Chapter 12: Getting His Act Together
The light clicked on.
Andrew stood in the doorway for a moment, taking in the apartment. Christie was asleep on the couch, curled into herself with one arm hanging off the cushion. The room smelled faintly of cigarettes, and someone had left the bedroom window cracked open despite the fact that it was barely fifty degrees outside.
He checked the time. Quarter past midnight.
He crossed to the window and closed it, then went to the kitchen and ran the tap until the water was warm, filled a glass, and brought it over to the coffee table.
"Christie." He kept his voice low. "Hey, Christie."
She surfaced slowly, blinking up at him with the disoriented look of a kid pulled out of deep sleep. "You're back," she said, like she'd been waiting but hadn't wanted to admit it.
"Drink some water. Then go back to bed."
She sat up, took the glass without argument, and drank. Then she climbed off the couch and shuffled toward the bathroom, announcing flatly, "I have to go."
Andrew watched her go and felt something loosen in his chest that he hadn't realized was tight. He rinsed the glass, put it back, straightened the couch cushions, and went to check that the bedroom was in decent shape. He was changing into sweats when he heard the click of the bedroom door down the hall, Christie putting herself to bed.
He exhaled.
One thing at a time.
He showered, set his alarm, and went to sleep.
He was woken up at seven-fifteen by a knock at the door.
He lay still for a second, remembering that Bonnie was technically still in the picture, and went to check the peephole before doing anything else. That habit had developed fast.
It was Bonnie. She was in the hallway in a camisole and underwear, listing slightly to the left, and when he opened the door she lurched forward. He stepped aside. She went down onto the floor like a coat falling off a hook and stayed there, laughing softly at something only she could hear.
The bedroom door opened. Christie stood in the doorway in her pajamas, took one look at her mother on the floor, and closed the door again. The click of the latch was very quiet and somehow worse for it.
Andrew got Bonnie onto the couch, found a throw blanket, and left her there. He stood in the kitchen for a minute, looking at nothing, then brushed his teeth and decided that today was the day he said some things out loud.
He made breakfast — scrambled eggs, toast, orange juice, the kind of simple spread that required no real effort but still constituted a meal — and knocked on the bedroom door.
"Christie. Breakfast."
She came out without being asked twice, sat down at the table, and kept her eyes carefully away from the couch. She ate without talking. When she finished she carried her plate to the sink and washed it herself, then went back to her room.
Andrew watched her do all of this and thought: eight years old and she already knows how to make herself small.
He cleaned up the rest, poured himself a second cup of coffee, and sat down at the kitchen table with a legal pad he'd picked up at the drugstore and a pen.
He stared at the blank page.
Then he started writing.
The list wasn't pretty, but it was honest.
Current situation: Resident musician gig at the bar, paying roughly fifty dollars a night on a good night. Twenty-two dollars in his wallet. Apartment covered for now. Bonnie and Christie in the picture, for however long that lasted.
Problems: About six of them, depending on how you counted.
He moved on.
Guitar — He was decent. Decent enough to keep the gig, not good enough to build anything serious on. He'd been playing since he was fifteen and he knew his ceiling. It wasn't low, but it wasn't where he needed it to be to make real money, and he didn't have the kind of natural songwriting instinct that turned decent players into something more.
He drew a line through it. Not a door closed, just not the main door.
Cooking — He paused here.
This was the thing he kept coming back to. He'd always been comfortable in a kitchen in the way some people were comfortable with tools — not trained, just intuitive, the kind of person who could look at what was in the fridge and make something that actually tasted like a decision rather than an accident.
Since arriving in New York he'd had occasion to cook more than usual, and he'd noticed that it came easier than it should. The braised short ribs he'd brought to Monica's — the first time he'd made that recipe — had been good. Actually good. Monica had said so, and Monica did not hand out compliments about food.
Monica, he wrote.
She was a professional chef. More than that, she was someone who cared about food the way other people cared about things they'd chosen their whole lives around. She knew people. She knew the restaurant world. If he wanted to learn what a real kitchen looked like from the inside, there was a connection sitting right across the hall.
He wrote: Talk to Monica. Ask about dessert work — prep, entry-level, anything.
He sat back and looked at that for a moment.
The other item was more complicated.
Evan's estate. His father had left behind enough to matter and enough ambiguity to be a problem. Andrew had no illusions about how these things went — probate court moved slowly, lawyers charged by the hour, and the more money involved the more people materialized with reasons they deserved a share of it.
He didn't know exactly what the estate looked like, but he knew there was a number significant enough to change his situation materially if it came through clean.
Prepare for it to not come through clean, he wrote. Plan without it. Anything that arrives is a bonus.
That was the only sane approach.
He went back up the page and wrote at the top, in caps: DO NOT QUIT THE BAR GIG UNTIL YOU HAVE $3,000 SAVED.
Three thousand dollars. It felt like an arbitrary line, but it wasn't. Three thousand meant if everything fell apart at once — the gig, the apartment, the whole arrangement — he had runway. Months of runway. Enough time to figure out the next thing without the specific kind of panic that made people make bad decisions.
He underlined it.
Below that he wrote: Exercise. Consistent. No excuses.
He looked at the list. It was not a glamorous document. It was not the kind of plan that announced itself. It was just a series of small, achievable things written on a legal pad at a kitchen table on a Friday morning while a hungover woman slept on his couch.
But it was something.
He folded the page, put it in the kitchen drawer, and went to knock on Christie's door.
He had some things to say to her mother first. And then, when Bonnie was awake enough to hear them, he was going to say them.
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