The Lucky Kind (2 page)

Tribeca

M
ost of the kids at Francis live uptown, mostly on the Upper West Side, but the Upper East, too. Eden Reiss lives in Tribeca, which is all the way downtown. She’s the only person in our class who lives there. And Tribeca is my excuse to talk to Eden Reiss today. Her walk to the subway is kind of in the direction of my building, so all I have to do is fall into step with her and ask her for Tribeca restaurant recommendations for my parents’ anniversary, which is next month. It’s flimsy, but it’s the best I can do. I barely spoke to her once last year and it’s a new year and so it’s going to be different. We’re juniors now, which means there’s only four more semesters left to get this girl. Someone’s going to get her attention, and damned if I’m not going to at least try for it to be me.

I’m standing outside the building after school is over, feeling like a total jackass because I’m waiting for Eden. Stevie flashed me a thumbs-up before he left for tutoring, even though I hadn’t even told him what I was planning. Crap, this is pathetic. She might have plans after school. What if she’s with her girlfriends, or with Rob Mosely, who lives in the West Village and sometimes takes the subway with her? This is never going to work.

But then there she is, on her own, chewing gum, pulling her hair back with one hand and getting her MetroCard out with the other. Girls can do so much at once.

I wait until she gets started on her walk, and then fall in behind her, trying to be casual.

“Hey, Eden.”

She turns back, blinking. “Hey, Nick.”

“You walking to the subway?”

“Yeah.”

“Me too—I mean, I’m walking home, but it’s this way.” Christ, I sound rehearsed.

“Oh.” Eden keeps right on walking.

“How long does it take you to get home? Once you’re on the train?”

She shrugs. “About twenty minutes, I guess.”

“You must get a head start on reading.” I don’t think I could sound more like a dork at this point.

She wrinkles her nose. “Nah. I like to people watch. Have you ever noticed how we always try to fill our time with reading, or listening to music, or whatever? What’s wrong with just staring into space, or at the other people? You see interesting things.”

“I’ll bet.”

Eden nods, but she doesn’t say anything else, and for, like, five steps we walk in silence. She hasn’t once smiled at me.

“So, you live in Tribeca, right?”

“Yeah.” She knows I know that.

“How come your parents chose Francis? It’s so far away.”

“My mother went to Francis.”

“Really?”

“Why would I lie about that?” she says, not meanly, and not rhetorically, either. I think she may want me to answer. But I move on.

“Anyway, it’s my parents’ anniversary in a few weeks, and they like to go someplace new every year. There are so many good restaurants down there—any suggestions?” I’m doing everything wrong, but I don’t know how to do it any better.

Eden shrugs. “Do they eat down there a lot? ’Cause I can’t think of anyplace new—but there are some great places that have been there forever. Do they want something romantic?”

“I guess. My dad always makes the plan, but I said I’d help him think of something.”

“Try Scalini Fedeli.”

“Scalini Fedeli, got it.” I know the name, because we’ve eaten there. But I’m not going to tell Eden that.

“Thanks,” I say.

“Sure,” she says, and turns onto the block where the subway entrance is. It’s out of my way, but I turn with her. She’ll disappear soon, and I haven’t made any kind of progress at all.

But then something happens, right at the subway entrance: Eden stops walking, and turns to face me. “I have to run.” She sounds apologetic.

“Yeah, me too,” I say, even though I don’t have anywhere I need to be.

“One of these days I’ll have to drag you downtown,” she says, and she, just barely, smiles. I can see her teeth peeking out from under her plump upper lip. She looks so fresh that I think her mouth would taste like apples.

“How come?” I ask, feeling stupid.

“Show you around the neighborhood, I guess.”

“Right.” I don’t think I’ve smiled this entire exchange, so I start to, to let her know that I’m friendly and that I’m enjoying talking to her, and then I stop, because I should be so cool that I don’t need to smile. But then that’s worse, because now this half smile of mine is hanging in the air between us.

Mercifully, Eden says, “Right.”

“See you tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” she says, and hops down the stairs to the subway. When she bounces, I can just barely see the bottom of her underwear: plain gray cotton. Not polka-dotted to match her bra.

“Dude, she practically invited you to her bed,” Stevie says later. Stevie is very optimistic about Eden Reiss. I’m sitting on my bed, a highlighter in hand. Stevie’s phone call interrupted my attempt at our history homework.

“I wouldn’t say that. She said ‘the neighborhood.’ ”

“Well, that’s world-class innuendo.”

“Jesus, Stevie, not everything is innuendo.”

“It is if you look for it.” I can hear Stevie grinning.

“Hang on a sec, someone’s on the other line.”

“Okay, but come on back, ’cause we gotta get you into the Garden of Eden.”

“How long you been waiting to say that?”

“Not as long as you’ve been waiting to do it, man.”

I click over. “Hello?”

“Hello? Excuse me, is Mr. Brandt at home?”

I recognize the hesitant voice immediately. “Is this the same guy who called last night?”

“What?”

“Are you trying to sell us something? ’Cause we’re on the do-not-call list.”

“No, I’d just like to talk to Mr. Brandt.”

I roll my eyes. “Hang on a sec.” I click back to Stevie. “I’ll call you from my cell phone. It’s for my dad.” Stevie and I may be the last two guys in New York who still call each other on their landlines; we’ve been friends since long before either of us had a cell phone. Other than my own, his home phone number was the first one I ever memorized—and I’m pretty sure that his house was the first place I ever called all by myself.

I click back to the other line. “One second,” I say, and then walk into the living room and hand the phone to my dad, who’s watching baseball from his desk. “Bring it back to my room when you’re done.”

“Who is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Thanks, kid.”

“I’m not your secretary,” I say, but I’m smiling.

“Hello, this is Rob Brandt,” he says, and for some reason, I don’t walk away immediately, back to my room, to my cell phone, to call Stevie and discuss Eden, or at least to work on our homework together. I’m kind of curious who this guy is.

But my father surprises me. “Oh, hello,” he says. “Yes, I usually go by my middle name,” he explains, and then he’s silent. “Can you hang on one second?” Poor guy’s been on hold three times already tonight. Guess he’s not a telemarketer.

“Nicky, do me a favor.” My father hands me the phone, carefully, like it’s made of glass. “I’m going to go into the bedroom. Will you hang up when I pick up, please?”

“Sure.” He’s acting like he’s asking me to do the impossible, and this is not a big deal. The phone from my room gets fuzzy in my parents’ bedroom. We do this all the time.

“Okay. Thank you,” he says, breathless. I can’t tell if he’s nervous or excited. “Just hang up, that’s all.”

“I think I can handle it, Dad.” He seems to cringe when I call him “Dad.” Or maybe I just imagined that.

Before I hang up, I hear my father ask the guy to repeat his name. It’s Sam Roth.

Stolen Bicycles

I
can’t imagine that my father would be in any kind of trouble with that Sam Roth guy. My father is a remarkably nice man. People always like him. He’s part of why Stevie practically lives here. He always wants to watch the ball game, but he’ll totally turn it off and play video games with us. And he’s good, too.

My dad grew up in Ohio, in this very small town called Troy, so small that I always think it must have been a shock to his system the first time he saw New York. We go there a couple of times a year to visit his parents; we land in Columbus, where his brother now lives, and then we rent a car and drive to Troy. The only hotel in Troy is a Days Inn where the sheets always feel dirty. But we stay there, two or three long weekends a year. On the drive from the airport, as the scenery goes from city to suburb to country, I count how many billboards there are advertising Jesus. Maybe that’s why I’m the only Jewish kid I know who says “Jesus Christ” when I’m surprised, or pissed off, or have screwed myself royally. Other than Stevie, that is, but he probably got it from me.

When we’re in Troy, we go to church. It’s a small community church, and the four families who’ve been going there more than one hundred years have honorary ownership over each of the four stained-glass windows. Every year we take a picture in front of the Brandt window. Once, standing in the white church, under the window, gritting my teeth for the picture, I leaned in and asked my dad—trying not to break my smile—whether his parents knew I’d been raised Jewish. Mom’s Jewish, their wedding was even Jewish, with a rabbi and the seven blessings and the stomping of the glass at the end. They must know. But Dad just smiled and shushed me.

Apparently, Troy isn’t as nice as it was when my dad was growing up. My grandparents like to take us to the mall, where we eat at a diner that my father says used to be his favorite restaurant. My grandparents don’t seem to notice that things aren’t as new as they used to be. My dad tells me that he worries about his parents wandering around that mall without him, oblivious to the fact that it’s maybe not a place for elderly people to wander around.

It was at this mall that I found out my father was brave—but a quiet kind of brave, so that until then I hadn’t even been aware of it. I was nine years old, and we were at the mall alone together, running errands for my grandparents. It’s an outdoor mall, rows and rows of stores with sidewalks in between, kids racing by on Rollerblades and bikes and skateboards. I’ve always been jealous of kids who are good on skateboards because I have terrible balance. When we were little, Stevie had a skateboard and spent hours in Central Park watching me fall off it.

My father and I were coming out of the video store, having rented a couple of movies, and my father told me to wait, go back inside, just wait a second until he came and got me. I knew what he’d seen, because I’d seen it, too, but I guessed he just wanted me to stay inside until it was over. There were two boys, maybe fourteen or so, cutting the chain locks on some mountain bikes resting against a parking meter. My father walked toward them—and these were not skinny kids; they looked scary, at least in my nine-year-old opinion. But my dad walked straight to them, with his glasses and the corduroy patches on the elbows of his jacket, and he talked them out of stealing the bikes.

I know that because I recognized the look on his face when he talked to those boys. It was the same look he got when he was explaining something to me. He actually reasoned with them. I still wonder if those boys waited until we walked away and then came back to take the bikes, but I don’t think they did. I think they were actually convinced by whatever my father said. My dad: so reasonably insistent, so calm.

So when he got off the phone that Wednesday night, my dad didn’t shout for me or for my mother. After I hung up the phone, I went back to my room and called Stevie, then finished my history reading, and I only knew my dad’s phone conversation was over because I saw him, out of the corner of my eye through my open bedroom door, walking down the hallway toward the living room. I heard Pilot trotting toward him, but my father must have not wanted to play with him, because the dog came into my room, rubber ball in his mouth, begging to play fetch. A few minutes later I saw both my parents on their way down the hall, and when they got to their bedroom, they closed the door behind them.

So now I have no idea what’s going on, but I know it has to do with that guy on the other line.