Pinch of Love (9781101558638) (21 page)

EJ punches his response: “SLEDDING IN THE DARK!!”

“
W
E'VE GOT SOME PROBLEMS,” Garrett says. It's a Tuesday and he's at my door in jeans and a BU sweatshirt instead of his usual pin-striped suit. I was expecting Ingrid, and the television is tuned to the station that broadcasts
Pinch of Love,
which is about to start. I've just prepped ingredients for tonight's trailblazing experiment: a half cup of fresh basil, a tub of vanilla ice cream, and peeled, seedless tangerines.

“What's wrong?” I ask. “Where's Ingrid?”

“No Ingrid tonight,” says Garrett. “I've involved you in our problems, Zell, and I shouldn't have. I'm sorry.”

I pull him inside. “Give me a second and I'll make some coffee?”

“Lots of cream, no sugar.”

“Got it.” I make coffee, wondering if the kiss we shared somehow figures into the problems Garrett mentioned. I pour two mugs and bring them into the living room, where he's sitting on the couch, head in his hands.

“So what's up?” I set the mugs on the table.

“I got a phone call from Ingrid's teacher today. She said Ingrid hasn't been doing her homework. And she hasn't been doing it for a while.”

“But she
does
do her homework,” I say. “All the time. At least, when I ask, she tells me she finished it already.”

“Do you check it?”

I never check it; it never occurs to me. “She doesn't pinkie swear on it,” I say. “I don't make her.”

“I haven't checked it in a long time,” Garrett says. “I just trust her when she tells me she's done it. It's my job to check it. Not yours.” He runs a hand over the top of his head. “Heck, it's my job to sit there and watch her and make sure she actually does it. She's only nine.”

I feel like I should say something, but I don't know what, so I just sit and listen.

“I'm a zombie at work because I'm so tired all the time. It's a wonder I haven't been fired yet. Knock on wood.” He raps twice on the coffee table. “And now I find out that I'm even a crappier father than I suspected. That my daughter's been lying to me for weeks.”

“You're
so
not a crappy father—”

“It was wrong of me to put you in charge of my daughter, Zell. And I'm not going to class tonight. Ingrid and I need to sort things out.”

“Where is she now?” I ask.

“She's home. Doing her homework. At least she'd better be.”

“Where?”

“
Where
? In the kitchen. Why?”

“She might hear me from there.”

“Huh?”

I go into the powder room and knock on the Ahab wall: knock-knock-knock, pause. Knock-knock-knock, pause.

After a second I hear Ingrid, on the other side of the wall, run into her bathroom. She knocks just as Garrett joins me. He looks perplexed.

“Are you doing your homework?” I ask Ingrid.

“Yeah.” Her voice sounds far away.

“Pinkie swear?”

“Pinkie swear.”

“Get back to it.”

“Okay.”

Garrett smirks and shakes his head. “Nice.”

We return to the couch. “Can I ask you something?” I say.

“Sure.” He gulps the steaming coffee.

“Is Polly Pinch Ingrid's mother?”

He sets his mug on the table. “To be honest, I can't believe you didn't ask me that a long time ago.”

“I've wanted to ask you. But it's really none of my business.”

“Can you turn that off?” He nods at the television;
Pinch of Love
has started. Polly discusses how her cat goes crazy when she cooks her “super-simp” Southern-style chicken à la king. The cat meows and rubs its cheeks on her shins and tries to jump up on the counter, Polly says. She blinks slowly, once, and smiles with her lips parted. “I guess my kitty thinks
just that much
of my chicken à la king.”

“Christ,” Garrett says.

I flick off the TV.

“So I dated this chick Anita during college,” he says. “Anita looked a lot like Polly Pinch. As in, Anita could win a Polly Pinch look-alike contest. Ingrid found an old photograph of me and Anita together, and she's been hung up on the idea, ever since, that Polly Pinch and I were once an item. And that Polly Pinch is her mother.”

“Is she?”

Garrett sighs. He rubs his face with both hands and then lets them drop into his lap. “Right after we graduated, Anita got pregnant with Ingrid. We decided to try and make it work. We got an apartment together, got jobs, saved money. But the whole time, I knew Anita was scared. I knew she wasn't into it. I had a feeling. . . . When Ingrid was four weeks old, Anita ran off to Atlanta with a jewelry salesman.”

“Oh. Wow.”

“Yeah,” he says. “
Wow.
It sucked, to say the very least. But it was a long time ago and . . . I'm over it. I don't know if I can ever forgive her, but I can't blame her for running away. She wasn't ready for a baby. I mean, neither was I, but . . .”

“Do you ever hear from her?”

Garrett sort of snorts and scowls at the floor. “Not exactly.”

He falls quiet for a while, so I get up, find the turntable in the kitchen, and bring it into the living room. Gladys sings about how she can't give it up no more, because she's much too strong. Garrett hums along. The popping sound of vinyl on a record player is soothing somehow, and it makes me think of dry kindling snapping away in Gail and Terry's fireplace.

“Nice mugs,” says Garrett.

“Nick's dad made them. He made all this stuff,” I say, gesturing to the pottery on the bookshelves.

“Zell? One other thing.” Garrett pulls an envelope from his pocket. It's addressed,
To my mother, Polly Pinch, Boston, Mass,
in wobbly, little-kid handwriting. “I found this in the mailbox when I went to put some bills in there this morning. Have a look.”

I sit and slide close to him, close enough to smell the coffee on his breath and his woodsy cologne. I worry that I'm
too
close, that I'm sending mixed signals. He shows me the envelope's contents: two five-dollar bills, eight one-dollar bills, nine quarters, seventeen dimes, a couple nickels, twenty pennies. Ingrid evidently found Garrett's law-office letterhead lying around their house. She twisted and folded the papers into a little square, the way Nick, EJ, France, and I passed notes in middle school.

I unravel the square. Ingrid's handwriting emerges, in green ink.

AFTER I READ THE LETTER, I smooth it against the table. “Jeez,” I say. “She saw an e-mail I wrote once. To Nick. That's probably what gave her this idea.”

“To Nick?”

“I guess you could call it a . . . a coping mechanism.”

“Maybe this letter is Ingrid's coping mechanism.” He doesn't look up as he speaks. “Her teacher very gently implied that Ingrid doesn't appear to have many friends because all the kids at school think she's a nut-job, because all she ever talks about is Polly Pinch. She doesn't really ever mention friends, and she hasn't been invited to play after school at anybody's house in a while, or to birthday parties or stuff like that. I guess that's why I'd never thought about asking one of her friends' moms to watch her while I was in class. Her Polly obsession's only gotten more intense with this baking contest in her head. I thought for a while that it would be a good thing for her, but now I'm not so sure. Imagine her reaction when I tell her she can't cook at all anymore. Not even with you.”

“You mean . . . ?”

“I've got to get through to her, Zell. I've got to get serious with this. She can't blow off school. I've got to just lay down the law. So no more Polly Pinch, period.”

“No more baking experiments?”

“No. You're off the hook. And you're off the hook for babysitting, too.”

I don't say anything. I imagine baking alone and fight off a surge of self-pity. Truth is, I don't want to bake alone. I don't want to be alone anymore, period.

“So what are you going to do with Ingrid?” I ask.

“Well, next week's not an issue because she's off to Nature's Classroom.”

Nature's Classroom is the overnight hippy camp where pretty much every public school fourth-grader in suburban Massachusetts spends a week hiking in the woods, singing Cat Stevens songs around campfires, and learning to distinguish raccoon poop from deer poop and coniferous trees from deciduous trees.

“After that I'm going to bring her with me to class,” Garrett says.

“I thought that didn't work too well in the past,” I say.

“It's
unfair
to expect other people to watch her. And I can't quit law school. I just can't. I'm so close. Just a few more classes. Maybe I'll take the summer semester off and we'll . . . reassess. Figure out a better situation.”

“Have you ever thought about therapy?” The question blurts from my mouth—I don't know where it comes from, really.

Garrett laughs. “I probably do need a therapist.”

“I meant for Ingrid.”

He clears his throat.

“I mean, if she's really delusional about her mother,” I add. “That's too much for any father to handle. Especially on his own.”

He doesn't respond, and I suddenly feel ashamed, as if I stepped over some line. Who am I to give advice?
I'm
the one who should be in therapy. “I'm sorry,” I say. I shake my head. “That was out of line.”

He holds up a hand, shushing me. “I don't know. At this point, I don't want to make her feel like even more of a freak. She needs normalcy. She needs—I don't know. Who the hell knows.”

“Maybe she just needs you.”

“What's that noise?”

I turn down Gladys and the boys; we hear Ingrid knocking on the wall.

“I'll get that,” says Garrett. He goes into the powder room, and I don't listen as they talk through the wall for a minute or so.

He comes back into the living room. “Thanks, Zell. She wants me to come check her homework. So I'm gonna go home now.”