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She had his deep-set green eyes and a tiny birthmark under the chin. That she got from her grandmother on Fab's side. Once only, as he remembered, had they had a major altercation. She had been sixteen. They couldn't afford a third car. So Marilena compromised.
"A second-hand Harley is cheap," she came out.
Alex had numbed with fear and, petrified, lost his temper.
He quaffed more of the beer.





His and Fab's was the open-minded, transient generation of the War Babies and flower children. It took thousands of nights and days of journeying through a plexus of barnacles (and, occasionally, blossoms) to arrive at the cumulated cognizance of each other. Took millions of hours of moil, megawatts of sentient energy, to reach their present affection. Bouts of mule-headed silences and spells of prodigious uncooperation gnawed at the best part (the remaining blossoms) of their years together. And Marilena was there--somewhere in an obscure background--silent, as children are about these things.
No, one, precise event brought about their break up. It just came. Fab only did first what he could as well have done, had he a place to move to. Her mother's house in Washington had provided the most plausible step. And she took it.
Fab's menopause had come early in life. Her outlook and thinking started to change then, perhaps evolve, as he knew not. For Fab was no longer the woman he credit himself of knowing. Quiet strength now changed to straightforward brazeness, resolute to wilfulness, and the once feminine demeanour was replaced by Spartan sternness sapped of any, feigning even, of romance.
He could not discern if this was the eventual course that marriages took at this point or not, but he was not ready for it. He could not readily assimilate a relationship that unawares fractured and dissipated through one's reticence and attitude, might it be of hormone provenance or a surmised collapse in hand-me-down institutions, or Fab's staunch--ignored by Marilena--protests against her daughter joining the Police Academy.
All this, while Marilena had gone about her life sedately, engaging herself least with theirs. Marilena would neither interfere or side with either. Like a detached observer-participant, a ubiquitous presence, unintrusively she would come and go accepting that it was expected of her not to understand all that she grew up with.
This composure overshot Alex's understanding, but he could not find the right questions to ask. Marilena's self-sufficiency all but contended moderation. Yet, there was no trace in her unmercurial manner flourishing self-aggrandizement, no glorying in self-sacrifice. Her decision to stay by his side when Fab had left was candid and accessible as her birth.
"Why didn't you go to live in Washington, Marilena?" he would jestly probe.
"You need me more," she would say.
"You're twenty-two, what about marriage?"
Herself, casual, "Marriage is a contract. It's different today."
"How's that?" he had asked.
She had come and sat next to him and put her arm around him. "It's only a ceremony, dad."
"Only a Ceremony," he repeated, rolling the Bud can in his hands.