The Girl in the Glass by Susan Meissner Read Free Book Online

thing extra.”
    This time my nonna did not hesitate. “I admire your optimism, Nick. You know I do. I know you think this idea will work and that nothing stands between you and success. But the world is an uncertain place. And you have had other ideas that never really—”
    “But this concept is completely different!” Childlike longing hung in my father’s voice. It so surprised me that I opened my eyes. I didn’t understand at the time what my father was asking for—the word mortgage meant nothing to me—but I knew it was something Nonna could give him and my aunts didn’t think it was a good idea for him to have it.
    “Yes, this idea is different. But the odds are just the same,” Nonna said.
    “Is that what Therese and Bianca told you? Did they tell you that?”
    “They did not have to. I can see the risk, Nicky. And you haven’t paid back the ten thousand you borrowed two years ago. That concerns them.”
    My father swerved the car a little. “You told them about that?”
    “I didn’t tell them. They asked. I am not going to lie to my children.”
    I heard a swear word fall off my father’s lips. “They asked? They asked if I owed you money?”
    “They asked if this was the first time you had asked me for money. I couldn’t tell them it was.”
    My father swore again, and my grandmother shushed him. My magical day was ending, and I couldn’t pretend that it wasn’t. I wasn’t sitting in a pink teacup and laughing. I was in the backseat of my father’s aging Volvo listening to adults argue about money. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard my father have a conversation with Nonna about money. Nor was it the first time I’d heard him talk that way about his sisters. My aunts had always come across to me as kind of bossy with their immense brown eyes, pointy eyebrows, and stern mouths. I thought my dad didn’t care much for his sisters because they were always trying to tell him what to do. That night on the way home from Disneyland, I wondered if maybe the aunts had a reason for being mad at my dad all the time. And it hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that Nonna loved Therese and Bianca like she loved my father. The aunts weren’t annoyed with Nonna or their husbands or their own children. Or even with me. But they were with him. Almost all the time.
    When I was older, I understood that my father was a fabulous idea man but terrible at follow-through. He would see a business for sale, like a little candle store or a sandwich shop, clearly at the end of its rope, and he could vividly imagine hauling it back from the edge of the abyss. But he couldn’t forge his noble ideas into reality, and he didn’t have the money to keep trying. I would think of that night often, whenever I felt cheated out of a simple desire. I grew up wishing the odds weren’t so stacked against people with dreams.
    Whatever it was he wanted money for as we drove home from Disneyland, he wasn’t going to be getting it from Nonna. He would have to stay at the insurance company doing whatever it was claims adjusters did. I didn’t know what he did all day long; I just knew he didn’t like it.
    “It’s none of their business, Ma. When they asked, you could’ve told them that. You could’ve—”
    I didn’t want to hear any more. I closed my eyes again and made a little sound like I was waking up, and my father immediately fell silent.
    “Are we home yet?” I asked sleepily.
    “No, angel. We’re not home.” But he said it quietly, as if not to me.

    The morning after the epic evening at the Melting Pot, I awoke well before my dad was supposed to be there with poppy-seed bagels. And since I hadn’t stayed for dinner with my mother and Devon, nor had I eaten much after I got home cranky and disillusioned, my stomach was growling. I pulled on a pair of sweats and a hoodie, grabbed a Pink Lady from the fruit bowl on the kitchen table, and went for a walk along the beach.
    I knew deep down that it