Bitter Spirits
Page 42

She raised the shade.
They sat in silence for several seconds. He lowered the shade again.
“All right. I’ll tell you everything. What do you want to know?”
“I . . . I want to know about your wife.”
He hesitated. “Her name was Paulina. Her family was from Nob Hill. Lost their fortune after the earthquake. My mother encouraged the marriage to distract me from getting caught up in the bootlegging with my father. She thought it would bring us a certain status that the money alone didn’t. We were married for a year.”
Aida waited for more. It was slow to come.
“The summer of 1925, when one of Paulina’s relatives invited us to a charity dinner at the Elks Club, my parents accompanied us. My father’s mental health was not stable. He was having manic episodes when he wasn’t himself.”
Oh . . . Ju’s comment about Winter having all his marbles. Aida didn’t know what to say.
“He’d been seeing a doctor for several months. During the charity dinner, he went through one of his fits and caused a scene. Embarrassed Paulina. We left the dinner in a rush, to get him home and call the doctor. He was screaming in the backseat. Paulina was arguing with my mother, telling her that my father’s fits were caused by the devil, or some such nonsense. And I was trying to calm everyone down. I accidently jerked the wheel as a streetcar was turning a corner.”
Aida made a small noise.
“One second of distraction. That’s all it took. One second, and I killed three people. It was my fault.”
“You can’t believe that,” she whispered.
“People have told me that again and again, so why do I still feel guilty?”
“Oh, Winter.”
“I’m not looking for pity. Just don’t tell me that my life is all champagne and caviar, because it damn well isn’t.”
He tugged on the shade to lift it once more, and they spent the remainder of the ride in silence. As they pulled up to her building, she said, “Maybe it’s not a good idea that I work for you anymore.” When he didn’t answer, she exited the car.
“Aida!” he called after her. As he stepped onto the sidewalk, a woman with an unruly toddler passed. The child, attempting to escape her mother’s grip, twirled around and looked up at Winter. The tiny girl wasn’t even the height of his knees, and Aida could only imagine what he looked like in her eyes: an angry giant towering above her. But it wasn’t just his size. The girl saw something Aida didn’t notice anymore: his mismatched eyes and scar. She screamed bloody murder and ran to the shelter of her mother’s legs, sobbing in terror.
Winter’s face fell.
Ever loyal, Bo lurched from the car, shouting in Cantonese at the woman, motioning for her to take her crying daughter away. Protecting the monster from the child.
Aida’s throat tightened as her own eyes welled with tears. She took one last look at Winter and walked away in the opposite direction from the crying girl, more depressed than she’d been in years.
• • •
With one hand on the open car door, Winter stared out over the black roof of the Pierce-Arrow, watching Aida retreat inside Golden Lotus. He slammed his fist against the car frame. Pain shot up his wrist. He angrily threw his hat into the street.
“I take it she found out about Sook-Yin,” Bo said as his gaze tracked the hat.
“And Sook-Yin told her about Paulina.”
Bo whistled. “You probably should’ve told her that yourself.”
“Not another word.”
Bo managed to stay quiet for all of five seconds. “Is she never-want-to-see-you-again angry, or just temporarily angry?”
“How the hell should I know?” Winter felt as if Aida had just pulled on a loose thread of a sweater, and he was left watching it unravel before his eyes, powerless to do anything to stop it. When he picked her up that morning, he’d felt happier than he had in years.
And now he wanted to pummel every stranger on the sidewalk.
The crying girl didn’t help, though he couldn’t say he blamed her—or that it was the first time, either. A face that makes children cry. What a perfect ending to a perfectly pissy afternoon. “She doesn’t want to work for me anymore,” he said miserably.
“Maybe that’s for the best,” Bo said. “Now you can ask her out to dinner and not feel conflicted.”
“Doubt she’d agree to that at this point.”
“She did say you were the most handsome man she’d ever met.”
Winter looked askance at his assistant.
“Hey, I tried not to listen,” Bo argued, “but you were both shouting and . . .”
Winter stomped off into the street to retrieve his hat, then rammed himself into the backseat of the car and slammed the door.
Bo climbed into the driver’s seat. “Home? Pier?” he asked. “Or do you need to hit something?”
Hitting something sounded beautiful. And after Bo dropped him off at the boxing club, he spent the rest of the afternoon doing just that.
And the next afternoon.
And the next.
But it didn’t help. His hellfire mood only worsened.
He busied himself with work, visiting his warehouses and overseeing deliveries. He spent an entire morning taking apart a small boat engine and putting it back together. His employees began looking at him as if they wanted to toss him in the bay. He didn’t give a damn.
He’d nearly convinced himself that he never wanted to see Aida Palmer again—that he’d be just fine if he didn’t, because a woman like her would only drive him to violence, what with her insisting that he tell her every godforsaken thing about his life, screwing up his orderly routine, making him feel guilty.