“They’re so cute,” Lucy said.
“Are they new?” Danny asked.
Abby’s face reddened. She looked around theatrically and said, “What is this, like, the Style Network? Um, can I go do my homework now, please?”
“In a moment,” Danny said. “We’re talking.”
Abby folded her arms and compressed her lips, making it clear how much talking she planned to do.
“I asked, are those shoes new?”
Abby looked at him steadily for a long moment, as if deciding how to reply. Finally, she said, “They’re a gift from the Galvins, okay?”
“That’s so nice,” Lucy said, trying to calm the waters. She busied herself at the dining table, which was piled with books and papers and junk mail. She was smart enough not to get involved any further.
“A gift? For what occasion?”
“Occasion?” Abby’s eyes widened. “I mean, for standing there like a dork, watching Jenna buy stuff when we were at the Natick Mall this afternoon, because I don’t have a credit card and I don’t have any money, and she probably just felt sorry for me.”
“She felt sorry for you?”
“She has her own Platinum American Express card and I don’t even have, like, a debit card.”
“That’s terrible. How can a girl show her face if she doesn’t have a Platinum AmEx card?”
Abby smoldered silently.
“If you wanted to buy something, you could have called me. You know that.”
“And you would have said no.”
“Maybe yes, maybe no. But at least you should have asked.”
“Oh yeah, sure, I could see that. Like, ‘Hi, Dad, I just saw the cutest pair of Tory Burch flats and Jenna just bought a pair and can I have two hundred dollars to buy them, too?’ Like you would have said yes? At least why don’t you be honest with yourself?”
“Two hundred dollars?” Danny said. “You’re damned right I would have said no.”
“See?”
Obviously, his daughter didn’t mind receiving charity from the Galvins. “You girls spent the afternoon at a shopping mall? What about your homework?”
“I didn’t have my laptop with me.”
“Why not?”
“You’re talking about that MacBook that weighs, like, a thousand pounds? I don’t think so.”
“You carried it around all last year and didn’t mind.”
“And the year before and the year before and the year before. It’s a dinosaur. It should, like, be on Antiques Roadshow or whatever.”
He tried not to laugh. “If you need a new laptop, we can talk about it,” he said. “Until then, why don’t you invite Jenna over here sometime? Maybe you two can actually get some homework done.”
Abby stared with incredulity. “Are you serious?”
“If you’re concerned about privacy, I can go out and work somewhere while you girls are here. Find a Starbucks, whatever.”
“You don’t get it, do you?”
“What am I not getting?”
“You think I want her to see this… this veal cage we live in?”
Danny couldn’t help bursting out laughing.
“It’s not funny!” she protested.
“Of course it’s not, sweetie,” Danny said. When her mother was well, before her second marriage broke up, Abby had lived in a rambling old six-bedroom Victorian in Chestnut Hill that belonged to her stepfather, a partner in a big Boston law firm. Now she had no stepfather-not that she minded that-and no rambling house, and no mother.
He came closer, tried to put his arms around her, but she bucked away. “I just want to make sure you give yourself enough time to do your homework. This is a really important year. You know that. This fall, you’ll be applying to colleges, and-”
“Seriously?” she said, stiffening. “Seriously?” Then, yelling: “I don’t believe this!”
She spun around and ran into her bedroom and slammed the door.
Lucy glanced up from the dining table, gave a sad smile. She didn’t need to say anything. She felt bad for both father and daughter; she understood the complexity. Her marriage, to an architect, had broken up, though amicably; her son, Kyle, was a sophomore at Bowdoin. She’d been through all this.
She ran her fingers through Danny’s hair. “No one ever said teenagers were easy,” she murmured.
6
Lucy woke early and made coffee for the two of them before leaving for work. Danny managed to get in a solid hour of writing before he heard the music coming from Abby’s room.
Thumping, floor-vibrating bass, some kind of hip-hop. It wasn’t so long ago that Abby awoke to some sweet twangy ballad by Taylor Swift or one of her many clones. Now everything she listened to sounded the same: Auto-Tuned vocal tricks and rants about being “on the floor” in “the club.”
Twenty minutes later, he was sitting at the dining table reading The Boston Globe and sipping coffee from an oversize white mug that said I
My Daddy in the spindly printing of a five-year-old. The Y looked like Poseidon’s trident. Abby had made it at a friend’s birthday party at a clay workshop in Brookline where kids decorated ready-made pieces of ceramic pottery. More than a decade ago, and he remembered it as if it were a few months.
Abby emerged from the bathroom in a steam cloud, wearing a bathrobe, hair wet from the shower. She came over to the small kitchen without acknowledging his presence and poured herself a bowl of Cinnamon Roll Frosted Mini-Wheats, doused it with Lactaid milk, and brought it over to the dining table.
“Any left for me?” she asked as she sat down.
“Any what?”
“That.” She pointed at his coffee mug.
He grinned. “You’re too young to get hooked on caffeine.”
She slid the pile of mail in front of her and began flipping idly through the envelopes. “I mean, it’s so not a big deal when I sleep over at the Galvins’. Celina always makes café con leche for Jenna and me.”
“Celina is their housekeeper? Or their cook?”
“Keep up, Dad. She’s Jenna’s mom.” She picked up the cream-stock envelope from Lyman and slid a finger under the flap. He didn’t want her looking at the reminder note-no need for her to worry-but he also didn’t want to make too big a deal of it, so he said nothing.
“Well, you’re not at the Galvins’, are you?” he said, and he couldn’t hide his smile.
He’d solemnly sworn, when Sarah and he first saw that whooshing heartbeat on the fetal monitor, never to say all those trite, predictable things that all parents seem to say. Like: As long as you live under my roof, you’ll live by my rules and Because I said so and I don’t care what the other kids do and Don’t make me stop this car.
He put the milk away in the refrigerator, and then he heard a high-pitched sound, a stifled cry, and he whirled around.
Abby was holding the Lyman letter in a trembling hand. The paper rattled. Her face had gone pale.
“Hey, don’t worry about it,” he said. “The check’s a little late. I have to move some money around.”
She was crying with an abandon that Danny had seen her do only once before, in the hospital room right after Sarah had died. There was barely any sound. Like she was gasping for breath. Or hiccupping. Her eyes were wide, her mouth open and downturned. She looked almost in shock. Tears streamed down her cheeks.
Danny felt his insides clutch. She was overreacting, but he couldn’t stand seeing her in pain. “Boogie,” he said softly, coming over to her and circling his arms around her shoulders from behind. “Abby. Baby, what’s wrong?” He glanced at the letter and felt his stomach drop. Even though he glimpsed only fragments of sentences, it was enough to understand: