Chapter 19

WE DON’T HAVE school that Friday because of a teacher development day, so it’s a rare opportunity for me to see what Dad does while I’m at school. The answer, it turns out, is he wakes up late, eats breakfast, and then spends hours on his laptop at the kitchen table, probably going over numbers for Verde.

I wish I hadn’t procrastinated so long. I should have asked him earlier, when he was more relaxed, because anything on his laptop is bound to amp him up, and I need him in the best mood possible.

But I’ve run out of time. Tomorrow is Saturday, and Tess is expecting me at Pacific Beach.

This could be fine, I try to convince myself. Maybe he’ll say yes. It’s been two weeks since the whole police incident and the Verde incident, which is only two incidents in an entire adolescence. Right? There’s room for negotiation, at least.

“Hey, Dad?”

He doesn’t look up from his laptop. “Hm?”

“Can I . . . go somewhere, tomorrow?”

His eyes don’t move from the screen. “No.”

So much for negotiation. “Oh, come on.”

“Did you really think that was in the cards after your behavior lately?”

“I thought you might at least ask where I wanted to go.”

“Okay, I’ll bite.” He closes the laptop and gestures at me. “Where?”

“The beach.”

He frowns. “No, seriously, where?”

“I am serious. The beach. Pacific Beach.”

“You know, it’s hard for me to say yes to something that’s clearly a lie.”

“I’m not lying!” He still looks skeptical. “What do you want to do, take me back to the police station, have them strap me to a lie detector machine?”

“Cool it.”

“I’m not lying to you.”

“You don’t even like the beach.”

“I know,” I say, wanting this so badly that I blurt it out without thinking, “but she does.”

“She?”

“Um—”

“You mean Lily?”

“No,” I say. “Her name is . . . Tess.”

Slowly, Dad reaches over and pulls out the chair next to him. I stare at him. He gestures to it. This feels like a trap, but what choice do I have? I sit down.

“Who’s Tess?” he asks lightly.

“She’s the editor in chief of the paper. Tess Espinoza. She’s a year ahead of me, so we’ve never had classes together, but we’re, um. Friends.”

“Is that why you wanted to stay so badly? On the paper?”

“It might be . . . part of it,” I admit.

“Tell me about her.”

“What about her?”

“Well. What’s she like?”

This is making my skin itch. It shouldn’t be this hard to talk to my dad. But I haven’t done it in so long—shared something like this with him—that it feels awkward and uncomfortable.

But if this is what I have to do to see Tess tomorrow, I’ll do it. I’d do just about anything for her outside of murder or arson, and I could be persuaded on the arson.

“She’s so smart,” I say, because it’s the very first thing that comes to mind. “Way smarter than me, and you’d think I wouldn’t like that, right? Because I always want to be right; you say it all the time. But I like that she’s quicker than me. And knows all these things I don’t.” I take a breath. “She’s really funny, too, but not in a mean way. Not ever like she’s trying to hurt somebody. I don’t think she could hurt somebody. It’s what makes her really good at being editor in chief, I think. That she wants to do the best she can, for everyone.”

Dad smiles. “She sounds great.”

“And she’s pretty, too,” I rush to add. “Not that it matters, not that it’s the most important thing. I know it isn’t the most important thing, that she’s pretty. But she is.”

“Are you two . . . ?” Dad pauses. “Dating?”

“No,” I say quickly. “No, we haven’t even . . .” I shrug. “I don’t see that happening.”

Dad is quiet for a moment. “Do you want it to?”

And then it’s me who’s quiet. Because I don’t know how to answer that. Yes, I want that. But—

“I don’t want to want things,” I blurt out.

He looks confused. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t think I’m the kind of person who gets to have that,” I say, slowly. Carefully. “So I don’t want to want it. If it won’t happen.”

“But what makes you think that?” Dad presses me. “What makes you think you won’t—?”

“I’m a lot,” I say. Underneath the table, I’m digging my nails into my palm. “You know? To deal with, to be around, and I just don’t . . .” How can I explain this to someone like him? How can I tell him the way I feel, without making it sound like he made me feel it? Even if maybe . . . he did?

“I just don’t see it happening,” I finish.

Dad doesn’t say anything for a while. He just looks at me, and I can’t read his expression. Is he sad? Or confused? Or . . . hurt, somehow?

“You should go,” he says finally. “You can go, I mean. On Saturday.”

I breathe a sigh of relief. “Thanks.” Pushing back the chair, I get up. “I’ll keep my phone on the whole time—”

“What are you bringing?”

“Bringing?”

“To the date.”

“It’s not a date.”

“You should take something anyway. What food does she like?”

The only thing I know she likes for sure is In-N-Out fries, animal style. “I don’t know.”

Dad’s already out of his seat and pacing the kitchen. “You’re on the beach, so something you can eat with your hands. Something that doesn’t need a cooler. . . .”

“Dad, no, you don’t have to make anyth—”

He’s already in the cabinet, dragging out a huge bag of flour. “Let’s do marranitos.”

Just hearing him say the word makes me feel seven years old again. We used to make them all the time when I was younger and he was less busy. I loved those cookies—not just for the sugar and the ginger taste, but the shape they came in. Little pigs, with curly tails.

I wonder if it makes him feel seven again, too. In his tiny childhood kitchen in Bakersfield, rolling out dough with his mom.

“Go find the cookie cutter,” he orders me. “It’s by the Tupperware, somewhere.”

Dad begins laying out the sugar, butter, and flour on the kitchen island for his mise en place, which is just restaurant speak for getting your shit together before you begin. It’s one more way Dad and I aren’t the same—I always wanted to dive right in, headfirst.

As he hands me a stick of soft butter to unpeel from its wrapper, he says: “I didn’t ever think I’d get married.”

I stop midpeel. “Really?”

It can’t be for the same reasons as me—Dad has always been able to get along with people. No way he could have opened two restaurants otherwise.

“I was barely older than you when I left home,” he says, turning to the cabinet where he keeps all his bowls. “It made me pretty independent. I didn’t need anybody, I thought. I knew I could get through life just fine on my own, so . . .” He shrugs. “I assumed that’s what I’d do.”

You can’t build a case on assumptions. It seems like you shouldn’t build a life that way, either.

“That’s how people think, when they’re young.” He glances at me out of the corner of his eye. “In absolutes.”

Why does he do that? Say people when what he really means is you, specifically.

“That’s so condescending.”

He gives me a look. “Gideon.”

“If you’re young, you can’t possibly know anything?”

“When you’re young,” he says, “you can’t imagine all the possibilities that are open to you. It’s not a dig, kiddo; you just haven’t been alive long enough to experience them. That’s all.”

“So what changed your mind?”

He sucks in air through his teeth, so deep his shoulders hitch.

“Your mom.”

Oh.

“Because she wanted to get married?” I ask. It’s usually the girl, isn’t it, who wants to get married first? That’s how it is in movies.

“Because I did. The second I met her, I didn’t want to be alone anymore.” He smiles, like there’s something playing in his head. “How could I, when—well. It was your mom. You know?”

That cuts deeper than any of the knives on the block by the sink. Burns at me hotter than the stove top Dad is lighting to melt the butter. How could he say that? Worse, how could he possibly believe it?

“I don’t know anything about Mom,” I snap at him before I can stop myself.

He takes a step back from the counter. A small one. “Of course you do.”

I can’t stand it when he does that. Brush off something I’ve said about my own life with total certainty. Of course.

“No.” I look him in the eyes. “I don’t.”

Dad busies himself with unstacking the mixing bowls. “You know she was a teacher. You know she was from Redding, up in the mountains. You know she moved down here to go to SDSU.” He swallows. “You know she loved you.”

What I remember most is feeling warm. Not inside—or not just inside. I don’t ever remember her wearing long sleeves, so her arms were always bare when she hugged me. Or held me. And they were always warm.

Her face is so fuzzy in my memories. That feels like the part I should remember, but it isn’t. I remember her skin. Soft, and freckled, and warm.

“That isn’t the same,” I tell Dad. “It’s not the same as knowing her.”

“She had a best friend. Jane. Do you remember Jane? She was really tall, short hair? Weird glasses.”

“Uh, maybe?”

“I think I still have her number.” He turns toward his room, like he’s found an escape route. “She’d be able to . . . you know.”

“Talk?”

“Yeah.”

He bends down to turn the oven on.

“Why can’t you?”

He straightens up. Turns around. Blinks at me. “What?”

“Why can’t you?” I repeat. “Why can’t you ever talk about her?”

Dad is quiet for a very long time. I’m almost about to ask again, when he takes a deep breath, lets it out, and says:

“I thought it would be easier.”

“What do you mean, easier?”

“Just what I said. I thought it would be easier not to talk about it, constantly. Easier not to . . . dwell on it.”

“Yeah?” I ask. “Easier for who?”

“For you,” he says, and it’s sharp and hurt. “Not me. You.”

“Me?”

“You were so young when it happened, you barely even remembered—I thought it would be easier on you.”

“It wasn’t,” I say. “Isn’t.”

“I didn’t want you to miss her more than you had to. More . . . clearly than you had to.”

He wanted to protect me from something he couldn’t. He tried, but there’s no protecting anybody from tragedy, just like there’s no stopping them in the first place. That’s what makes them tragedies.

Dad didn’t want me to miss the person I’d lost. All I did was grieve a ghost instead.

“She was my mom. I was always going to miss her.”

For a minute, the only sound is the occasional crack of the oven as it heats up.

“I’m sorry,” Dad says finally, looking down at his hands. “I’m just . . . sorry.”

Is he sorry for never talking about her? I wonder. Or is he sorry that I had to grow up without a mom at all? And then I think . . . maybe it isn’t or. Maybe it’s and.

I square my shoulders, take a breath, and ask what I’ve wanted to since I was six years old: “Can you tell me something about her?”

“I . . .” He looks shell-shocked by the question. “I don’t know what you’re looking for.”

“Stories.”

“Stories?” he repeats.

“Yeah, because I know facts. I know where she was born, and where she worked, but I don’t have any stories.”

Facts always mattered to me—when I was a detective and when I wasn’t one, too. Maybe that’s why I was okay, for years, only having those facts and nothing more. But it’s like Tess told me: facts don’t exist on their own. They’re told to us, by people, and every sentence and word in a story is a choice. The way a person tells a story can show you—for better or worse—how they really feel. I want to hear a story about my mom. And I want to hear the way my dad tells it.

Facts matter. They’re the truth, and that matters. But I’m starting to think stories matter just as much.

Dad puts both hands on the countertop and stares down at the flecked pattern like he could disappear into it.

“She had red hair.”

“That’s only another fact.”

“Gideon, just—” He holds up a hand. “This is hard. Okay?”

I nod. And wait. And listen.

“That was the thing I noticed first,” Dad continues. “I was working in this little place downtown. It was a pass-through kitchen, so from where I was on the line, I could see some of the patrons. And there was this girl who would come in every Wednesday, with this amazing red hair.”

It was amazing. I remember that. It’s like a lock clicks open at the back of my brain. It’s like a box gets taken out of storage, off the very back shelf, and unwrapped. Her hair was long, and it would spiral down by my face when she held me in her lap. I would grab for one of the curls—not to pull it, but just to rub it between my fingers. It felt softer than anything.

“She only ever got coffee,” Dad continues. “And she always sat alone, with a textbook. So I started sending the waitress out with a different pastry each time. She never turned it down. And then I nearly got fired, because I couldn’t stop looking at her. I was screwing the whole kitchen up. At that point, I figured—better make this worth it. So I asked her out.

“She didn’t have much family—wasn’t close to them, anyway, and I was the same. We thought we’d make a family together. The kind neither of us got to have. And . . . we did. For a few years, a few perfect years, we did.

“She liked food—all food, any cuisine—but didn’t know much about it. The first time I took her to a sushi place, she put the whole clump of wasabi in her mouth at once. I felt horrible, but she just laughed, even with tears streaming down her face.

“I only knew her for eight years. Eight years and two months from the day I met her until the day she died.”

It almost knocks me over. Eight years. Dad has known me for twice as long as he knew her. And she’s been gone longer than he was ever with her.

Dad misreads the look on my face. “Too much?” he asks gently. I shake my head. It wasn’t too much. Not at all. It was honest.

I feel like I need to do that, too, now. Tell him something, so he knows what he told me wasn’t too much. So that maybe he’ll do it again, one day. It’s not a trade, exactly. More like . . . a gift. Honesty. But not just any kind of honesty. The kind that hurts. Vulnerability.

“In my head, it was like this . . . wall,” I say. His eyes snap up, like he wasn’t expecting me to speak. “Her being gone. Whenever I would start to think about it, I would imagine a brick wall that I could build higher and higher, however high I needed to. To keep it”—I make a vague pushing kind of gesture—“away. I guess.”

Dad nods. “For me, it’s like a box. It’s there, it’s safe, all those . . .” He takes a breath. “Memories. I can take them out, if I want. Sometimes. But mostly they just stay there. Locked away.”

“Is that what you’re supposed to do? To deal with something like this?”

Dad shakes his head. “I have no idea what you’re supposed to do.”

I always thought he knew what he was doing. Even if I thought the choices he made were wrong, or unfair, I figured at least he was certain. But he wasn’t. Isn’t.

“You said you used to think of it like a brick wall,” Dad says suddenly. “Does that mean you don’t? Anymore?”

I guess I did use past tense. Was. I’m not sure it’s right. If this were an article I was copy editing, I might have circled that was. Drawn a question mark beside it.

“I told Tess about Mom,” I admit. “I didn’t have to, but I did. I think that’s why I said that.”

“Special people in your life can do that, sometimes,” Dad says. “They can break through you. Like that.”

The way he says it, it’s not a platitude, to use a word Tess would like. It’s something he knows. Because he’s had it happen, too.

“Can I have another story?”

He takes a sharp breath in through his nose. “I—”

“Please, just . . . one more.” God, I sound like a kid. I feel like a kid, the kid I actually was, begging him to read one more book before I had to go to sleep. And he always would—I’d sort of forgotten. But he’d always give in, at least once. One more book. One more story.

Maybe he remembers that, too. Because he looks down at the countertop and says:

“One year, right after we’d first gotten married, Grandma Felicitas sent us this Easter card. And it was . . . horrific.”

“Because of Jesus on the cross or whatever?” We don’t see my grandma that often, but I remember going to her house in Bakersfield when I was little and being terrified of the gigantic crucifix she kept on the wall.

“No,” Dad says. “It was this bunny.”

“A bunny?”

“A demon bunny. I don’t know what was wrong with the artist, but this rabbit looked like it wanted to eat your soul. I immediately tossed it in the recycling. But your mom . . .” He grins. “Fished it out when I wasn’t looking.

“The next morning, when I opened up the bathroom cabinet for my toothpaste, there was the bunny card taped to the inside mirror. I nearly had a heart attack. A week later, I went to get something from the pantry, boom, Demon Bunny staring down from the top shelf. I peel back the covers at night, Demon Bunny’s taken my side of the bed. And the whole time, your mom is just sitting there with this angelic little smile on her face.”

“Why didn’t you just throw it out?”

“Oh, I did,” he says. “She’d made copies.”

I burst out laughing, and then he does, too. I can’t remember the last time that’s happened. Both of us, laughing at something together.

“I couldn’t even pretend to be mad about it. I just laughed and told her I loved her. And then like always . . .” He stops for a second. “She sang it back to me.”

Sang it? “She made it into a song?”

“She used a song,” he says. “Her favorite one. By Irving Berlin. It’s called ‘Always.’”

“I don’t know it.”

“Yeah, well, it’s pretty old. From the thirties, or sometime around then. She was so funny—that’s the only kind of music she liked, old musicals, that big band stuff, you know.”

I do know. She might not have watched the movies I love, but—it’s close. It feels so close. She feels so—

“Mom liked old music?” I ask, and my eyes sting and Dad goes all blurry. “Stuff from the thirties and forties, she liked that whole . . . time?”

Dad takes a sharp breath in, like he’s realizing it, too. “Yeah. She did.”

And I stand there, stunned to silence by the possibility that somehow, a part of me held on to a part of her. That somehow, we could have our own shared sliver of space.

“Do you have it?” I look toward the living room, where Dad keeps his old CDs stacked by the TV. “The song. Her song.”

Dad takes his phone out of his pocket and types on it for a while. Then he lays it down on the counter, turns the volume up all the way, and hesitates for only a second before pressing play.

At first, there’s only a violin, sliding through high notes. Then a man’s deep, rich voice, singing slow:

I’ll be loving you, always

With a love that’s true, always

I can’t decide whether the melody is happy or sad. It’ll sound sweet and light for a moment, then the next note will dip. Is he wistful? Resigned? Content?

I think about the man who wrote it, and I want to understand what he meant, what he felt, what he wanted me to feel, nearly a century after he wrote it and a decade after my mom sang it.

Happy or sad. Joy or pain. Tragedy or love story. Then I think—what if there’s no or? What if there’s only and?

Tragedy and love story. It’s both. It’s all of them. It’s . . . everything.

And I’m supposed to feel it. That everything.

Days may not be fair, always

That’s when I’ll be there, always

I wonder if there’s going to be a day, years later, when I try to tell someone about what’s happening right now. This afternoon, this moment. With every breath, every note I hear for the very first time, I wonder if I’m living inside a story.

I lock the details in, the way I know how to.

Rain streaming down the window. The smell of marranitos rising in the oven. And Dad humming along.

Not for just an hour

Not for just a day

Not for just a year

But always