They reached where two long corridors converged, halting at the edge of an expansive food court. “I’m not hungry. You pick,” Ivan told Nina, and then he escorted her to a table inside a spot called Mrkt Ktchn, where a deeply attractive young man welcomed them. Before Nina could order, Ivan asked, “How much are the vowels?”
“Which vowels, sir?”
“Ignore him. I’ll take the Super Greens salad,” Nina replied.
As the waiter withdrew, she fixed her gaze on Ivan.
“Do you have to?”
“Come on. You’d have laughed if he hadn’t looked so much like Marlon Brando.”
That brought a smile to her lips.
“You’re having a salad for breakfast?”
“I am what I am.”
“All right, Popeye,” Ivan retorted. And after a moment, “I was thinking about when you were a little girl.”
Nina groaned. This is the game you sign up for: wait six months, and he can voice anything he pleases. He keeps a cache of observations, memories, dreams, which he pulls out like knives and then pretends they’re spur-of-the-moment thoughts. What were they for? Power? Revisions? Some dream of renewed closeness?
“Listen,” he began, “before you get all upset with me.”
“I’m not upset.”
“Bored?”
“I’m not bored.”
“Then what?”
“I am waiting.”
“For what?”
“You to tell me what you were thinking about me as a little girl.”
Nina watched a couple entering the restaurant; the man, around Ivan’s age, carefully helped the woman into her chair. They both fussed with their glasses and the heavy menus, as if the simple act of sitting deserved ceremony.
“Dad?”
He met Nina’s eyes. “Are you going to tell me what you were thinking?”
Ivan shrugged. “I forget.”
It had sounded appealing when he first called to propose his plan: a week in Paris, father and daughter. Ivan’s longtime dream. She had agreed to come, partly from benevolence, but also because she couldn’t stand Charlie and lacked the nerve to dump him. Because work had ground her down, making her feel fraudulent, with all the required lightness and deference when nothing about her felt light or deferential.
Now she suspected the trip might be a mistake. Too much time together. Too many unknowns. But there was no turning back.
“Fine,” she conceded. “Then tell me this: are you solid with money?”
Ivan closed his eyes. “I thought I had a grace period.”
“Which ended hours ago.”
“Hours?”
“Hours.”
“I’m fine financially.”
Nina nodded and glanced across the room, watching two tall flight attendants stride with practiced cadence through the concourse, their legs keeping perfect time.
“Would you tell me?” she asked, though she expected he wouldn’t. She knew the sum was tight. She knew he’d sooner cut his own throat than ask Nina for a dime. So why ask? Because he irritated her. Because she was Nora’s daughter.
“I could have built a fortune, you know,” Ivan confessed.
“But you never cared about filthy lucre?”
“Don’t be a jerk.”
“Because you have the soul of a poet?”
“I do have the soul of a poet, you little shit.”
“I always thought you had the soul of a painter. The earth was your canvas.”
“I should have invited someone else.”
Nina laughed. “Go on. Tell me about your lost fortunes, your pure heart.”
Ivan shook his head.
“Come on. Tell me before Marlon comes back, while you still have my attention.”
“You’ve heard it all before.”
“Then tell me something I haven’t.”
“Do you know that nearly everyone I worked with has carved out a little empire now?”
“Yes.”
“All of them—the guys who hustled doors, glass, or insulation. Do you know that?”
“I do know that.”
“See? You don’t care.”
“I care, but you’ve told me this a thousand times.”
“Only in the broad strokes.”
“They did what they ought to: invested, expanded, put in their hours, and started families in their thirties. Unlike you, a repulsive old man, who waited until nearly fifty.” Nina began to imitate his tone. “And they’re all stuffed with money, with plenty of time. But not you, Dad. You wavered and wondered and waited for love, letting a thousand chances slip away while Jerry became the king of doorknobs, or something.”
He laughed, and she paused there. She didn’t say that, because of his supposedly pure and romantic heart, Ivan was living alone in the same rented house he’d occupied since Nina was a girl. She didn’t say that if he’d thought a little about the future, neither of them would be as worried about money.
“I should have invited her,” he added, nodding toward the white-haired woman who was just finishing with her glasses.
Nina glanced over. “More appropriate for a man your age.”
“More appropriate than what?”
“Than my mother was.”
“You’re in quite a mood today.”
There was something in his expression Nina disliked. Listen to me, listen to me. Everyone craved attention. Charlie, the half-formed person she’d lived with for the last seven months, craved it. The men she worked on, Charlie’s friends, and her friends’ husbands—each of them carried a need, a despair she could no longer tolerate, a desperate longing to be looked at, mounted, tended, constantly reassured.
What angered and saddened her most was that this wasn’t how she remembered Ivan when he was younger—when he woke early, dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and work boots by the time she woke up, groggy and irritable. The last time she’d visited his house, she’d found him in sweatpants and a sweater stained with toothpaste and who knew what. But as a girl, he’d always been awake before anyone else, making toast, pouring orange juice, and lifting her up to kiss her forehead. He smelled of Old Spice, Right Guard, and coffee, and he was a solid presence against whom she loved to throw herself. She never wanted less of him, not even when she entered middle school, not even after her period began. All that time, Ivan remained constant. She knew precisely how to provoke him and how he would react. She grew dependent on his impatience as she did on his tenderness, and no matter how cruel she could be, after all that, Ivan had only frightened her once.
Meanwhile Nora, her mother, kept changing—like a teenager, with new hairstyles, clothes, ambitions. Nora was late, traveling, never quite smelling or looking or sounding like the Nora of the week before. While Ivan remained in jeans, checked plaid, and boots, freshly shaved and sporting the same haircut since forever. Even as he aged, those changes made him seem more permanent, not less. The furrowing lines across his brow, the sunspots, made him seem stronger to her. But after he sold the business, she began to notice a creeping sadness in his eyes, and more than anything, what Nina couldn’t stand was the constant need that seemed to possess him.
“Anyway,” Ivan said, “the money is fine, Nina. Would I have bought us tickets to Paris if I were on the brink of poverty? Would I have booked us a week in the finest apartment the city has to offer?”
“Yes,” Nina replied, smiling. “Yes. You absolutely would.”
“Why are we talking about money? I wanted to tell you about when you were a little girl.”
She glanced beyond him, searching for her salad.
“Then tell me already and stop sulking.”
Ivan shook his head and, after a slow breath, said, “I always woke up earlier than your mother in those days.”
“In any of those days.”
“Yes,” he said, unsure whether this was a accusation, a compliment, or a correction. “But in those early days, I would open our bedroom door and there you’d be, standing at the far end of the hall, waiting like one of those girls from The Shining.”
When she smiled, he leaned in and continued. “The moment you saw me. No. The moment you saw me see you, you would laugh the moment you did. We hadn’t cut your hair yet, something we kept postponing, and you were wild-looking, hair everywhere in your face. I thought you were stunning. I remember seeing you in the hall that morning and thinking, my God. Then, at some point, I don’t know what happened, what changed.”
“I stopped being beautiful?”
“You never stopped being beautiful, and you never stopped laughing, and you kept charging toward me, until one morning you swung right, a quick fake, and bolted into our bedroom straight to Mom, who was always trying to wake up. And then, for months, you said to me, ‘No, no, no, I won’t say good morning, I won’t hug you.’”
“I did?”
“You don’t remember, of course.”
“How old was I?”
“You were about three, I think.”
Here came the waiter, approaching with Nina’s salad and a basket of bread. Ivan watched him move—loose-limbed, sinewy. An athlete. When he set the dishes down and smiled, Ivan felt a familiar little pang of pain at such masculine beauty.
“You two need anything else?”
Ivan shook his head and watched Nina’s face shift under the waiter’s gaze.
“Nothing for me,” she said, and, watching him cross the room, added, “My God.”
“Will you be okay?”
“I don’t know,” she answered, laughing. “I truly don’t know.”
He watched Nina begin to eat and marveled at the precision of her movements—graceful while she tried to hide her wonder.
“We fought constantly, you know,” he said.
“When?”
“When you were little. Every day felt like a battle.”
“Over what?”
“To see you eat like this—”
“To eat like what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Well.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It was one of the things we argued about.”
“The way I ate?”
“You refused to put a napkin on your lap. You refused to chew with your mouth closed. You refused to wipe your face.”
“I was three.”
“You were three. Your mother and I were certain of ourselves then. We wanted you to be—”
“What?”
“Prepared for everything.”
“At three?”
“Yes. We’d planned to send you to war at four.”
“Where it would matter to eat with your mouth closed?”
The waiter reappeared with a pitcher of water and asked, “Did you feel those earthquakes this morning?”
“I didn’t,” Nina said, caring. “Big ones?”
“Enough to send a pile of my books tumbling from a shelf. Crazy days.”
“Something in the air,” she said, and then, to Ivan, “See? And he’s a reader, too.”
“The ideal man.”
“Go on then, tell me: what was the point?”
“Of what?”
“Of all that discipline, the iron fist, the napkin on the lap.”
“We had an idea of fluency,” he said.
“Fluency?” She popped a piece of bread into her mouth, exaggerating her chewing, mockingly showing him how it turned to paste on her tongue.
“Exactly,” he said, “that’s precisely what you did when you were three. Same look, same grin. Back then I thought, she’s saying to me, ‘Screw you, buddy, what are you going to do about it?’ You reminded me of a coworker of mine who liked to pick fights. A fellow named Sean or something.”
He could see Nina didn’t care what the guy’s name was.
“A belligerent asshole always causing trouble. You were just like him.”
“Maybe you could introduce us.”
“If this guy doesn’t work out,” Ivan muttered as the waiter delivered the check.
He handed the waiter his card and, when it disappeared, Nina said, “Would you mind if I stayed here with him instead of going to Paris?”
“You should do that. You’ll be very happy together.”
“No. I think I’ll come with you.”
“But why?”
“He isn’t interested. He can have anyone he wants. I’d bet fifty bucks there’s some weedy actress with giraffe-like legs waiting for him at home.”
Ivan laughed. “Then he’s an idiot. Here he has the most beautiful and brilliant woman, and he picks some bimbo? She probably doesn’t even know how to eat a salad properly.”
“Sometimes you’re hard to hate, Dad.”
“That’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“You were telling me about fluency.”
“Yes. The idea was to teach you as many languages as possible. By language, we meant everything—social codes, manners, food, customs, dress, all of it. We wanted you to feel at ease anywhere, in any situation. We wanted you to be comfortable in a fancy restaurant and in a greasy diner, and to carry yourself with confidence, never thinking you’re above any of it.”
“That’s good.”
“What is?”
“Your philosophy. Your strategy.”
“Are you being an asshole?”
“No. I mean it. It’s good. Do you feel you succeeded?”
“You tell me.”
“I know how to eat a salad in an airport.”
“Barely.”
She picked up another chunk of bread and held it to her nose so a long strand dangled over her lip.
He smiled, though it irritated him, and he saw her take note of his expression. She removed the bread, looking embarrassed, and wiped crumbs from her mouth with a napkin.
“You always hated a mess.”
He nodded. “Curse of the trade.”
“And you always said that.”
“I know.”
“Is it the work that curses you or the other way around?”
“Do you mean I got into the trade because I was already a meticulously control-freak?”
“At least you know yourself, Dad.”
“At least or at last?”
“Both.”
Brando returned with Ivan’s credit card in a check holder. When he was gone, Nina said, “You’d better tip properly, old man.”
“I always do.”
“You always don’t.”
“I give them what they’re worth. Do you want me to reward this kid for having crappy taste in women?”
He left fifteen percent of the pre-tax total—the standard his father had taught him, the same he’d taught Nina, which she’d followed until her sophomore year in high school, when she started bussing tables at a Mexican restaurant a few blocks away. Since then, labor and capitalism and the male gaze had been all she could talk about.
“Let me see,” she said.
Ivan closed the check holder and pressed it down with his fist. “Don’t bother,” he warned.
She feigned reaching for his wrist so convincingly that he flinched.
The waiter had liked them until he saw the tip. Not even fifteen percent. How do people expect us to live? He’d hoped for at least twenty percent. Still, they were endearing, and the boy reminded him of someone. Not in appearance exactly, but in the look. All business except when his eyes fixed on the girl, whom he assumed to be his granddaughter. Who was it? Not someone recent. From another life. Maybe a high school teacher. A coach, perhaps. No, a math teacher. What was his name? One of those unsmiling guys. Jackson. Jordan. Something like that, he mused as he carried the check back to the register to add the tip. No. Mr. Jameson, he decided. Mr. Jameson. Tenth grade. Exactly. He’d probably tip poorly too. Math guys. So obsessed with numbers they hate handing them over. Someone told him once. It still made him laugh, even if it didn’t make sense. Jesus. Mr. Jameson. The man had saved him once after a beating at school, just by chance—walking by and pulling those kids off him like he was The Hulk. He didn’t look like much, but he was strong. Mr. Jameson. You never know about people. He decided to write that guy a letter, he thought, as he walked toward the elderly couple who were still engrossed in their menus. Tonight, at home, he’d sit down and compose that email. Just to say thanks.
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From Passengers by Alexander Maksik. Used with permission of the publisher, Europa Editions. Copyright © 2026.
