His daughter wore a dress, of all things. Garland never would have guessed she owned one. Despite the season, it was a light summer dress — pretty in a way, but also disappointing. Not until she arrived had Garland realized he had been awaiting a girl in frayed jeans and sneakers with the soles worn low. An image born not of simple nostalgia, though, but from a profound sense that there was no other way for her to be.
In the days leading up to this dinner, Garland and Muriel hadn’t been able to stop speculating about what it meant, this sudden, enigmatic reunion. Their daughter had offered no real explanation. Despite his wife’s skepticism, Garland hadn’t asked for one. She had said she was calling from a hotel, of all places. Nearby, in Detroit. She’d said she wanted to come for dinner. She was bringing a friend, a girl named April. In the end, the girl hadn’t been able to make it, but their daughter had. And here she was.
Her hair didn’t have her mother’s waves or his — admittedly thinning — curls. She had dyed it. Blond. Every time he caught a glimpse of the color, he felt something seize in his heart.
Anyone observing them from a distance, Garland supposed, might think them strangers, stranded together by something as unspectacular as inclement weather. There was more truth to that, he thought, than in his daughter’s apparent ease.
Rearranging the mushrooms on her chicken, Muriel lifted her eyes and with a voice gone dry said, “So how does he like the investment business?”
The words fell like raindrops in the desert, making Garland all the more aware of just how silent the house had been — not a noise, except for the baritone murmurs of the anchorman on the television he’d left on in the den.
From a stack kept warm under a folded cloth, his daughter selected a roll. As she split the bread in two, she happened to glance up, and she seemed surprised to find Muriel waiting for her to reply.
“Who?” their daughter said, butter knife still raised in the air. “How does who like the investment business?”
In the space of a moment, Garland watched his wife suddenly show her age, advancing ten years in as many seconds. Her eyes squinted as she tried to read her daughter’s face, searching for an explanation, fissures appearing in the powder across her brow. It was as though she were trying to assure herself that this woman — whom she’d never really known as a woman — was, in fact, her own flesh and blood. Garland imagined her trying to fill in the years between the girl she remembered and the woman in her late twenties now sitting opposite her at the table. On the credenza there was a picture, a seven-by-ten, of his daughter at her high school graduation. His eyes were no longer what they’d once been, but Garland could make out the royal blue robe and the matching cap dangling by one corner from her fingertips. Her hair was streaked with orange, in her nose a silver ring. It was the last picture they had of her. Since then, her face had grown more stern, losing the last of its roundness. The grass at her feet in the photo was almost too green to be real. A day in late spring, and the sky at her back was perfectly clear, but she was unhappy. Garland didn’t need to be able to make out her face to recall she’d been unhappy. She’d always disliked having her picture taken. Perhaps that was it. She was simply expressing her objection. The picture was the closest thing Garland had to a tool for measuring the time that had passed, and it indicated only the physical changes, which he realized now were almost irrelevant. Who she had been in that picture he felt he would never know, any more than he could ever hope to know the person she’d become. Without either of those reference points, how could he possibly understand what had changed?
“Your fiancé,” Muriel said at last. “Is it Myles?”
Garland regretted the way his wife said the name as though there were something dubious about it. But he could understand Muriel’s impulse to draw her out, using what little information their daughter had provided over the phone. And he was glad, as well, that it was Muriel, not he himself, taking charge. He’d never excelled at these conversations, these silence fillers.
What they knew — what their daughter had allowed them to know — was that suddenly she was engaged. Suddenly she lived in Portland, a yoga instructor, her fiancé a financial analyst. To Garland and Muriel, everything could not help but seem sudden, coming as it did completely out of nowhere. But for all they knew, these facts had all been true for a long time now. It had been seven years since there’d been anything from his daughter other than terse e-mails assuring her worried father she was indeed still alive. The call that had come through two nights before was not the one he had long expected, not the one Garland had been spending these years preparing for. It didn’t come from a jailhouse. It didn’t come from the police. It didn’t come from the FBI. She had not been arrested for dumping sugar into the gas tanks of bulldozers. She had not been attacking whaling ships or driving spikes into trees. She was not wanted for questioning. Most important of all, she was not dead, killed by a concussion grenade or by something similar of her own making. Even when she was a child, even from decades off, he had thought he could see these ends coming. And yet despite all the things he’d thought he understood about his little girl, here she was, not just alive but also well, healthy, a picture of inexplicable normalcy. How could Garland not feel baffled? How could he not wonder if, all this time, he had been the one who misunderstood?
When it came to this fiancé, this Myles, it was hard to know what to say. Never before had their daughter told them about a boyfriend. Never before had they met one. When they were all younger, Muriel had processed this slight in the only way she could, as evidence that their daughter had something to hide. And as for that secret, Muriel had assumed the worst thing she could imagine, an orientation of which she would never be able to speak in front of her friends. Far better that, Garland had always believed, than what he considered the far more likely truth, that it was them their daughter had wished to hide. From embarrassment or shame, who knew? She was their only daughter — their only child — and they’d had no practice with romantic things. Garland found it difficult to contemplate her love life now without wanting to start from the beginning, imagining the woman in front of him was not twenty-eight but twelve, and this Myles, whoever he was, merely a first fleeting crush.
But for Garland, such questions as these were idle curiosities at best. Who cared what the man did? Let him be a puppeteer, a traveling circus performer. What difference did it make? Why sit here and pretend that this absent man whom they had never met was more a stranger than the girl, the woman, sitting now before them, pretending all was well?
“Right,” their daughter said. “Myles.” And then she flashed an ambiguously crooked smile. “It must be the wine,” she said, though she’d taken no more than one or two sips.
Muriel said, “Where did you two meet?”
His daughter stabbed for a potato and missed, scraping her fork against the plate. “A long time ago,” she said. “Seattle.”
“And”—Garland had to pause to clear his throat, startled to suddenly find himself speaking—“have you been together all this time?”
In his chest, Garland felt something simmer. He wasn’t sure what it was. There was an element of relief, perhaps, a comfort to be found in knowing she hadn’t been alone all these years, that she’d had someone to care for her, someone to love her, someone to protect her. Though as for the last, she would no doubt say she had no need.