Page 5 of Ruthless Daddy
I tried to make a joke, but the words wouldn’t come. Instead, I just nodded, and Marco—bless him—let the subject drop.
We moved to the window, overlooking the main room. The staff were rolling out the velvet ropes, the bartender lining up the house bottles in perfect symmetry. There was a pulse in the floor, the anticipation of a night not yet begun. I could see two of the regulars already circling, both in dresses they couldn’t have afforded without their last boyfriends. The sight of them used to make me hungry, but now it just made me tired.
“I ever tell you about my place? The vineyard?”
“No,” I said.
“When things get too much—if they get too much—you ask me about it. Ok?”
“Sure,” I said.
We stood in silence for a while, watching the club fill up with strangers. In an hour, Tonio would show up, crash the bar, and drag at least two women home before dawn. Sal would arrive last, as always, and pretend he hated every minute of it. Maybe, if we were lucky, we’d get one good hour of laughter before the world came crashing in again.
Marco put his arm around my shoulder. It was heavy and warm, and for a second I didn’t flinch.
“Take a break,” he said. “Just for tonight. Let the girls dance. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want.”
I nodded, not really agreeing but not fighting him either. The glass in my hand was empty, and I let him refill it.
Serafina moved closer to the window, hands clasped over the curve of her belly. She watched the crowd, scanning for danger and opportunity the way she always had. In that moment she looked more like the old man than she ever had before—same set to the mouth, same refusal to let life be anything but a battle.
She caught me looking, and for a second, her smile was real.
The three of us stood there, side by side, and watched as the lights dimmed and the club came to life. Maybe, somehow, I could find a way to enjoy myself tonight.
Chapter 2
Angela
Thetricktoforginga utility bill was committing to the watermark.
Amateurs left it off. Amateurs thought nobody looked. But the watermark was the first thing a tired front-desk clerk’s eyes went to when they tilted the page toward the fluorescents, and the absence of one was the kind of small wrongness that made a person ask for a second form of ID. So I built mine with care. Forty minutes of patient layer-work in a free design program on a public computer that wheezed like it had emphysema, while a man two carrels down clipped his fingernails into a paper cup and a woman in a parka the color of dishwater slept with her cheek pressed to her keyboard, a string of capital Y’s snaking down her screen.
The third floor of the Harold Washington smelled of old carpet, warm electronics, the faint sour ghost of someone’s microwaved lunch. I loved it. It felt like I was visiting church—a holy space, somewhere for everyone but also just for me.
The bill I was working from was real. I had pulled it that morning out of the recycling bin behind a six-flat in Lincoln Park, peeling it off a banana peel like an archaeologist, and I had carried it eight blocks in my coat pocket with the smug satisfaction of a woman who knew that a real ComEd bill was worth more than money. The address belonged to a unit I had clocked off a Craigslist vacancy listing. The previous tenant had moved out three weeks ago. Nobody was getting mail there yet. Nobody would for a month.
I scanned it. I lifted the bill code, the account number, the cheerful little ComEd lightbulb logo. I dropped in my new name—Anna Ancelotti, the name I had been wearing for fourteen months, and a service date from last month, and a billing total of one hundred and thirty-seven dollars and twelve cents.
I sighed. It was hard to believe that just two years ago I had been a forensic analyst at a hedge fund. Harder to believe that right now, the principals of that hedge fund were doing federal time partly on the strength of my testimony. The part of my brain that had built that case had never powered down. It just sat there now, mostly unused, like a Ferrari in a garage in a town with no roads.
Anna Ancelotti.
I tried the name on in my head the way I did every morning, like a coat I had to wear. It still didn’t fit. It had never fit, which was the point—WITSEC handed you a life that was meant to feel like someone else’s, on the theory that someone else’s life was harder to find. Mine had been a forty-three-year-old paralegal from Akron, on paper. In practice she was me, awake at three in the morning, listening to the radiator pipes in a stranger’s apartment and counting the exits.
Until six weeks ago, when I had come home from work and seen that the dish towel I always left hanging on the oven handlehad been folded and put back on the wrong hook, and I had not slept indoors since.
The print queue beeped. I walked to the printer with my hands in my pockets, and collected my single sheet for twenty cents. ComEd. Anna Ancelotti. 2247 N. Sheffield, Unit 3F. Past due notice in friendly orange.
Beautiful. Truly.
I folded it once, twice, three times. I ran the creases hard with my thumbnail and then I un-folded it and creased it the other way and folded it again, until it had the soft drape of a document that had been shoved into a purse and then a drawer and then a hand. I held it up to the long fluorescent. The watermark glowed at exactly the depth it should. The lightbulb logo sat a hair to the right of true centre, the way the real one did because some graphic designer at ComEd in 1998 had laid out the template wrong and they had been printing it wrong ever since.
I let myself smile. Small. Private. The kind of smile you allowed yourself when you had been very good at something nobody was ever going to clap for.
The sleeping woman in the dishwater parka snored. The fingernail man clipped on, oblivious. Somewhere on the other side of the floor a child was being told, in the patient hiss of a mother running out of patience, that we do not climb on the magazine rack, Devon, we do not, we do not.
I slid the bill into the inside pocket of my coat, against my ribs, where the warmth of my body would finish aging it for me by lunch.
