Three-Martini Lunch by Suzanne Rindell Page A

slam.
    I never knew what my father meant by
bars
. It didn’t make sense. As far as I could tell, Clarence hadn’t stolen anything from my parents, apart from copious amounts of food and beer.
    Either way, Clarence must have left the neighborhood not long after leaving our apartment, because although I expected to cross paths with him at some point, I never saw him again.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    A fter the incident with Clarence, I avoided the subject of my father’s discharge at all costs. I never asked my father anything about his years of service; I never asked my mother, either. I pushed Clarence’s words to the back of my mind, where they remained for years, until my mother turned to me that hot afternoon in June and handed me a key.
    â€œAren’t you afraid to go all the way across the country to California?” Janet asked me as we sat at a drugstore counter on 125th Street once I had announced my plan.
    Her brooding eyes bored holes into my own.
Yes
was the true answer: I was afraid to go. I was also afraid
not
to go.
    â€œI know this will upset our plans a bit . . . It will take us a little longer to save up for a place of our own, but it’s something I have to do.”
    She closed her eyelids as though they were suddenly very heavy, andbriefly lifted a hand to her temple. Then she dropped the hand and opened her eyes again. “All right,” she said in a meek voice, shrugging and shaking her head. “If it’s something you have to do.”
    â€œI think this will help us in the long run,” I said, reaching across the table to touch her hand where it had fallen. “I think once I’ve done this, I’ll be ready . . . for the next steps to come.” I did not say
marriage
, but of course marriage was what I meant, and Janet knew it, too. She looked up, and smiled meekly.
    â€œThen I guess I ought to wish you good luck.”
    I squeezed her hand and leaned across the table to give her a grateful peck of a kiss. This move was only moderately successful. Her lips were cold and waxy, and smelled a bit like the peculiar clay used in ladies’ lipstick. She smiled, though, and I smiled back, already feeling guilty for the slight shimmer of relief I felt upon having resolved to go to California after all.

11
    T he money my mother had given me was a start, but if I was going to make it all the way out to California, I’d have to scrimp as best I could. Summer loomed closer, and I graduated from Columbia. My mother attended the ceremony with a mixture of pride and dread on her face as she fanned herself in the humid sun, for graduation also meant the end of my life in the dormitory, and that meant I was coming home to stay under the same roof as Wendell.
    For income, I had my part-time job as a bicycle messenger. The pay was modest, but I was having little luck finding much else—college degree be damned—so I asked the messenger service to increase my hours to as many as they would allow. I was paid weekly, and every Friday I added to the roll of bills I kept hidden in an old boot in the corner of my closet, but the saving was slow going.
    One morning, however, the heavyset dispatcher sent me on a delivery that changed my fortune in a rather unexpected manner. It was—I realizelooking back on it now—the second time within the space of a month that someone handed me a key and altered my prospects.
    â€œBe careful with this one,” the dispatcher advised me, chewing on a toothpick and handing me a slip with an address scribbled on it. “Character named Augustus Minton, but likes for his help to call him ‘Mister Gus.’ He’s a grumpy sonofabitch, but he’s richer than God. He writes a whole heap of them dime-store books under some other name—for kicks, I suppose—but he comes from important family, so we’re under orders not to rattle his cage. The old fart