“What about the investigation?” I asked, thrown. As far as I’d understood things, we were still waiting for the results to come back. I hadn’t known my dad not running for reelection in November was even in the cards.
“Even if it comes back in my favor,” he said. “I don’t know. It’s just been on my mind lately.”
I looked at him for a moment, then looked back down at the stack of plates once again, trying to get my thoughts together. It hadn’t been that long ago that I couldn’t picture my dad without his job. But now it was getting harder to remember when things hadn’t been like this, our lives overlapping. It was in the way my dad knew to make sure that the fridge was stocked with Diet Coke, the way I knew his paper-reading hierarchy—national news, sports, business, comics (he was especially invested in the family hijinks of the Grants in Grant Central Station). It was how when he’d been running late to dinner at the Crane last week, he’d called and asked me to order for him, and I’d done it without needing to ask him what he wanted. It was last Sunday, when Clark had come for dinner and then Tom and Palmer had stopped by afterward to hang out and we’d all ended up playing Pictionary, my dad teaming up with Tom and Clark, the three of them strategizing and taking it way too seriously (and winning, not that I was bitter). It was this, now, watching movies on a rainy Sunday and not wanting to be anywhere else.
“So if you didn’t run,” I said slowly, trying this idea out, “you’d be here?”
“I would.” My dad looked across at me. “What do you think?”
I looked down at my hands for a moment, twisting them together, trying to gather my thoughts. The idea that this summer wouldn’t just be over as soon as news came from Washington was something I really hadn’t let myself think about before. I cleared my throat before I spoke. “It would be okay with me. If you were around, I mean.”
“Good,” my dad said, tapping his pencil once on the coffee table.
“After all,” I said, making my tone faux serious, “Palmer might do another scavenger hunt. And we’d need you for backup.”
“Well,” my dad said, matching my tone, “I wouldn’t want to miss that.” He smiled at me, then settled back against the couch and picked up his papers again.
I’d planned to bring the plates to the kitchen, take a shower, and get ready before Clark came over for dinner. But I found myself curling back up in the chair. I just wanted to sit there, in the quiet, with my dad working, letting myself imagine, for the first time, what October or February could look like. No train rides down to D.C., no Peter. Being able to tell someone who was actually interested, and not being paid to listen, how my day had been. And so, even though I knew I should probably get moving, that Clark was on his way over, I stayed there, perfectly still, letting myself picture it, playing it out in my head like a movie—seeing what, just maybe, could be.
• • •
The rain didn’t let up the next day. It just got heavier, which meant all my walks were much shorter than usual, and my car was now covered in muddy paw prints, despite my best efforts to keep the seats covered in towels. Since the shorter walks left me with unexpected time on my hands, Clark and I ended up getting lunch at the diner and then going to the Pearce to hang out with Toby, who was, to put it mildly, not looking forward to her date that night. She’d been sending incredibly long text messages about it, and I was spending most of my time trying to figure out what she was actually trying to say with the emojis. We found ourselves walking through the Renaissance room listening to Toby complain about what a weird name Craig was and wondering why Bri wouldn’t just let her mourn the loss of her Wyatt crush in peace.
When a group came in for the tour that Toby had forgotten she was scheduled to give, she hustled out to the front entrance, leaving me and Clark alone to wander around the museum. Which, I realized, wasn’t actually the worst way to spend a rainy day. We walked around, making up backstories and names for the people in the paintings as we walked.
When we reached the gallery where my mother’s picture was, I knew I could have steered him away, or told him I was museumed out, or something. But I didn’t; I took his hand and led him to where my mom’s painting was. I’d told him about it, here and there, but he’d never seen it before. And even though anyone who paid the Pearce’s entrance fee could see this picture, standing next to Clark as he looked at it, I was feeling somehow exposed—like he was seeing something I usually kept to myself.
“So?” I asked, keeping my voice light, like I really didn’t care about the answer, even though my heart was pounding hard in my chest.
“It’s great,” Clark said, looking at the painting for a moment longer before looking at me, and squeezing my hand. “It’s really wonderful, Andie. Your mom was so talented.”
“She was,” I said, looking at the way the stars seemed to glow against the canvas, the way you could somehow feel the wind that was blowing through the trees.
“So what are you looking at?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think there was meant to be something else there,” I said, gesturing to the bare section of the canvas, the faint etchings of pencil lines that I’d spent way too long trying to make sense of. “But I don’t know what it was.”
Clark nodded, eyes still on the painting. “So did you pose for this, or . . . ?”
I shook my head. I hadn’t ever known where the inspiration for the painting had come from, only that my mother had started working on it late one night when she was sick, before my dad had quit the campaign and moved home again. “I don’t know where it came from,” I said, and as I did, I felt the hollow realization in my stomach that because I had never asked her about it when I had the chance, now I would never know.
“Because you’re definitely looking at something,” Clark said, almost more to himself, as he leaned closer to the picture again. “Right? I mean, look at your sight line.”
“I know,” I said, shaking my head. “But I don’t think we’re ever going to know what it is.”
“Well, maybe not,” Clark said after a moment, his words coming slowly, like he was still putting something together. “Was this supposed to be somewhere? That you know of?”
“It’s the field behind our old house,” I said. I had recognized it as soon as I’d seen my mother start sketching it out. You could see the top of our roof in the distance and the remnants of the tree house my dad had tried to build for me before he’d admitted it was outside of his capabilities and I’d admitted that I actually hadn’t wanted a tree house. “Why?”
“Because I have an idea,” Clark said, raising his eyebrows at me.
Twenty minutes later I sat in Clark’s passenger seat, feeling my heart beat harder the closer we got to East View. When Clark had suggested going to my old house to see if we could find out anything, I’d been ready to tell him that I didn’t want to go back there, that I’d avoided it for five years. But I didn’t tell him that. Instead, I’d found myself agreeing and giving him directions. I wasn’t sure why, but I didn’t want to have to hide from it any longer. And Clark seemed so convinced that we’d find our answer to what was happening in the painting that I found myself wondering if maybe this could be true. The closer we got, I found myself anticipating every turn, every landmark, even though I hadn’t been down these streets in five years.
“You’ll be coming up to it on the left,” I said as he signaled and turned onto our street.
“Gotcha.” The rain started to come down harder, and he increased his wiper speed.
I turned to face the window, feeling like maybe I was ready to do this after all. That it probably had been ridiculous to avoid it for all these years.