“Number one. No running away from me when we’re out together.”

“Okay, but what if—”

“Nope. You have to stay with me. At all times. I must be able to see you.”

She slumps over, puts her head on her arm.

“And in the mornings, you need to get yourself ready for school. Clothing, shoes, homework, backpack. Can you do that?”

“What are you going to be doing?”

“I will be making your breakfast and your lunch.”

“What if I want school lunch that day?”

“Then we’ll talk about it, and you probably can. Now, next. What do you do after school? You go to an after-school program, am I right?”

“No. I got kicked out of it.”

“Kicked out? What did you—never mind. So what do you do after school?”

She laughs. “You know literally nothing about my life, do you?”

“I’ve been a little preoccupied . . .”

She stands up and comes around to his side of the table and sticks out her hand to shake his. “Hello. Let me introduce myself. My name is Fritzie Peach Delaney. At least that’s my new name for while I’m here. My real name, if you want to know, is Frances Elizabeth Farrell. And I’m eight years old, and I have two bio-parents who don’t know anything about me. Thank you very much, and now I will sit down again.” She takes a bow and goes back to her seat.

Fritzie Peach? The kid is named Peach? How did that get by him?

“Oh, and after school, I usually get met at the bus stop by a nice lady named Marnie MacGraw—maybe you remember her? And she usually takes me to her store, where they sell flowers and Marnie knows a lot about love, so she talks about love all day with people. People are always coming in and hugging her and kissing her and telling her things, and she tells them things, and sometimes everybody dances. There is a lot of talking. And yoga.”

“Right,” he says. He doesn’t know why this makes his chest feel tight, but it does. When he can collect himself, he says, “Okay. So then after school, I, Patrick Delaney, will meet you at the bus stop and bring you here.”

“Unless I get invited to go home with a friend.”

“Unless you get invited to go home with a friend, correct. Which you will tell me about.”

“I will try to remember.”

“No, no. That’s one of the rules. I have to know where you are. At all times.”

“What if I’m downstairs with Ariana and her friends?”

“Then you’ll tell me.”

“What if I’m on the stoop with Bedford?”

“Then you’ll tell me.”

“What if I’m in the bathroom?”

“Fritzie.”

“What?”

“You know you can go to the bathroom.” He takes another slice of pizza. “By the way, is your name seriously Fritzie Peach?”

“Yep.”

“And how did you happen to get that name?”

“I gave it to myself.”

He laughs. “You’re quite a piece of work, you know that?”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

He stands up and starts clearing the table. “It means . . . it means . . .” His phone buzzes in his pocket. It’s Marnie. “Oh! I gotta take this,” he says to Fritzie.

“Okay, but do we have a rule about getting my ears pierced?”

“We do,” he says. “You’re not to do it.” And then he clicks the phone. “Hi.”

Her voice is odd. At first he thinks that maybe the worst has happened, that she didn’t make it to Florida in time to see her father before he passed away, but no. He realizes it’s just her new, formal, dealing-with-Patrick voice. That kind of voice. Official.

“Just going up to see my father now in the Cardiac Care Unit. How’s Fritzie?”

“She’s fine.”

“Good.” Then there’s a silence. He’s supposed to say something else, so he says, “How are you?” even though she probably just covered that. Going up to see her father in CCU, right.

“Don’t let Fritzie forget to put her homework in her backpack,” she says.

“Fritzie, put your homework in your backpack,” he says. Then: “How was the flight?”

“Good. A bit of turbulence, but nothing so bad.”

He tells her it snowed and they went to the park. Which just about covers it if you don’t want to go into the part about haircuts, dog nearly getting lost, Patrick’s name being shouted seventy kazillion times. Just park, pizza, snow. He’s fine. Bedford’s fine. Fritzie’s fine.

He looks over at Fritzie. Oh God, she is so un-fine. That hair. Now that he looks at it, really looks at it in the kitchen light, he sees that she seems less like a jaunty POW and more like she might have had a bad case of mange.

He decides it’s best not to mention this on the phone. He doesn’t feel he’s qualified yet to explain the concept of arting one’s hair. In fact, he’s grateful when Marnie says she has to go, and they can stop talking.

The next day, after looking at Fritzie’s hair and feeling like an abject failure at parenting, he invites Ariana upstairs for a hair consultation, with Fritzie’s permission. In spite of himself. He has to ask for help, day two.

“We’ve had an incident of hair-arting, and I’m thinking you might be able to art it into something more . . .”

“Attractive?”

“Well, less like it was chewed off by rodents. More like it was done on purpose.”

She does exactly that: snips and shapes, and she recommends a bit of hair gel for the mornings, something that would make it stick up ever so slightly.

“Thank you,” Patrick and Fritzie say at exactly the same moment. For probably completely different reasons.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

MARNIE

“Just so you know, I’m not sorry,” says my mother at the airport, out of the blue.

I look over at her. We’ve been sitting at Gate Eighteen with our cups of tea, waiting for the plane to board. Around us are a bunch of pale New Yorkers in flowered shirts laughing as though they’re being freed from weather prison. My mother has mostly been grimly typing something on her phone, stopping to stare into space in an unfocused way, and then furiously typing again in response to a ding from her phone.

After a few attempts to make conversation with her about such neutral things as airport security lines, the taste of hot tea in Styrofoam cups versus cardboard cups, and annual snowfall amounts in Brooklyn, I too have fallen silent.

She puts her phone away and leans over closer to me. “I probably won’t be talking about this much in the next few days, but I just wanted you to know that my time in Brooklyn was perfect the way it was,” she says. “So thank you. And I don’t feel guilty for being away, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

That is what I’d been thinking. “Well,” I say. “That’s good. I’m glad. Guilt is sort of pointless.”

“There are some things I didn’t tell you that I might as well mention now,” she says. “Just because I want you to know. I did have a little fling. I didn’t tell you about him because I didn’t want to burden you with all that. But I just texted him to tell him what’s happening and that things are over.”