It was one o’clock by the time we reached Reno, and between the two of us we had devoured a half-pound bag of gummy bears to stave off our growing hunger. I’d been to Reno a few times for conferences, the sort supported by California school districts but held in Nevada for the cheap casino stays and the obvious entertainment options. Still, we spent twenty minutes circling before we decided to take our chances on a $4.99 all-you-can-eat casino buffet.
“When was your food last rotated?” Olivia asked the cashier as I paid.
“It’s always fresh!” the cashier replied, tossing a very full head of blond hair.
Olivia ended up picking skeptically at a salad. “Fast food might have been a better option,” she said, frowning at my plate of chicken fingers and mac and cheese.
I shrugged. “Got to keep my strength up for the journey.” Even if the possibilities for bacteria were high, I had to admit the food tasted good—or maybe I was just hungry for the first time in a long time. If life as I knew it was going to end in a week, I was going to eat all the junk that a middle-aged man with a definite belly shouldn’t eat. On the other hand, this was probably the exact sort of food that was served in prison cafeterias, and therefore was awaiting me for the next twenty-five years, minimum.
Rather than eat, my ninety-eight-pound daughter tried not to stare openly at some of our fellow diners, like the man who was pushing eighty in a corner booth, wearing dark sunglasses and a frosty, much younger blonde on each arm, or the woman in a skintight leopard-print dress and matching five-inch leopard-print heels.
When I returned from the buffet with a towering bowl of soft-serve ice cream, Olivia grinned at me. “Do me a favor?”
“Maybe.”
“Can you please go out into the casino for ten minutes and then come back sobbing, with your hair all disheveled and announce that you’ve lost the farm? Please. It could be an early birthday present for me. I’ll film the whole thing.”
“How about instead I give you a few bucks for a round of blackjack and see if they kick you out?”
“What makes you think they would kick me out? I could pass for twenty-one.”
“Sure you could.” I laughed and Olivia took an indignant bite of her salad.
I didn’t press the point. Olivia was sixteen-and-a-half and looked fourteen. She basically wore the same skinny jeans and oversize combat boots every day, a combination that made her look comically childlike. Any curves she did have were hidden beneath her ubiquitous black hoodie, sized more appropriately for a linebacker. When she’d started hanging around with the Visigoths a few years ago, she’d begun wearing light face powder and dark eyeliner. I’m not sure what the desired effect was, but I thought it made her look like a kid dressing as a teenager for Halloween. Not that this was the sort of thing a single dad could mention to his daughter. When it was just the two of us at home, or when Kathleen visited during the summer, Olivia toned it down, as if only her family could be trusted to view her actual face—a face so small and lovely and so much like Kathleen’s, at times I could hardly bear to see it.
“You want to walk around for a bit?” I offered, when Olivia couldn’t be persuaded to eat another bite. “We have another half hour of parking.”
“Okay.”
We wandered a bit off the main drag, the weekday crowd thinning as we went. Olivia pointed at an old-fashioned costume shop, and I waved her in alone. She had inherited Kathleen’s love of the antiquated and interesting. Kathleen couldn’t pass a piece of furniture without running her hand over the grain, or pulling the piece away from the wall to get a better look at its construction. Daniel had once called her “The Chair Whisperer”—a name she’d pretended to hate. Watching Olivia pick her way through this secondhand store, fingering a fur coat, holding a tiny glass egg up to the light—it was déjà vu; throw out the all-black clothes, and I could have been looking at a young Kathleen.
My stomach clenched. What was I doing? The vision that had suddenly become clear to me last Friday, with the world as I knew it spread out before me like a road map, wavered.
I can’t. I can’t do this.
I switched my attention from Olivia, who was now pawing through a collection of old postcards, to the man staring back at me from the hazy surface of the shop window—a mad artist’s caricature of the person I used to be. A sad person, an angry man, a failed father who had let his son die and his wife leave and his daughter surrender to her fear of everything.
I knew the answer, but begged the question: Where did it all go? How did it all get away from me? How had we gone from four to three to two, reducing ourselves to insignificance? And how could I do what I was about to do, and reduce the number to one?
I can’t.
Then Olivia was in front of me, tapping on the glass to get my attention. She was wearing a top hat and carrying a cane, and while I watched, she did a strange little tap dance in her combat boots, ending with a two-arm flourish. I clapped, not caring about the glances from a couple who passed me on the sidewalk.
Olivia grinned and took a deep bow at the waist.
My throat almost squeezed closed, the love I felt for her gathered into a solid lump. I didn’t know if all parents felt this way from time to time, but right then I didn’t see just the tap-dancing teenage Olivia, but all the versions of her melded together: the chubby infant, the sturdy-limbed toddler, the gymnastics tumbler, the thrower of noisy, sugar-fueled slumber parties, the thin, quiet girl in her eighth grade graduation robe, the skin-and-bones teenager hiding behind her Visigoth garb.
I have to do this, I thought, as if I could communicate the thought to her telepathically, straight from my mind to hers.
It’s because I love you that I’m going to do this.