Twisted

window.”
    His eyes gleamed. “I took her home and we stood on the steps of her parents’ house—she was still living with them. We talked for a while more then she said she had to get to bed. You catch that? Like she could’ve said, ‘I have to be going.’ Or just ‘Good night.’ But she worked the word bed into it. I know, you’re in love, you look for messages like that. Only in this case, it wasn’t Manko’s imagination working overtime, no sir.”
    Outside, a light rain had started falling and the wind had come up. I rose and shut the window.
    “The next day I kept getting distracted at work. I’d think about her face, her voice. No woman’s ever affected me like that. On break I called her and asked her out for the next weekend. She said sure and said she was glad to hear from me. That set up my day. Hell, it set up my week. After work I went to the library and looked some things up. I found out abouther last name. Morgan—if you spell it a little different—it means ‘morning’ in German. And I dug up some articles about the family. Like, they’re rich. Filthy. The house in Hillborne wasn’t their only place. There was one in Aspen, too, and one in Vermont. Oh, and an apartment in New York.”
    “A pied-à-terre.”
    His brief laugh again. The smile faded. “And then there was her father. Thomas Morgan.” He peered into his coffee cup like a fortune-teller looking at tea leaves. “He’s one of those guys a hundred years ago you’d call him a tycoon.”
    “What would you call him now?”
    Manko laughed grimly, as if I’d made a clever but cruel joke. He lifted his cup toward me—a toast, it seemed—then continued. “He inherited this company that makes gaskets and nozzles and stuff. He’s about fifty-five and is he tough. A big guy, but not fat. A droopy black mustache, and his eyes look you over like he couldn’t care less about you but at the same time he’s sizing you up, like every fault, every dirty thought you ever had, he knows it.
    “We caught sight of each other when I dropped Allison off, and I knew, I just somehow knew that we were going to go head to head some day. I didn’t really think about it then but deep inside, the thought was there.”
    “What about her mother?”
    “Allison’s mom? She’s a socialite. She flits around, Allison told me. Man, what a great word. Flit. I can picture the old broad going to bridge games and tea parties. Allison’s their only child.” His face suddenly grew dark. “That, I figured out later, explains a lot.”
    “What?” I asked.
    “Why her father got on my case in a big way. I’ll get to that. Don’t rush the Manko Man, Frankie.”
    I smiled in deference.
    “Our second date went even better than the first. We saw some movie, I forget what, then I drove her home. . . .” His voice trailed off. Then he said, “I asked her out for a few days after that but she couldn’t make it. Ditto the next day and the next too. I was pissed at first. Then I got paranoid. Was she trying to, you know, dump me?
    “But then she explained it. She was working two shifts whenever she could. I thought, This’s pretty funny. I mean, her father’s loaded. But, see, there was a reason. She’s just like me. Independent. She dropped out of college to work in the hospital. She was saving her own money to travel. She didn’t want to owe the old man anything. That’s why she loved listening to me talk, telling her ’bout leaving Kansas when I was seventeen and thumbing around the country and overseas, getting into scrapes. Allison had it in her to do the same thing. Man, that was great. I love having a woman with a mind of her own.”
    “Do you, now?” I asked, but Manko was immune to irony.
    “In the back of my mind I was thinking about all the places I’d like to go with her. I’d send her clippings from travel magazines. National Geographic s. On our first date she’d told me that she loved poetry so I wrote her poems about traveling. It’s funny. I never wrote anything before in my life—a few letters maybe, some shit in school—but those poems,man, they just poured out of me. A hundred of ’em.
    “Well, next thing I knew, bang, we were in love. See, that’s the thing about . . .  transcendent love. It happens right away or it doesn’t happen at all. Two weeks, and we were totally in love. I was ready to propose. . . . Ah, I see that look on your face, Frankie boy. Didn’t know the Manko man had it in him?