false

My dad always said no. For a while there when my sister and I were young, my dad would take us downtown to the market building on Saturday mornings. Things the market building had that regular grocery stores didn’t were brown eggs. Also special thick white honey in big tins with tin lids, which when you wanted to eat some, you had to pry off with a knife unless the person who used it before you didn’t put it back on all the way.

Can we have a donut dad from the donut store? No. Can we have a cookie from the bakery? No. Can we have a kitten from the pet store? These kittens are the most adorable ever. No.

The only time I could get him to say yes was when we went together to a regular grocery store. Not every time, because that wouldn’t be realistic, but as seemed fit, I’d start coughing part way through our shopping. Not crazy, heavy hacking because, again, how realistic would that be? Just subtly, conveying in the portrait of my cough that maybe what he’d been too distracted to notice is that I’d actually been having the coughing problem for a few days already.

Then when we got to the checkout I’d make my move. Dad? I have a bit of a sore throat. Do you think you could buy me some cough drops?

Ludens; not Vicks because Ludens were round capsule shaped not pointy triangles so softer feeling in your mouth. They were bigger too, super lemony and less mentholated-tasting.

**

I bought a new camera yesterday. The guy selling it to me recommended a Fuji because of their great warrantee. I’m buying it for our trip to New York City next week. It’s pink which I’m okay with. Although, upon sharing my neutral response to the pink with the salesman, I think culturally speaking, he may have felt badly for me that I didn’t know enough to be moved more.

I would say he was gay. Big open blue eyes with no hidden corners, gossipy; he got a better price for his hotel when he went to NYC through Priceline than we did through Hotwire. The deals he got were always the best and most savvy even under the most trying but also interesting of circumstance but meant conspiratorially not to compete. None of the embarrassed, eye lowering, problematic tug of our sexes between us I usually get with men, and even more especially with the incorrigibly young and their high testosterone that won’t forgive them for backing down from it.

**

Larry’s not working right now. I mean he’s not working at a job that makes money. He is working. He is working on his art like he never has before. It would be wiser to spend none of it, to sit on the money from my father’s inheritance.

I don’t feel like spending it is a way of making up for all my father’s “no’s” along the way. They were easy. They were predictable. I didn’t mind them. I didn’t feel unloved.

Larry booked a hotel in Manhattan with an outdoor pool on the roof. By which I mean to say, Larry found the perfect hotel for me. Of course he and Jacob will love it too. It’s going to be the end of the day or the beginning and I’m going to be floating in a rooftop pool and feeling the sky and the vibrations and the sounds of New York City all around me.

What I feel about the money is: I feel like my dad just wanted me to be happy.