“Yeah,” I muttered, shaking my head. “Sure.”
“You can’t talk to me like that, Andie,” my dad said, and I could hear what I was feeling—the anger, the frustration—in his voice. “I am your father, and—”
“Oh, really?” I asked as my dad parked the car in the turnaround and killed the engine. I unclipped my seat belt and got out of the car, slamming the door, then turned back to my dad, who had followed me onto the driveway. I could feel the anger coursing through me like a drug, like I was about to set off the powder keg, with no idea what exactly was inside it. “You’re my father?” I asked, putting a snide, sarcastic spin on the words. “Really?”
My dad stood with his keys in his hand in front of the car, looking wrong-footed. Inside there was a part of me that was yelling to stop this, just make peace and go inside, but the louder part of me wasn’t listening, and I barreled on.
“Then tell me who I went to the prom with this year,” I said, my voice starting to shake. “How many times did I have to take the driving test before I passed it? Who was my history teacher last semester?” My voice broke on the word “history,” and I could feel the tears lurking behind my eyes, which somehow only made me angrier, my words coming out fast and out of control. “I haven’t had a father in five years. So you can’t just show up now and start acting like one.” I felt one tear fall, then another, and I brushed them away angrily, trying to hold myself together.
“You can’t . . . ,” my dad said, shaking his head. He glanced at the house, then turned back to me. “I was doing what I had to for our family.”
“What family?” I asked, and my father’s face crumpled for just a second before he recovered. I swallowed hard, knowing I’d gone too far but also knowing I wasn’t going to be able to stop this now. “I have done nothing but make sure I didn’t do anything to make you look bad. My whole life. I’ve been tiptoeing around, always thinking about how anything I do might affect you. And then you mess it all up. Do you know why I’m not in Baltimore?” I asked, my words coming faster and faster, taking on a life of their own, like a runaway train. “Dr. Rizzoli pulled my recommendation. Because of you. Do you know how much that wrecked things for me? And it’s like you don’t even care.” I stopped abruptly, drawing in a sharp breath.
There was silence in the driveway—just the chirping of birds in a nearby tree—but it was like I could still hear the words I’d just said echoing between us, like I could still feel the reverberations.
My dad crossed in front of me to the door and unlocked it without saying a word, and I followed. We walked inside, and my dad hung up his keys, then stuck his hands in his pockets. I had no idea what happened now, but it was clear he didn’t either, which made me feel somehow even worse. Like there was nobody in charge, nobody even trying to steer this sinking boat of ours.
We looked at each other, and I swallowed hard. For just a moment I let myself think about what my mom would have said if she could have seen us, yelling at each other in the driveway. How disappointed she’d be in both of us—in what we’d allowed ourselves to become.
“It’s not just this summer,” I said, tears falling down my cheeks unchecked. “You moved me to this house without even telling me you were going to. I never got to say good-bye to the farmhouse. There’s none of Mom’s stuff around, we never talk about her or say what we miss—it’s like you want to pretend she was never here at all. It’s like she never even existed.” I was full-on crying, wiping my nose with the back of my hand and not even caring. I could barely see my dad any longer. He was just a fuzzy shape behind the tears I wasn’t even trying to blink away.
“And you said—you said in your book that we were so close. That you have to work at a relationship and that you’re proud of ours.” I took a shaky breath, knowing I was coming to the end of what I was going to be able to say. “But it’s not like that anymore. It’s not, and I don’t know why. I don’t know . . . what I did.”
My dad was staring down at the floor, his shoulders hunched. He nodded, just once, not looking at me, then turned and walked past me without a word. He walked to the end of the hallway, then opened the door to his study and went inside, closing the door behind him with a soft click.
I drew in a shaky breath, not sure what I was expecting but feeling somehow that being left alone, after all that, was so much worse than if he’d yelled at me.
On legs that felt wobbly, I walked slowly up the stairs to my room and headed directly for my bed, kicking off my flip-flops and pulling my quilt up over my shoulders. I curled into a ball and closed my eyes tightly, wishing harder than I ever had before that when I opened them, I’d be back in the farmhouse. My mom would be downstairs, and my dad, too, both of them waiting for me, and everything else that had happened had just been a nightmare, the worst kind of bad dream, but nothing that could possibly be true.
But when I opened them, I was back in my beige room, with everything broken in pieces around me. I closed my eyes again and pulled my covers over my head.
Chapter
NINE
“Andie?” there was a double knock on my door, and before I even had time to respond, it cracked open an inch. “Can I come in?”
I looked up from where I was still curled on my bed. After a few hours I had made myself get up. I’d taken a long shower and finally changed out of Clark’s clothes and back into my own. Even though I’d left my phone on the kitchen counter, I hadn’t wanted to leave my room—I wasn’t sure what I’d be walking into downstairs. It was like I’d just broken every unspoken rule we’d had, and I had no idea where we went from here—or what it looked like. And maybe it looked just the same, which was somehow the worst possibility of all.
“Okay,” I said, as the door swung open all the way.
My dad didn’t come inside, though, just stayed in the doorway, standing on the threshold, his hands in his pockets. “Want to get some ice cream?”
• • •
At Paradise Ice Cream I looked across the table at my father. We were sitting at one of the wrought-iron tables on the patio with our ice cream—mint chocolate chip for my dad, cookie dough in a waffle cone for me. We’d driven over here in almost silence, talking only about the logistics of where to go, if he could change lanes, if I could see a parking spot.
“How is it?” he asked, gesturing toward my waffle cone with his spoon.
“Pretty good,” I said, taking another bite. “Yours?”
“Not bad,” he said, scooping up another spoonful. We ate in silence for a moment, and I looked around the nearly deserted patio in the fading afternoon light. It seemed we’d picked a good time to come—it was a little after five. I knew from experience that around seven, post-dinnertime, the line would be out the door. But right now we had the place practically to ourselves. “So,” he said, taking another bite, then pushing his cup slightly away from him and looking right at me. “I thought we should talk about this afternoon.”
I looked at him and nodded, realizing that after years of knowing my father’s speeches by heart, being able to anticipate every turn of phrase, I had no idea what was about to come next.
“I’m sorry, Andie,” he said, his voice raw. “I truly am. I don’t think I realized . . .” His voice trailed off and he cleared his throat. “If I’d known how you felt, I would have made a change long ago. And of course I should have. It’s no excuse. But . . .” He sighed and looked out over the parking lot. In the grass along the side of the road, I could see fireflies begin to wink on and off, not many yet, not so you could take them for granted. “My life’s been about forward motion,” he said, his voice quieter now. “It has to be in government. You have to think about the next day, the next problem, and keep moving forward. And I’ve been so focused on trying to get back to where I was . . .” My dad let his voice fade as he looked out again, seeing something that I wasn’t. He shook his head, then looked at me. “I wish you’d told me about Daniel Rizzoli.”