I shrugged and took a careful bite of my cone. I hadn’t wanted to do it while he was talking, like I would somehow have been interrupting. “I didn’t think there was anything you could do.”
“I could have yelled at him for a few hours, though,” my dad pointed out, and I smiled for what felt like the first time in a long time. “It might have made both of us feel better.” He pulled his ice cream cup closer to him but didn’t take another spoonful, just looked at me. “But I still wish you would have told me.”
“Yeah,” I said, my voice quiet. I wished I could have told him too—wished he was someone that I could tell things to. But I had no idea how to say this out loud to him.
“So,” my dad said, pulling a pen from his shirt pocket and drawing one of the rainbow napkins toward him. “I thought we should devise a strategy.”
“A strategy,” I repeated.
“You were right,” he said, clearing his throat as he drew a series of diagonal lines on the border of the napkin—his version of doodling. “I haven’t been around as much as I should have. I’ve missed out on so much. And of course you’re upset about it. As you should be. . . .” He stopped and tapped the pen twice on the napkin, then looked up at me again. “So we have a problem.” He set down his pen and picked up his spoon again. “And I thought we could devise a plan for how to correct it.”
I felt my fingers twitching for the pen that was just out of reach, wishing I had a napkin of my own to figure this out on, or at least get my thoughts more in order. This was actually feeling familiar—it was how my dad had dealt with every problem he’d had to face in his career. He and Peter sat down and devised a strategy for whatever the problem was, whether it was to get a bill passed or push an agenda through, or to win his reelection. And if something wasn’t working, they came up with a new plan. It was like they didn’t allow for failure, only course correction. I just hadn’t known that it could be applied to things like this. “What were you thinking?”
“The way I see it,” my dad said, and it was like I could practically hear the relief in his voice as he started to write, like he was able to grab on to some hard-and-fast facts, “we’re dealing with a lack of quality time spent, right? So we’ll spend some more time together.”
“How?” I was noticing, to my surprise, how comfortable it felt to be able to discuss something like this, to break it down into manageable pieces.
“Well,” my dad said, writing on the napkin, “maybe we have dinner together every night.”
I drew back in my chair. “Every night?” I echoed, the words coming out strangled. Most of my friends had dinner with their families during the school year—and I was usually at Palmer’s house, having dinner with her family, at least once a week—but this was the summer. How was I supposed to go from hanging out at the beach to a party at the Orchard to pool-hopping if I had to be home in the middle of it to have dinner with my father? He looked up at me and I tried to hide what I was feeling, nodding quickly. “Well . . . um . . . sure. That sounds . . . fine.”
My dad shook his head. “Andie, we’re negotiating here,” he said with a half smile. “I know you don’t want to have dinner with me every night. I ask for more than I know I’ll get, you offer less than you know you’ll end up with. That’s how this works.”
I smiled as I flashed back to a memory of a rainy day years ago, on some senator’s campaign bus, my dad stumping for him, while he taught me (and three members of the press corps) how to play poker. “Okay,” I said, making my voice more serious, trying to take any tells out of it. “Dinner once a week.”
“Twice,” my dad countered, and I looked up at him and nodded. Twice a week sounded good. Twice a week sounded like something we could handle. “And we’ll talk,” he said, his gaze level with mine. “You can’t just sit there and be a moody teenager.”
“Ugh, when am I a moody teenager?” I asked with an exaggerated eye roll, and my dad smiled, like I’d been hoping he would.
“Seriously,” he said, tapping his pen twice on the table. “This won’t work unless you tell me things. Like that you’re going on dates with fantasy novelists.”
“Well, I didn’t know that either,” I pointed out, but my dad was still talking, overlapping with me.
“I need to make up for lost time. So you have to fill me in. Deal?”
“Deal,” I said, and my dad gave me a nod. Dinner twice a week. We could do that. “But you have to too,” I added, the words coming out fast. It was what I’d realized when I’d been lying upstairs in my room, going over all the things I’d shouted at my father—like how he didn’t know anything about me. But I had been retroactively embarrassed to realize I really didn’t know anything about him, either. Peter and the press corps and the random rotating interns knew much more than I did. “Tell me things about you. Okay?”
My dad nodded. “It’s a plan.”
We finished our ice cream after that and started to head to my dad’s car with every intention of going home. But Paradise Ice Cream was right next to Captain Pizza, and we both stopped in front of the door as the heavenly pizza smell drifted out. We looked at each other, and without discussing it, headed inside, where we ate slices of cheese (extra for me, regular for my dad) at the counter while the guy tossing the dough showed off for us, only occasionally losing control of the dough when a toss went wild.
When we were walking to his car in the fading daylight, I tried to pick the right moment, when he was distracted by pulling out the keys, to ask about the consequences for the thing that had started all of this—my staying out all night. “So we’re good with everything now, right?” I asked, adjusting my purse on my shoulder, attempting just the right amount of casual in my voice. “Like, with the whole thing from last night. We’re okay?”
“Oh, no,” my dad said, looking across the hood of the car at me. “You are so totally grounded. I thought you understood that. A month, at least.”
I started to protest, then bit my lip. This was really bad—that was most of the summer. But I also knew there was the chance he might increase it if I started complaining. “All right,” I said with a sigh. I looked over at my dad, who was shaking his head at me.
“Andie,” he said, sounding pained, “we just went over this. Am I supposed to negotiate with myself?”
“Right,” I said quickly, trying to regroup. “Um . . . two days.”
“Please,” my dad scoffed as he beeped open the car and got into the driver’s seat.
“Four days?” I tried, getting into the passenger seat and buckling my seat belt.
“A week,” my dad countered, and I nodded.
“But I get to go to work,” I said, “and the grounding doesn’t start at night until seven p.m.”
“Call it six and you’ve got a deal,” my dad said, starting the car. He glanced over at me. “I realize that things might have gotten a little lax with Joy,” he said, and I just nodded, deciding that he probably didn’t need to know I’d been without a curfew for years now. “But that’s going to have to change now.”
“There’s a new sheriff in town?” I asked. My dad smiled, and it hit me how rarely I’d seen it—not my dad’s candidate smile, but the one that was meant just for me.
“You got it,” he said. “And punctuality is going to be the coin of the realm.” My dad started to shift the car out of park, then put it back and looked over at me. “I don’t want you to think . . . ,” he started, talking mostly to the steering wheel. “I miss her so much, you know,” he said, his voice wobbling. “Every day. Even now I’m always thinking about things I want to tell her. Stuff she’d find funny. I didn’t even know what I was doing that first year. It was like someone had turned off the sun. The center of everything was suddenly gone.”