specific, but he didn’t care and his rules were simple: no roommates, no matter how nice; no studios, no matter how cushy; nothing on Staten Island, no matter how cheap.
Simple, right?
Apparently not. Loretta tried to negotiate even those slight requests, but he’d held firm. Griff knew exactly what he could put up with day to day.
Sighing, she’d made ominous predictions about impossible rents, and Griff had just told her to dig around. New York real estate was always a radioactive
shark tank. Griff just needed to see some options.
Reluctantly, she’d agreed to look after she’d dropped Nicole at kindergarten. He would meet Loretta there and drop her off in time to pick up her daughter
at noon.
As he drove to the school, Griff checked his phone. Just a voice mail from Alek letting him know that he’d put Tommy in a cab as instructed. Translation: “I
didn’t ass-pound your drunk friend with my large Russian penis last night.”
Griff wondered if there was a way to scare Tommy enough to make him avoid Alek altogether.
He thought about caling Tommy’s number to make sure he’d made it home safely, but thought better of the idea. They weren’t exactly friends, and it sounded like things were already tense in the Dobsky house. Last thing Griff wanted to do was complicate a bad situation by sticking his beak in.
Mind your own dumb business.
After he’d paralel parked in front of the brightly-painted windows, he looked for Loretta, but she was nowhere to be found. Griff looked down at his celphone. Had he forgotten to check his messages? Nope. Nothing there from Loretta.
“Morning!” a warm baritone caled from across the street. Dante ambled toward him with a cup of coffee and a butter-stained paper bag in one hand and a
child’s carseat in the other. A van slowed down to let him pass. “Got you danish.”
After his accident, Dante had gone on leave with his mild concussion. It had only been a week since he’d cracked his head open and almost burnt alive. He
looked more handsome than ever. Apparently, near-death agreed with him.
Griff tilted his head in confusion. “I’m supposed to meet your sister.”
“And I’m chopped liver?” Dante handed him the coffee.
“No. I just….” Griff accepted the bakery bag. He could smel apricot and his stomach rumbled.
“Frankie surprised her for their anniversary. He flew in from Iraq last night, and she caled me to pinch-hit as a child-kennel and apartment-pimp combo.”
Griff nodded thanks, squinting in the morning sun. There didn’t seem to be any awkwardness between them.
I missed you, D
.
Dante grinned back, like he’d read Griff’s mind and agreed. “I knew you’d be hungry.”
“Cool.” Griff turned back to his truck. “You wanna drive while I eat?”
“Yeah. I want you to have food in you when you see these shitholes. Give you something to upchuck.”
Griff didn’t have a hand free to smack his smiling friend, but it was the thought that counted. Besides, smacking a concussion seemed like overkil. He took a
sip of the strong coffee. “How’s your head?”
“Hard as ever.” Dante knocked on his head like a door and Griff winced. “Whatsamatter?”
Griff’s eyes bulged at his best friend’s blasé attitude. “Uhhh. It hasn’t even been a week? You’re on medical leave. Ringing any bels?”
“Nah. I’m fit for anything you can throw at me.” He roled his eyes and slapped his chest.
“Dante, get serious. You almost got roasted alive. You split your head open.”
“Don’t worry, G. You saved me already. I’m not gonna wind up a vegetable.”
Griff breath gusted out in a chuff of amazement. “Christ. You’re already a fucking vegetable. A
sprout
.”
“I got your sprout right here, Muir.” Dante squeezed his basket and chewed his medium-rare lip. “We can’t al be redwoods. And
you
may not be a fan, but my sprout here gets planted plenty.” He folowed Griff back to the truck. “Keys?” Without warning, Dante stepped close and thrust his hand into Griff’s pockets, digging around right there on the street.
“Agh!” Griff froze standing next to the passenger door.
Dante chuckled low. “
There’s
my blush.”
Griff held his breath while Dante’s hand slid against the side of his soft bulge. He tried to remember that they were just two friends joking around on the
corner in Brooklyn. He hissed, “Yeah. I coulda… you don’t have to play undersea treasure hunt in my damn pants.”
“Gotta watch out for that electric eel.” Dante closed his hand over the ring and winked and puled his fist out.
- Jangle - Jingle -
Griff took a sip of coffee and checked to make sure no one had seen. The sidewalk around them was empty. He almost didn’t care.
Huh. I guess porn’s kind of a cure for hang-ups.
Dante puled the door open for Griff to climb inside, then closed it firmly. He jogged around the front and hopped into the driver’s seat. “I can’t believe I get to drive your damn truck.”
“I always wanted a slick wop chauffeur.” Griff took a big bite of apricot Danish and chewed happily.
Dante laughed and dug a wad of folded paper out of his back pocket to hand him Loretta’s listings: his escape plan. They were warm with Dante’s body heat
and curved from being snug against his butt. “Where to first, Mr. Muir?”
Griff chewed a moment and let the creased pages cool off a little before he unfolded them.
Dante was raring to go. “Pick a dump, any dump.”
Griff scanned the page. Loretta had thoughtfuly organized them by neighborhood. “Hmm. First stop, looks like Sunset Park.”
Dante bobbed his head, checked the mirror, and puled into the street smoothly.
GRIFFIN didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but he had no idea New Yorkers were wiling to live in such disgusting places. For some of them, slums would
have been a step up.
They al sucked, every apartment Loretta had dug up—not just a little, but on a biblical scale. It was appaling to see what Brooklyn had to offer to a blue-
colar bachelor seeking digs. Finaly, Griff understood what Loretta had been trying to tel him so tactfuly.
That wasn’t completely fair. Some of the places turned out to be nice but completely unrealistic. Even with his income from the FDNY, bouncing at the Stone
Bone, and working construction on the weekends, these apartments were so expensive that Griff would have to work sixty hours a day to make the rent, let alone eat or pay for electricity.
The apartments he could afford, al three of them, were medieval in their ugliness and unfitness.
Option one was a sixth-floor walkup that had actual piles of trash scattered up the endless steps and dog turds on the landing. On the floor, a couple screamed at each other in French, it sounded like. A toddler wandered outside the door in diapers and bare feet.
No thanks
.
One apartment hadn’t even had wals or a toilet, just the bare pipe sticking up out of unfinished concrete in the dead center of an empty room. “Couple
weekends, good as new!” the super had exclaimed. “You can instal whichever rooms and whatever crapper you want.” He pointed at the three-foot window high
on one wal. “And a view!”
The third place turned out to be a semi-legal two bedroom that had been built over a pizzeria without permits by a couple of shifty cousins. They explained
that their family couldn’t find out about the tenant so rent had to be paid weekly in cash. As a bonus, Griff could have al the pizza he could eat,
plus
they could place bets for him with their dad’s numbers racket. Upstairs, Dante found a rat the size of a possum curled dead in the pepperoni-scented bedroom. The sheepish cousins explained that they’d spread poison downstairs in the basement, so the rats had come up here: “On vacation, like.”
Dante laughed al the way back to the truck, thumping Griff on the back, trying to get him to laugh too.
Once they were on the road again, Griff didn’t say anything. He just folded and refolded Loretta’s pages, stil curled with the shape of Dante’s ass.
Dante was driving back toward the kindergarten so he could colect Nicole.
“Sorry.” Griff felt like an idiot for dragging Dante al over creation.
“C’mon! For what? I wanted to help.”
“You don’t mind driving around?”
“Duh. No! I fucking hate it, G.” Dante turned to Griff and twisted his handsome features into his vilage idiot face: eyes crossed, tongue out. “I want you to
move in with me, man.”
“Nah. I appreciate it, but I need to get a place of my own. I’m a grownup.” Griff turned to look out the passenger window, not wanting to see the plea in
Dante’s bottomless eyes.
“Think. I got al those rooms.”
“Without fucking wals or doors!” Griff laughed and looked over at his best friend.
“Exactly! We could pool resources. Half the costs. I could use the steady rent, and you could even cover your part of the bils by helping me renovate. We’d
both be better off and you know it. Even my parents think so.”
“They said that?”
“Griffin, they suggested it.” Dante took his eyes off the road to nail him with a glance. He frowned. “They know how much you work. They know what it’s
like at your dad’s. And they worry about both of us.”
Griff tried to put his anxiety into words that didn’t cross any lines and stil sounded grateful for the offer. “Dante, I don’t think I should ever live with anybody.
I’m a pain in the ass. I keep rotten hours. I snore.”
And I jerk off every single night watching you on the web
.
Dante wasn’t buying that. “Yeah, asswipe, and I’m an arrogant prick. I own and
use
more grooming products than a chick. I can sleep through a missile strike and I have the same damn schedule, in case you hadn’t noticed. Why are you so dead set against me?” He put a hand on Griff’s thick leg and squeezed.
Why-why-why? I wonder.
Griff struggled to keep his thigh relaxed, not to react. He looked down at the hand and then at the road in front of them. He swalowed. “It’s not you. I love
your place, you know that. And hanging out. Hel, I helped build out a lot of the deranged heap it is today. It—I don’t want to crowd you.”
“You’re not! How can you crowd me?! I’m
asking
!” Dante’s exasperation crept into his voice, reasoning with a lunatic.
Griff took a deep breath and let it out. “I just don’t want to put any pressure on you that isn’t already there.”
Dante squeezed Griff’s leg and patted it—
good dog—
before putting both hands back on the wheel. “Okay. Okay. I just want you to know that I want you
there. I wish you’d think about it.”
“I know.” Griff nodded. His thigh stil tingled with the handprint. “I do. I did. I have.”
I think about it twenty-three hours a day,
which is why it’s a rotten
idea
.
Dante puled into a space down the block from Nicole’s school. He kiled the engine and handed the keys back.
Griff took them and turned to Dante. “Sorry about wasting your Friday. You should be in bed.”
“It wasn’t wasted. Sheesh.”
Little people were miling with moms in front of the pastel letters painted across the front of the building.
Dante pointed and started to climb out of the truck. “There she is.”
To Griff’s surprise, he heard himself ask, “Can I come say hi?”
“Sure! Yeah. She’d love that.” Dante waited for Griffin to lock the truck and pocket the keys.
Under a bright painting of stacked pumpkins, Nicole was holding a young teacher’s skirt, pointing at their approach. The teacher leaned down so Nicole
could say something.
Dante spoke out of the side of his wine-stain mouth. “I should mention, just so you know: she cals you Monster.”
“Monster?” Griff shook his head as they crossed the street. “Where’d she get that, I wonder?”
“Dunno.” Dante looked away and completely failed to seem innocent. “You’re huge and grouchy and fiery red.”
“I’l try not to step on any midgets.” Griff smiled and shouldered him hard enough to make him stumble.
“Hey!” Dante gave a bark of indignant laughter. “I’m fucking fragile! I’m recuperating.”
“Seem bad as new to me.”
The two firemen picked their way through the mob of tiny students to colect theirs.
Nicole watched them approaching with a kind of patient skepticism, like she was waiting for Griff to step on a building. Griff did feel like Godzila.
“C’mon, bug.” Dante scooped his niece up, nodding thanks to the teacher for waiting with her.
Nicole roled her little eyes at the injustice of being treated like a child. “Uncle Dante.”
“And Monster,” Griff muttered as they headed to Dante’s car.
Dante and Nicole laughed until he laughed too.
SOMETIME around two in the afternoon, Griff realized that he and Dante would make good parents—like, together. Oddly enough, Nicole was the one who diagnosed their delicate condition.
After the two men had picked up Nicole at school, they had gone for lunch at Ferdinando’s, old-school Sicilian
ristorante
al the way. They demolished a couple orders of rice bals, and then Nicole and Dante shared a few paneli specials, tasty chickpea fritters that were Dante’s favorite lunch. Griff had the pizziole, the pork so tender that he never touched his damn knife.
Griff insisted on picking up the check, and the soft way Dante looked at him to say “thanks” made him want to buy a milion lunches, lunches for strangers.
While he knew that having kids wasn’t realy this easy, Griff loved having the chance to goof off with his best buddy and play dad for a while. No alarms, no
bar fights, no renovations. Just the three of them wandering around Cobble Hil, taking bakery breaks every now and then. And if some secret part of him pretended that they were a male couple spending the afternoon with their daughter, he tried not to think about it too much. Dante had promised his sister he’d have Nicole home at three.