I take the half flight of stairs to the den with two leaps. Mom hates when I do that, but she’s not— Oops. Dad is home early, and is reading in the den. I pivot backward, hoping to escape before he notices me.
“Kermit,” Dad calls.
No such luck. I slink through the doorway. “Yeah?”
“Come in.”
The den is supposedly Dad’s man cave, although it still looks pretty much like Mom in here. Except for the flat screen and all the architecture books and one weird poster of the Blues Brothers, it basically matches the decor of the rest of the house.
Dad’s not even a man cave kind of guy, actually. For the first time, I wonder if Mom’s really just teasing him when she says things like, “Off to the man cave?”
This is the kind of revelation I would normally discuss with Sheila.
I take only one step farther, inexplicably annoyed. “What do you want?”
“Come all the way in.” Dad’s sitting in the corner of the couch, a book tented over his knee. He pats the couch beside him. “I just wanted to say hi. You don’t have to bite my head off.”
Maybe I do. “Sorry.” I go over and sit, not where he patted, but two cushions away.
Dad sighs. “So…”
“So?”
“How was your day?”
“It sucked.”
“Anything in particular?”
“Just the usual amount of suckage.”
“How is it being back at school?”
I think about Matt, nodding to me across the cafeteria, touching my shoulder, grinning at me over the Ping-Pong table, driving me home. “Not too bad. Kinda normal, actually.” Better than normal. But I’m ashamed of thinking it.
I scoot closer to Dad. Inch by inch, as if I can do it without him noticing. He puts his arm around me. The jig is up, so I go ahead and lean on his shoulder because, if not now, when? The book on his knee is titled Grieving with Your Child.
“I bet everything in that book is super cheesy.”
Dad laughs. “Kinda.” He squeezes my shoulder. “I don’t know. Maybe it helps people.”
Dad turns to books for everything. The books on the wall that aren’t about architecture are mostly how-to books. He has half a shelf of For Dummies titles alone. He loves to tell a story about Sheila when she was little, around the time that I was born and she was learning to read. Apparently she found Dad’s Dummies library and said to him, “You don’t seem like such a dummy.” He loved to tell that story. I wonder if he’ll tell it anymore now.
“Don’t they make a Grieving for Dummies?” I ask him. “That’s what we really need.”
Dad laughs. I feel it rumble through his chest and stomach. Then he squeezes me tighter and his body continues to shake behind mine and I know that he’s crying.
Dad never used to cry. Now he cries all the time. It’s one of many ways the world is tilted.
I wonder if they make a book called Grieving with Your Parents. I wouldn’t buy it or anything, but I might sneak into the library and put it inside an encyclopedia and pretend to be researching rodent life or something and secretly read it. So I would know what to do when this happens. Should I leave? Should I stay? Should I say something that might make him feel better? What if it makes him feel worse?
“I didn’t mean to say that,” I tell him. I want to say I’m sorry, but I hate those words now.
“Don’t ever,” Dad sobs, “stop saying things because of me.”
I let him hug me against his chest for a minute longer before I pull away.
“If you want to talk, we’re here for you,” Dad says. Tear tracks glisten like silver against the dark brown of his cheeks. “I don’t want us to become one of those families where no one talks to each other.”
Please. I scrunch my face at him. “How likely does that seem to you?” No one talks more than my parents.
Dad laughs. He doesn’t wipe away the tear tracks, though I really want him to.
“You’re just like your sister. Always sarcastic.”
“I’m not like her at all.” I slide off the couch. Away from him. “Don’t say that ever again.”
“Kerm?” Dad says. “Hang on a second.”
But I can’t go back to him. Not right now. Sometimes it feels like when they look at me, they are looking for her. And that isn’t fair. It isn’t fair at all.