Page 23 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

Margo wanted to argue, she wanted to tell him Shyanne’s feelings for him had never changed, that it had always been him and would always be him, and if they got together now, it would make everything she’d been through worth it. “I think you should at least talk to her about it,” Margo said.

“Maybe I will, but there are things between us that would be difficult for you to understand.”

“Why? I mean, I’m not exactly a kid anymore.”

“No, of course,” Jinx said, recrossing his legs in the other direction and looking up from the baby. “I seem to be constitutionally incapable of being faithful to any one woman, and I doubt that has changed. Shyanne was fixated on Cheri, but in many ways, Cheri wasn’t the obstacle, and removing her does not entirely alleviate the strain between us, even if Shyanne believes it would.”

“I mean, couldn’t you just... not?” Margo was thinking that he was old now—how many hot babes could he possibly be pulling? It was one thing when you were twenty-eight and touring the world as a pro wrestler, but a fifty-year-old underweight man unable to keep it in his black leather pants was a much sadder thing.

“Well, naturally that was my own assumption as well, that it was a behavior I could and should have control over. But I have never been successful, so I don’t know why I would be successful now.”

“And then there was rehab,” Margo said. She badly wanted to talk about it, even though there was a dignity to her father she feared disrupting, like pissing off a cat by picking it up. “How did that go?”

“Oh, you know, it’s a cycle,” he said. She did know it was a cycle. It was a cycle every professional wrestler went through: get injured, take pain pills so you can work injured, get more injured from working injured, take more pain pills. For a lot of wrestlers this compounded with life on the road and rowdy nights with lots of drugs and alcohol, but that wasn’t so much Jinx’s problem. Jinx’s role, really, was more to be Mayhem and Murder’s mom: making sure they made their flights, arguing with them about how many Somas it was acceptable to take, keeping them in line at hotels. Murder was a horrible prankster and had once pooped in the elevator of the Waldorf Astoria.

Despite this, and despite no longer working in the ring, Jinx had four or five different surgeries on his spine over the years, none of them hugely successful, or maybe one had been for his hip, she forgot, but she knew he’d had both knees done too. Not taking the pain pills at all wasn’t really an option.

“But, like, how did you know to go to rehab?” Margo asked. She didn’t understand why he didn’t just take his pain pills as prescribed, one a day, or a pill every four to six hours, or whatever. For him to be abusing them seemed to imply he wasn’t taking them and hoarding them and then taking a lot at once. She’d simply never dared to ask about the nitty-gritty of how it all worked.

Jinx was clearly hesitating, wondering how much to tell her. Finally, he looked up and, staring her directly in the eye, said, “I’d begun using heroin and was having a relationship with a young woman named Viper.”

“Oh, gross! Dad!” Margo was loud enough that Bodhi jerked awake on Jinx’s chest. Margo reached out so Jinx could hand him back. Jinx simply bounced Bodhi a few times and he fell back asleep.

“Shyanne mentioned that you might be in the market for a roommate, and I badly need a place to live, but if we’re going to be living together, I want to be honest with you even if that causes you to think less of me.”

He was still looking right at her. Jesus, what did he think? There was no way she could think more or less of him, he was almost a fictional character to her, a Greek god, a distant planet whose orbit brought him close only once or twice a year. She’d seen him more on TV than she ever had in person. It was painful to want it to be more than that, so she kept him carefully contained in her mind. But now he was talking about living in her house. On a semipermanent basis. The idea was both thrilling and scary.

“Well...” Margo didn’t know how to say what she needed to say because it was the kind of thing she’d never in her entire life said to her father. “I do really need a roommate. And it would be neat to see you every day. But.. . I need you to be clean if you are going to be around the baby.”

“Margo,” Jinx said, “I am clean, and I want to be clean. I’m the one who checked myself into rehab. I finished my thirty days with flying colors; I am an active participant in my recovery. I would never, ever want you to see me like that. There will be no— There will be none of that here.”

“Why don’t you move in with Andrea or Stevie? Or one of the boys?” Margo suddenly asked. It seemed weird that Jinx would choose her over his real daughters. As was only natural, Margo stalked their Instagrams an absolutely unhealthy amount. Andrea had gotten married over the summer, and Stevie was going into her senior year at Barnard. In almost every way they were superior to Margo. They wore nice clothes, went to fancy restaurants, took exotic vacations. Neither of them had Jinx’s mushy nose, or they had gotten it surgically altered in their early teens. The boys didn’t have social media accounts, except Ajax, who was doing MMA. The boys were less interesting to her.

“Honestly, because when I discussed it with my therapist, we both thought the strain of those relationships might cause me to relapse.”

“Okay,” Margo said. She felt guilty that this pleased her and did her best to ignore it. “But then why not rent your own place?”

“Uh, because then I would definitely relapse. There would be no one to... perform sanity for.”

“Oh,” Margo said.

“‘Act as if,’ they say in NA,” Jinx said. “Fake it till you make it. But it’s okay to say no, Margo. I understand if you don’t want me here. I should have come to write a check and see the baby. Or not write a check and see the baby.” Jinx was now sad in a way that alarmed Margo. His cheeks were trembling or twitching, and his eyes looked wild.

“No, I wasn’t asking because I was hoping you would move in with one of them instead!” she said. “We desperately need a roommate, and I’ve been dreading trying to find one, and I love you. You know I love you. Do you know that? Dad?”

Jinx was looking down at Bodhi. He didn’t say anything for a moment, and then he almost whispered, “Well, I love you too,” and he was crying.

Margo got up and scooted around the coffee table to sit next to him. She leaned into him experimentally, his leather jacket cold on her hot skin. He turned his shoulders slightly so she could lean all the way against him.

“You can stay,” she said. She pulled away slightly and saw the imprint of her cheek from her tinted moisturizer on the sleeve of his leather jacket. “Of course you can stay.”

Ultimately, after a conference with Suzie over Chinese food, Jinx took Kat the Larger’s bedroom because it was, well, larger. They decided to hold off on getting a fourth roommate because Jinx argued the fourth bedroom should be turned into a nursery for Bodhi. Couldn’t they each pay $1,333 instead? Suzie seemed stressed out by this. Jinx was completely oblivious. Margo grabbed her later in the hallway as Suzie was exiting the bathroom. “I’ll pay your three hundred, don’t worry about it,” she whispered.

“Are you sure?” Suzie asked, plainly relieved.

“Totally,” Margo said, though she didn’t know why she felt compelled to spare Suzie the extra rent. She still had no idea what she was going to do, but she had the money from Mark’s mother in the bank and that was more than Suzie had.

When she returned to the living room, Jinx was watching some indie wrestling program that seemed to be nearly three-fifths comedy show and only two-fifths wrestling.

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