The Unexpected Everything - Morgan Matson Page 0,135

you what was bothering her until she was ready to, you had to learn to pick up on signals. And I had a feeling Toby would have sensed something from the very beginning of this conversation. “Is everything okay?”

There was nothing but silence on the other end of the phone. With every second that passed, I was getting more sure that there was something going on with her, even though I had no idea what it could be.

“Actually—” Bri started, just as my dad yelled, “Andie! Are you coming?”

“Ignore him,” I said into the phone, hoping somehow that she wouldn’t have heard him.

“It’s fine,” Bri said, and her voice was brisk and composed again. “I’m fine. I promise. I was just . . .” The sentence trailed off, and when she came back on the line, her voice was much more upbeat. “I’m fine,” she said again, “just have to get ready for work. I’ll talk to you later, okay?” Before I could say anything else, she’d hung up, and I was left looking down at the contact picture that filled the screen, of Bri and Toby either arguing while on the verge of cracking up or having their laughter interrupted by a fight, I’d long since forgotten which. I held the phone in my hand for just a minute more, wondering if she was going to call back, before giving up and returning to the study.

Three hours later I’d finished my second John Wayne movie of the day and was feeling emotionally depleted. “Man,” I said, as my dad turned off the TV and reached again for the stack of papers, pulling his reading glasses out of his pocket. “Didn’t John Wayne ever make a comedy? A musical or two?”

My dad looked at me evenly over his reading glasses. “Don’t make me call Sabrina again.”

“I withdraw the question,” I said, stacking up my breakfast plates and preparing to take them into the kitchen. I watched my dad reading for a few moments, making marks on the paper with his mechanical pencil, before I asked, “So what is that?” This was how I had been used to seeing my father—always working, always reading, head half-buried in a stack of papers or fixated on the news. Seeing him like this again was making me realize just how long it had been since I’d seen him in work mode.

“This?” he asked, looking down at the sheaf of papers in his hand, and I nodded. “It’s for a case,” he said, looking back down again. “An old friend in the public defender’s office asked me to take a look at something.”

“Oh,” I said, leaning back against my chair, trying to figure out what this meant. My dad had not been talking at all about what he was thinking about doing with regard to his job, and for the most part, it was something I’d almost forgotten about. It was like we were both on summer vacation, and none of the real rules for either of our schedules seemed to apply anymore. This was probably made much easier by the fact my dad wasn’t allowed to have any contact with his office, as it really did seem like that whole part of his life had just faded out. “Are you . . . ?” I started, then bit my lip, not sure exactly what I was trying to ask him, or what I wanted him to reply.

“I’m just looking at something for a friend,” my dad said easily, seeming to understand what I was trying to get at. After a moment, though, he set the papers aside and took off his reading glasses, turning to face me more fully. “It is something I’ve been thinking about, though,” he said. He cleared his throat and rolled his pencil between his palms before he asked, “What would you think about that? If I didn’t run again in the fall?”

“What about the investigation?” I asked, thrown. As far as I’d understood things, we were still waiting for the results to come back. I hadn’t known my dad not running for reelection in November was even in the cards.

“Even if it comes back in my favor,” he said. “I don’t know. It’s just been on my mind lately.”

I looked at him for a moment, then looked back down at the stack of plates once again, trying to get my thoughts together. It hadn’t been that long ago that I couldn’t picture my dad without his job. But now