14 Degrees Below Zero Read Free Page B

cigarette smoke found his eye.
    “So you’re walking the dog?” Lewis heard the sound of his daughter adjusting herself in bed.
    “I already told you that,” he said. “Hey, did I hear Ramona? Does she want to talk to Grandpa?”
    “Ramona isn’t up yet.”
    Lewis realized, all at once, that Stephen was in bed with Jay. He had spent the night there, in Jay’s little two-bedroom apartment on the far side of Hennepin Avenue, about six blocks from Lewis’s house. Lewis had suspected Stephen of sleeping over before, but it was an apprehension he’d never had confirmed.
    She wasn’t required to live like this. Jay had an open invitation to come home, to bring Ramona, to unite what was left of the family. Of course, should that happen, Lewis knew he wouldn’t approve of allowing Stephen to spend the night.
    What was this doing to Ramona’s psyche? He was no kinky Freudian, but things were hard enough for the little girl—she was growing up with a single mother, and she almost never saw her father. And now the confusion of seeing a boyfriend parading in and out of her mother’s room, the sleepy male face at the breakfast table, Stephen half-clothed and giving her mother confidential caresses to commemorate the erotic adventures of the night before.
    It had to be harmful to Ramona. It pained Lewis to think it, but the girl wasn’t being given an optimal upbringing. Of course, raising concern of any kind would only serve to cleave a yawning chasm of enmity between himself and Jay. She was stubborn, proud. She might move away. She might disappear.
    Lewis took a jagged breath and caressed his breastbone.
Not yet, can’t die yet.
His head swam with fear. He calculated his chances of surviving the morning at ninety-six, maybe ninety-seven percent. Very good odds, but he felt his world narrowing.
    What made it all the more unbearable was Stephen himself. Stephen was a tenure-track professor at the university, in the graduate program that Jay herself might have been starting this fall—if she hadn’t gotten pregnant at nineteen and dropped out after her second year of college. Now Jay was twenty-three. Stephen was nine years older. Stephen: Mister Perfect, Mister Intellectual. He hadn’t fooled Lewis for an instant, not from the moment—the very
millisecond
—they first met.
    “Dad?” Jay said. “You still there?”
    “Yes, honey,” Lewis said, trying to remember how he talked when he sounded normal. “Can I please say good morning to Ramona?”
    “She isn’t up, Dad,” Jay said again. “And there isn’t time. We’re going to have to hurry to get her to day care on time.”
    So Lewis was to believe that Ramona wasn’t awake yet, although in the same breath Jay was talking about rushing her to day care—a day care that, not insignificantly, Lewis paid for. Precisely when had his discourse with his daughter devolved into worthless half-truths and arm’s-length parrying?
    “When you were Ramona’s age, your mother and I always got you into bed by eight o’clock,” Lewis said. “That way, you were nice and rested in the morning. We didn’t have to drag you out of bed.”
    Indistinct sounds on the phone.
    “Jay, did you—”
    “What did you say, Dad? Sorry.”
    “Is someone there?” Lewis asked, the words escaping him despite his best intentions. “Did Stephen spend the night?”
    Lewis briefly considered walking home, getting into his car, and driving the short distance to Jay’s apartment. Perhaps this was a conversation best conducted in person. Maybe he needed to have a word with Stephen.
    “Dad, don’t take this the wrong way,” Jay said. “But it’s just not your business.”
    Zing.
In a heartbeat, Jay had turned cold and disapproving—an elegant diversionary strategy, something else she had learned from her mother.
    “I could consider it my business, since it pertains to the general welfare of my granddaughter.”
    “I can’t talk to you when you’re like this,” said Jay.