Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy Page A

clubs as his own. She wouldn’t know until it was too late. Frank Mantini would shit bricks, but Frank had already made his noble gesture, and gotten his satisfaction from that.
    Steven was about to drive away, undecided, when Rita came outside. She was wearing a white nightgown with a pink ribbon woven through the neck, left untied in the front. She was barefoot and she had been crying, and she got in the truck. He could see the outline of her small breasts inside the white cotton, and her face looked naked with no makeup. “He’s gone,” she said. “He’s gone.”
    “Acey?” he asked.
    “No, this guy,” she said. “My father—I wanted to find my father, so I got this missing-persons guy, you know, who finds people. He said he could find my dad, for sure. So I paid him, I gave him the cash, and he was supposed to look for my dad, and then he just, I don’t know, left. And took the money. I’m so fucking stupid.”
    “I’m sorry,” Steven said.
    “But you know what?” she said. “I’m almost glad. I think he would’ve found out my father’s dead.”
    “Why do you think that?”
    “Because he never looked for me,” she said, wildly, gesturing to the world outside. “He never found me!” Then she seemed to realize that he had never looked for her when he was definitely alive, and she deflated, shrinking into herself. “I don’t know,” she said. “No one can drink like that forever.”
    “Maybe he could,” he said. “He was a tough guy.”
    She wiped her nose. “Yeah,” she said. “So who won the raffle?”
    “Frank Mantini,” he said. “Our foreman, the one who was fired.” He fished the card out of his pocket and gave it to her. “He bought a bunch of tickets. He doesn’t want anything. He said he has daughters your age, and he wanted me to tell you to knock this shit off.”
    She looked at him, wide-eyed and forlorn, then made a small, anguished noise and covered her face with her hands. Her shoulders in the white nightgown shook. She crawled across the seat into his lap, fitting herself sideways between his chest and the steering wheel. Then she tucked up her legs and buried her wet face in his shoulder. He put his arms around her too-thin shoulders, carefully. Her hair smelled unwashed, but not in the way of adults: she smelled like an unshowered child, like summers at the public pool when he was ten.
    They stayed there so long, Rita alternately sobbing and sleeping, that his arms grew stiff and the sky started to lighten. Rita finally woke, cried out, and extracted herself. At no point had she tried to kiss him, but he didn’t try to kiss her, either. It wasn’t because she was Acey’s girl. It was because she seemed to be drowning, and might drag him under.
    She wiped her nose with her hand. “What do you remember about my dad, really?” she asked.
    He didn’t say anything.
    “You can tell me,” she said.
    “I remember he came to school one time to get you, in the middle of the day. He just showed up in the classroom, and he was drunk, I guess. I didn’t really know that then. He knocked over a kind of easel thing. He called Mrs. Wilson by her first name and said he was taking you out of school. She said he couldn’t.”
    Rita stared at him. “God, I don’t remember anything,” she said. “It’s like a big eraser came through that part of my brain. Did I go with him?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Why didn’t you tell me when I met you at the bar?”
    “Why on earth would I tell you that?”
    “Is that why you didn’t want me? Why you handed me off to Acey?”
    “I didn’t hand you off,” he said. “Acey grabbed you and didn’t let go. He was crazy about you. He talked about you all the time.”
    Her face crumpled. “Really?”
    He didn’t want her to start crying again. He had to get out of the truck and stretch his legs. “Are you hungry?” he asked. He started the engine. “Let’s get something to eat.” Still in her nightgown, at a glossy