The Unexpected Everything (28 page)

“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.

“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.”

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?”