“Hey, kiddo,” Dr. Dan said, turning to me. “How’s it going?”
Kiddo? Kiddo? Not what you’d call the girl you were going to wait for. A spear of pain slammed through my chest, snapping ribs, crushing my heart. Even worse, I felt the burn of tears in my eyes. In a second, I’d be crying, and Dr. Dan would know. And so would Lizzie. And so would everyone.
“Is my dad here?” I blurted. “I—I have an emergency.”
“Are you okay?” he asked, frowning.
“Where’s my dad?”
“I think he’s in the storage room, honey,” Lizzie said.
The storage room was down the hall, back toward the elevators. I pushed through the doors and ran, my wet jeans flopping against my skin, which felt raw and cold. Stupid, stupid, stupid, imagining someone like Dr. Dan would think I was interesting. That he would wait ten years for me! I was an idiot.
I burst into the storage room and saw a man and a woman kissing, their arms twined around each other. At my entrance, they jumped apart.
The man was my father.
The rush of my heartbeat thrummed through my ears.
One second. Two seconds. Three. The silence spread like melting tar. Dorothy—Dorothy? He liked Dorothy?—twisted the hem of her jacket in her fingers, biting her lip.
“Pumpkin!” my father said, far, far too late. “What a nice surprise! Is, uh, is school over? Why are you all wet?”
“It’s raining,” I said. My eyes felt hard and dry.
“Of course, of course it is. Um, Dorothy, did you find what you needed?”
“Yes, Dr. Tate,” she said, then slithered around us and out the door.
“Soccer practice was canceled,” I said, accusation knifing through my tone.
“Sure, honey. Come on. Let’s go get a hot chocolate. My poor Jenny! You’re soaked! You must be freezing.” He almost made me feel better.
“You were kissing her.”
His face wriggled as he searched for an answer. “She...she was upset. That’s all.”
“You were kissing her.”
Dad sighed and crouched down to my eye level. “Yes. I was. Because she was upset. But I love Mommy and you girls, and if you tell your mother or sister, they’ll just be upset. Don’t give it another thought, Jenny. It was nothing.”
Except I knew. There was no nothing about it, and the wrongness shimmered in the air. Dr. Dan’s betrayal evaporated in the heat of that wrongness.
“Let me buy you a hot chocolate, sweetheart,” he said, and his voice, his dad voice, was the same as always, warm and low and loving, and I hated him in that moment.
But I went with him, and I drank my hot chocolate and ate two madeleine cookies, and when Mom harped on me that night for not eating my dinner, he told her to go easy on me.
I didn’t forgive him. I knew. He liked that Dorothy. How dared he?
From that day on, true adolescence in all its sulky, consuming power burst out of every pore, seeped into the air around me. I didn’t speak to Rachel when she asked in her gentle, sweet voice if something was wrong. My mother muttered something about another menstruating female in the house, and I stormed out of the kitchen. When Dad asked if I wanted to go for a bike ride that weekend, I said no and stayed in my room, furious that he’d then asked Rachel and actually gone and had fun. The nerve. The betrayal.
The next week, Mom asked Dad how Lena and the baby were doing. They were great, he said. Lena would be back next week.
“What about Dorothy?” Mom didn’t look up from her plate.
His eyes cut to me. “Well, I don’t need another hygienist. I’ll give her a good recommendation, though.”
He took another bite of potatoes and chewed. The skin on his throat was lax and swaying with the motion of his jaw. Funny, how I’d never noticed that before.
My father was getting old.
Of course, to a sixth grader, “old” is anything north of eighteen. But in that moment, I felt two things—a savage, hot triumph that Dorothy was out of our lives, and an overwhelming disgust for my father. Just because she was gone didn’t mean I was going to forgive him.
And then, three months later, my father was shot in the face and killed, and he never got a day past forty-four years, six months and one day.
* * *
Death affects everyone differently. For me, I became more protective of my sister. Rachel had always struggled, too tender, too giving. After Dad died, she became even sweeter, and more shy.
Mom became someone entirely different. She was now a professional widow. Gone was the busy-bee mother, the art therapist, the committee chair for every committee that ever existed. Instead of World’s Best Mother, Mom became World’s Most Grief-Stricken Wife.
A creeping dread—and disgust, I’ll admit—grew in me like mildew as my brisk, capable mother devolved into someone who fell asleep in her chair every night, clutching a picture of Dad and her on their wedding day. She stopped coloring her hair, gained weight, started wearing Dad’s clothes. Work, which she’d so loved the past year, became too much, and she demoted herself back to art therapist, then cut her hours back to just a few a week. “I can’t bear being around all those old people,” she’d say. “Why was Rob taken so young? Why not one of them instead?”
All she could talk about was how happy they’d been, how blessed, a word I’d never before heard her say. “I wish it had been me,” she said one night, her tone sticky with self-pity. “You girls would’ve been better off if it had been me instead of Rob.”