Chapter 14: The Dress

Lucy picked up on the ninth ring.

"It's five thirty in the morning, Kate. I swear to God."

"Is my dad there?"

"He's on my couch with his shoes on, snoring. Why?"

I sat down on the curb of the Mahoneys' driveway and put my head between my knees.

By seven we were in Lucy's kitchen with the door chained, and I told them everything.

My father listened with both hands around a mug of decaf.

"I'm not leaving my bar," he said when I finished.

"Dad."

"Your mother wore red the first night she poured a drink in that place."

He set his mug down hard.

"I'm not leaving it for that boy in a robe."

Lucy slapped the table.

"You need a dress," she said. "You're going to a dinner with the mob."

"So?"

"So you're going to look like you own the building."

"I have a dress."

"You have the green one, and he's seen it, and it was a polite dress."

Malachi stood at the window of Lucy's apartment with his back to us, watching the street.

"I'm out of a job as of noon," he said. "I have a gym bag and a car."

"You have a place to sleep," I said. "Over the bar. It's a twin bed."

He turned his head slowly.

"Kate."

"You don't get to say no," I said. "It's my bar."

Lucy's aunt kept a consignment shop on the boardwalk end of Atlantic Avenue, and she opened it for us at nine.

I tried on six dresses.

The sixth was red, with a neckline that showed everything I had spent four years learning to stop apologizing for.

I stood in front of the mirror and looked at my chest and my hips and the line of my thigh through the slit.

Lucy didn't say a word. She pulled out her phone.

"Go live," she said. "Right now. Eleven thousand people want to see you walk out of the dressing room."

"I don't want an audience for this."

"They watched him break you," she said. "Let them watch this."

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