[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

[radicalize]

"No, of course not," Lucy says, shooting him a grin, equal parts genuine and teasing. "It's just you." Granted, he's not actually too far off on that front, but that's the sort of thing she figures she shouldn't just spring on him. She'll work up to it, has time to do so. Now, when they haven't even left her apartment yet, doesn't seem like the moment to let him know that she's taken in a five year old. "Don't worry, I don't have plans."

[silverhammer]

"Okay cool," Max replies, "Shoes, then Chinese. And I can tell you about the lady I almost hit with my cab."

The only reason he's eager to tell Luce that story is because he hadn't actually hit her. They'd joked once about her having to bail him out of jail, and it might've come down to that.

[radicalize]

"You almost hit someone?" Lucy asks, brow raising, though she manages not to let herself sound too alarmed. Almost, she thinks, has got to be the operative word in that sentence; anything else, and this would be a much different conversation they were having. They certainly wouldn't have been planning on celebrating. "Please tell me she just ran in front of you or something."

[silverhammer]

"The important word there is 'almost'," Max says, just to be sure that Lucy doesn't think he actually hit someone with his cab, "This chick is just wandering in the street, not even paying attention. I think somebody else would've hit her if I hadn't stopped. She was kind of a fox too, so it's probably good she didn't die."

[radicalize]

"Yes, because that's the real reason to be glad someone didn't die," Lucy says with a shake of her head, making a face at him. Honestly, she can't really say hearing that surprises her, but that doesn't mean she's just going to let him get away with it, either. "Well, as long as the almost accident wasn't your fault, I think it's okay."

[silverhammer]

"Hey, it doesn't hurt," he replies, waggling his eyebrows at her. He wouldn't have just left her there if she hadn't been a foxy blonde, though; Max just thought it was worth mentioning that she was.

"Karen or Kara or something. Turned out she was new. Just showed up and immediately got dragged to the hospital or something. It was wild. I think maybe they drugged her."

[radicalize]

"Jesus," Lucy says, eyes going wide. She's heard of people showing up at inopportune times — hell, she did herself, back on the island, the way she nearly knocked a guy out not something she's liable to forget any time soon — but that seems like a whole different brand of difficult, enough that she wonders if it was just that showing up here was disorienting or if there was something more to it than that. "Is she okay now?"

[silverhammer]

"So far as I could tell," Max says, but he's not exactly a doctor. Mostly he just took her home for free and had been done with it. He'd caught hell once his boss had realized he'd been giving free rides, but it wasn't as if he could have just left her there.

"Hey, wasn't I supposed to be telling you this story over Chinese?"

[radicalize]

"You were," Lucy says, biting back a laugh, as she heads back over to the door and pulls it open. With a story like the one he's been telling, it's entirely too easy to get distracted, but there's no sense in just hanging around here needlessly. "And you were going to be buying, too."

[silverhammer]

"I don't think I remember that part," Max jokes, and he's right behind her out the door, a grin on his face.

"Where do you think money comes from? Do you think it grows on trees?"

[radicalize]

"You sound like Dad," Lucy says with a short laugh, shaking her head at him. "I never thought I'd see the day." Grabbing the keys out of her purse to lock the door behind them, she looks back over her shoulder at him, grinning in turn. "Your paycheck. You know, from your job?"

[silverhammer]

"Apply yourself, Max! What are you going to do with your life? Stop making that face, or it'll stick that way!" Max replies, doing his best impersonation of their father. He hasn't seen either of their parents in... shit, over a year now, but that doesn't mean he's gotten rusty when it comes to mimicking their Dear Old Dad.

[radicalize]

"See, and what he didn't know is that's just the way your face is," Lucy quips, shooting him a too-sweet smile. It's all but impossible to not burst out laughing when he's got a pretty damn uncanny impression of their father. It might have been years — longer than she usually chooses to think about — since she's been home and saw the rest of her family, but some things are just unforgettable. "That's good, by the way. I'm sure he'd be really pleased to know how well all those lectures sunk in."

[silverhammer]

"Real funny. You should take the act on the road," Max replies, reaching over to muss her hair in retaliation.

"Besides, it's not that none of it stuck, it's just that I choose to ignore all the bullshit." It's never been that he doesn't care about their parents or anything, but their dad has never really gotten it. It was always his way or nothing, at least as far as Max was concerned.

[radicalize]

"Hey!" Lucy protests, letting out a short laugh, though she doesn't bother trying to duck away. It's too comfortingly familiar, being around him like this, and it's not like it really matters if her hair tangles a little. "I know. It's all you really can do, with him."

That she misses him and their mom and Julia isn't something she wants to admit to, though, at least not right now. For a long time, it didn't bother her, but it's been so fucking long now since she's seen them that it's impossible not to. Julia should be getting ready for college, maybe gone already, and God only knows how their parents are.

[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."