[Dated Late August]

[silverhammer]

Most of the time, it's Lucy coming around to see him, instead of the other way around. She says she's not checking up on him or anything, but he's known his sister too long to believe that. After all, she was the one who visited him in the hospital more than anyone else, even when he was almost about to get out and insisted she didn't have to.

Either way, this is a momentous occasion, a day that needs to be commemorated. Because Max has just been by the taxi stand, he's got the night off, and he's holding in his hands his very first paycheck. He's finally not under the thumb of their own personal Daddy Warbucks, and if that's not something worth celebrating, Max isn't too sure what is.

"Hey Luce," Max calls, knocking on the door to her apartment, "Come on, open up, I know you're home."

Comments

[silverhammer]

"You say that like you didn't have it easy," Max replies as they walk, and he tries idly to remember just where the Chinese place is. He's passed it about a million times in his cab, but going on foot's another thing entirely.

"Do you know what would've happened to me if I tried to go to New York the summer before college? I'm guessing a long, long lecture on how getting a summer job builds character."

[radicalize]

If she wanted, Lucy thinks, she could easily protest to that. The circumstances of her leaving were entirely different, when Daniel had just died and her only real alternative would have been going off to Europe with their parents, and even then, it hadn't been quite as easy as all that to get them to agree. Even so, she knows he's right. Up until she decided to forgo college and stay in New York, she did have it easy, at least comparatively so.

"Oh, but it does," she says, as sincerely as she can, though the effort it takes to keep from laughing is visible in the look on her face. "Don't knock it 'till you've tried it, Max. I'm sure all those dishes Dad washed to put himself through college really taught him a lot about life."

[silverhammer]

"Yeah, and stuck-on meatloaf and yellow rubber gloves," Max says, "I think I'm glad I passed on that one."

And he thinks that both of their parents would argue that driving a cab's not much better. Frankly, it's kind of a double standard and pretty unfair. He's learning plenty about life from the driver's seat; a hell of a lot more than he was learning in Princeton lecture halls, that's for sure.

[radicalize]

"Yeah, you should be," Lucy says, nose wrinkling as she nods. She's never done it herself, but she saw enough of it working in a diner in New York that she knows it's really not an ideal job to take on. "Driving a cab is definitely better. Less messy, too, as long as you keep only almost hitting people."