But the relief, if that was what it was, played only a part. There was also something hotter, something sharper, something more painful. His fingers cramped around his fork. How could Garland not feel resentment?
His daughter wiped her mouth and laid her crumpled napkin on the table. “The food was delicious.”
She reached out to pat Muriel’s hand.
Garland was in the living room watching a movie a short time later when his daughter came out of the kitchen, where she’d been helping her mother with the dishes. She set her wineglass on the coffee table and lowered herself onto the couch, adjacent to Garland’s chair.
“What are you watching?” she said, tucking her dress beneath her knees.
“I’m not sure,” Garland said, taking a moment to gaze at the screen. “I was watching something else, and then that ended and the movie came on …”
“What were you watching before?”
“I don’t remember exactly,” Garland said. “I wasn’t watching, really, just glancing at the set off and on. The TV was just noise to keep me company while I read.”
“What are you reading?”
Garland glanced in his lap. “Oh, a book.”
His daughter peered at the cheap paperback cover. “What’s it about?”
“Oh, it’s complicated,” Garland said. “Something … it takes place in Russia.”
“I’ve been hearing a lot about Russia,” his daughter said. “Crime syndicates and all that. Is your book …?”
“My book?” Garland said. “Well, it’s complicated. Maybe it has something to do with that.”
“Maybe it’ll make more sense later,” she said.
“No, well, I’ve read it before,” Garland said, regretting the words even as they left his mouth.
“It must be very good if you’re reading it again,” his daughter said.
“Yes, I suppose,” Garland admitted, “if you’re into that sort of thing.”
Garland picked up the remote and turned on the news.
“Have you been following the elections?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“The playoffs?”
Not that either.
“This thing with the Russians?”
“Someone must have told me about the Russians,” she said.
It was just as well. Garland didn’t know how he would’ve followed up, had she answered any of these things affirmatively. Every word of it was fluff. After all this time, would they really let the entire evening pass without saying a single thing that mattered?
Garland leaned back in his recliner, looking to see if Muriel was still in the other room. When he saw that she was, he lowered his head, and in a quiet voice, he said, “It’s just that none of this is what I expected.”
As he hoped she might, his daughter nodded. Not by way of response, but merely, it seemed, to indicate she understood. “I thought you’d be happy.”
The remote nearly sprang from his hand. “Oh no,” he said. “That’s not what I meant.” But he wasn’t sure how to explain what he was trying to say, what words to use that wouldn’t give offense. He had been waiting for this day for more than seven years, and yet now that it had arrived, he was afraid he understood less than ever.
“Do you live together, you and your fiancé?” Garland said, and then he waved off the need for a reply, turning embarrassedly to face the television.
“We do,” she said, but Garland shook his head, wanting to insist it didn’t matter. He wasn’t trying to be the protective father. He said, “It’s just, you were always so …”
“Independent?”
Garland raised his finger, an exclamation point. “Tell me,” he said after a moment’s pause. “Your house — what’s it like?”
His daughter crossed her legs and straightened her dress across her knees. “It’s sort of … a loft,” she said. “Wide open, big windows. In the heart of the city.”
Over the years, not a day had gone by in which he hadn’t thought about his daughter and wondered what she was doing, what her life might be like. Left to his own imagination, he’d pictured her living in all sorts of places: an old farmhouse, a cabin in the woods, a rundown warehouse, everything she owned secondhand or homemade. Wherever it was, the home he saw in his mind was full of bohemians and radicals who came barefoot to the table and ate with their hands from mismatched plates. Not once had he considered, not once imagined, that she might rise each morning to an alarm clock, engaged to a banker, that the warehouse might be one of those fashionable galleries of polished granite and steel. The people on those dramas Muriel loved lived in such places. They had wine fridges and espresso makers. He never would have guessed his own daughter even owned a TV.
Garland could never admit such a thing to Muriel, but he had always admired his daughter for having had the strength of character, even as a child, to do what she wished, what she believed in. So to hear now that for so long he’d been so mistaken saddened Garland more deeply than he could ever have thought. If she hadn’t left her parents to pursue a life she felt they couldn’t understand, then why had she left? Was it that she hated them? He knew he’d failed her, but could she really hate him that much?
Having tried out the sentence internally in several different ways, neither of which fully satisfied him, Garland finally turned to his daughter and asked, “Are you happy?”
The slightest bounce came into her knees.
“That was — I’m sorry. I’m sure you are,” Garland said. But he wasn’t sorry.
Looking almost apologetic herself, his daughter glanced at her shoes, light summer pumps. “I don’t know. Sometimes … I don’t know.”
“Of course,” Garland added. “I only meant …”
“That’s okay …”
In silence they watched a commercial for laundry detergent, pretending to be entranced by a kick line of leggy bubbles.
When it was over, Garland turned back toward his daughter. “You haven’t said what brought you to town.”
Now she was tapping her shoe against the base of his chair. “Business …” she began, and then she seemed to decide against saying anything more.
Yoga business? Fine. She could have whatever reason she wished. Garland was so close right now, he could touch her.
“It’s too bad,” he said, “that Myles couldn’t come with you.”
His daughter smiled. “I think you would’ve liked each other.”
It was a mistake, he knew, to study each word so carefully, but they were all he had, and it disappointed him to hear her say you would have, as if they had already missed the only chance they would ever get. Surely there would be another, even if Garland had to wait another seven years. He didn’t dare ask if he would be invited to the wedding. The answer, he feared, would be more than he could bear.
“You’ll be flying back out tomorrow?” he said. “Back to Portland?”
His daughter lifted her eyes, and then she paused and raised her wineglass, seeming to study the streaks of red. She held the glass so long before her mouth that Garland gave up on a response, which he understood now would only make him feel even sadder. It made no sense to him that his daughter had left them and remained in silence for so many years, only to return with blond hair, wearing a sundress covered in flowers.
His daughter was still staring at her wineglass. Garland thought he could see some sort of dread in her eyes, perhaps of the questions still to come, the ones Garland was still struggling to formulate. He felt sorry for her. He hadn’t meant for this to become an inquisition, but there was still so much he didn’t understand. Garland had been gathering questions throughout his daughter’s life, as if in anticipation of this very moment. Finally the moment had arrived, and Garland saw he had only two options, for there could be no middle ground: either he must ask every one of the questions, no matter how naïve, no matter how egregiously they might reveal his failings as a father — and then accept the answers. His other option was to ask none at all.