“I’ve got three T-shirts, a black jersey dress in case we go out and two pairs of shorts,” Bee says. “I could have packed in a backpack. I’m the girl, I’m supposed to be the one who brings the trunk for the weekend, not you.”
Daniel shrugs and tries to laugh at himself. “You know I’m an old woman,” he says eventually.
“Yes, you are.” Bee looks at him with affection in her eyes. “That’s one of the reasons why I love you.”
“I know,” he says, and he knows he ought to say “I love you too”—the words are on the tip of his tongue, and he tries to say them, he looks at her knowing she’s waiting to hear those words— but instead he finds himself rubbing her knee affectionately before standing up. “I’m going to get a newspaper,” he says abruptly. "Shall I get you a People?” And he turns and walks toward Hudson News before it gets anymore difficult.
Daniel has never been able to say “I love you” with ease. He wasn’t brought up like that, he often tells Bee, although that isn’t quite true. His father was cold and distant, but his mother had always showered him with love, and he had always and easily told her he loved her.
Bee was also an only child, and the apple of her parents’ eye. Both of them told her that she was the most precious child in the world, and that no one could possibly love a child more than they loved her, and she believed them. She grew up in a world of safety, security and outward expressions of love, and believed her parents to have a perfect marriage until her mother left her father after she went to college.
“I am tired of the secrets,” her mother once said, and Bee had asked what she meant, but her mother had just shaken her head wearily and said she didn’t want to talk about it, and Bee hadn’t wanted to push. She had hoped, for years afterward, that they would get back together, even though she was an adult, even though it shouldn’t have made any difference to her, but despite the divorce being amicable, friendly even, her mother always said it was an impossible situation.
Bee had tried to talk to her father about it but he hadn’t said much. Not that this was unusual; her father was often quiet, pensive, lost in another world, except when he was playing with Bee, when he was fully engaged, wholly attentive and brimming over with love for her.
Bee had always assumed that when she got married, her husband would treat her in much the same way as her father had, and she doesn’t understand, has never understood, why she has ended up in a marriage with a man who seems incapable of truly loving.
But Bee is not ready to give up. Not yet. Her force of will is so strong she is convinced she can change things, and convinced she will turn Daniel into the man she knows he really is, the man she knows he can be.
Jessica settles back into her car seat and watches her father, who looks over at her from time to time and smiles, reaching out to squeeze her knee as he drives.
She loves him so much it sometimes hurts. He is, without question, the best daddy of all time, and even though she didn’t appreciate him so much when he and Mom lived together, since he’s been gone she feels she has truly come to understand him, and as her attachment to him has grown, so has her dislike of her mother.
It started as ambivalence. Even when her parents were still together her mother was starting to annoy her. Constantly nagging Jessica to tidy her room, or do her homework, or change her clothes, her hair. And then she forced her dad to leave, thereby ruining her life. What was ambivalence has turned very rapidly to hate.
Sure, there are times when they get on. Sometimes her mom will take her for a manicure, which is always fun—then they’re kind of like girlfriends, although it only lasts for a short time, and then her mom always ends up trying too hard and Jessica wants to scream at her.
Jessica knows her dad would never leave her, and the only reason he left is because of her mom. And how does she know this? Why, her dad told her, of course. He said,