“P. F., you are an hour late,” my father says sternly when I get home. He looks at his watch. “Correction. An hour and twenty-five minutes late.”
“Oh,” I say. “Am I? I’m sorry—I didn’t realize.” However, I did realize that when we left the Lot, it was almost 11:00—making me an hour late. But I was just having such a good time, watching Steve and Jacqui split that last French fry.
“I worry about you!” my father says. “Do you know how many terrible things could happen to you on your way home at eleven-thirty at night on Rollerblades?”
I raise my eyebrows. If he feels that way, then why won’t he let me drive? “I was perfectly safe. I was with friends.” Of course, neither one of these statements is totally true. But “I was with some boys who drive crazy and drive me crazy” wouldn’t be the answer to give him right now.
“You were hanging out at that . . . lot, weren’t you?” he says in a disapproving tone.
“Yes,” I say. “Dad, it’s where everyone hangs out.”
“Yeah, well,” he says. “That doesn’t make it okay.”
“You should be glad I don’t hang out with the cemetery crowd,” I tell him.
“There’s a cemetery crowd? Which cemetery?” Dad asks.
“Eastman. There’s the Lot crowd, and then there’s the Plot crowd,” I tell him.
“You live to worry me, don’t you?” He closes the door behind me. “I really wish you hadn’t told me that.”
“Sorry,” I say. “Just trying to keep you informed.” I open the fridge and get out a carton of orange juice.
“You’ve got the early shift tomorrow,” he says, eyeing the juice as if it’s a dangerous stimulant. “Are you going to be up in time?”
“Dad, I’ll be fine.” I pour juice into a giant plastic cup with LINDVILLE SAVINGS & LOAN on the side—another of Mom’s freebies, as she calls them. I hate the word freebies.
“Look, P. F., I’m begging you. Please don’t be so late next time, okay?”
What about the fact that he and Mom are late every single time they’re supposed to come home and take over watching the kids? “Dad, it’s summer, and I’m only taking one class, and nobody else has to be home by ten. I don’t even get out of work until eleven on Saturday nights.”
“Be home by eleven then,” Dad says. “Fine. Eleven. But I need your help with something.”
He needs my help? What could I do that I’m not already doing? “What.” I don’t say it as a question because I don’t want to know the answer. I imagine more watching the kids, or maybe something new, like all the laundry instead of just some, or some new housecleaning or cooking assignments. Call me Cinder-Peggy. “Dad, I’m pretty much extended already.”
“But this is something different—and fun. It’s a skating thing.”
I raise my eyebrows. Skating . . . different and fun? Since when?
He looks at the calendar on the refrigerator, nearly buried under Dean’s drawings and Torvill’s latest sticker attack. “I don’t have much time to pull this together. It’s coming up in about three weeks. So let me ask you something, and don’t say no right away—just hear me out.”
“It’s about skating? Then no—right away,” I say.
“P. F., come on.” Dad laughs. “Cut me some slack here. Is there any way at all you’d consider getting back into skating? Just for a onetime thing? Just to help me out?”
“Why, is it Take Your Daughter to Skate Day at the rink or something?” I ask.
Dad laughs. “Very funny. No. It would be you and me and . . . well, I don’t know all the details yet. This is new to me, but someone wants me to perform and I just thought . . . P. F. and I could do this together.”
Why on earth would he think that? I’ve told him so many times that I’m not interested in figure skating anymore.
“See, you and Mom have your childbirth class together and that’s great, but I miss hanging out with you, too,” he says. “And when the new baby comes, we’re going to be even busier, so—I just wanted for us to do something together.”
I really appreciate the sentiment, but there’s no way I’m doing this, whatever it is. “Dad, there are a hundred reasons I can’t help you with some skating thing,” I say. “I don’t have time to practice, for one. I’m working, remember? And watching the kids, and—”
“Okay, okay. So maybe you’d have to cut your Gas ’n Git hours a little to fit in some rehearsal time. And because you’d be doing that to help me, I’d forgive some of your debt because your paychecks wouldn’t be as high. Whatever. We’d work it out.”
I don’t like the sound of this. He seems a little desperate. “Dad, come on. I told you. I don’t want to skate in public, ever again—are you crazy?” Anyway, don’t I do enough around here, without helping Dad’s skating career, too?
“But you’ve been skating. Every day.”
“That’s completely different, Dad. And anyway, what is this for?”
He isn’t giving out any specifics. “It’s not for competition; it’s strictly for entertainment. You and I would make up the program. You wouldn’t have to do anything complicated—I just want it to be fun.”
“Fun,” I repeat.
“Yes, fun,” he says.
We reach a stalemate where neither of us budges or says anything for a minute. I can’t believe he’s even asking me this. He knows I’m no good anymore.
Then he says, “Your spins were so nice,” still pushing the idea. This is how he sells so many houses. He wears people down.
“You can have another protégé or whatever when Dorothy gets older,” I tell him. Torvill and Dean have already tried skating and shown exactly zero interest in pursuing it. “Heck, don’t even wait. Put her on skates now. Put her in your program.”
Dad stares out the kitchen window at the street, as if he’s considering it. He’s juggling a silver Monopoly-size house in his hand, his reward for being a top agent one year. “I don’t want Dorothy to skate with me. I want you to, P. F.”
“Sorry,” I say, “but no. And please don’t ask me again. I mean it, Dad.”
“Okay, but I think you’ll be sorry,” he says as he drops the little house onto the floor and it skids under the fridge.
Somehow I know that I won’t be.