is this?” Tony asked. He glanced at the clock.

“What does it matter?” Regina asked.