The Unexpected Everything - Morgan Matson Page 0,88

of course I should have. It’s no excuse. But . . .” He sighed and looked out over the parking lot. In the grass along the side of the road, I could see fireflies begin to wink on and off, not many yet, not so you could take them for granted. “My life’s been about forward motion,” he said, his voice quieter now. “It has to be in government. You have to think about the next day, the next problem, and keep moving forward. And I’ve been so focused on trying to get back to where I was . . .” My dad let his voice fade as he looked out again, seeing something that I wasn’t. He shook his head, then looked at me. “I wish you’d told me about Daniel Rizzoli.”

I shrugged and took a careful bite of my cone. I hadn’t wanted to do it while he was talking, like I would somehow have been interrupting. “I didn’t think there was anything you could do.”

“I could have yelled at him for a few hours, though,” my dad pointed out, and I smiled for what felt like the first time in a long time. “It might have made both of us feel better.” He pulled his ice cream cup closer to him but didn’t take another spoonful, just looked at me. “But I still wish you would have told me.”

“Yeah,” I said, my voice quiet. I wished I could have told him too—wished he was someone that I could tell things to. But I had no idea how to say this out loud to him.

“So,” my dad said, pulling a pen from his shirt pocket and drawing one of the rainbow napkins toward him. “I thought we should devise a strategy.”

“A strategy,” I repeated.

“You were right,” he said, clearing his throat as he drew a series of diagonal lines on the border of the napkin—his version of doodling. “I haven’t been around as much as I should have. I’ve missed out on so much. And of course you’re upset about it. As you should be. . . .” He stopped and tapped the pen twice on the napkin, then looked up at me again. “So we have a problem.” He set down his pen and picked up his spoon again. “And I thought we could devise a plan for how to correct it.”

I felt my fingers twitching for the pen that was just out of reach, wishing I had a napkin of my own to figure this out on, or at least get my thoughts more in order. This was actually feeling familiar—it was how my dad had dealt with every problem he’d had to face in his career. He and Peter sat down and devised a strategy for whatever the problem was, whether it was to get a bill passed or push an agenda through, or to win his reelection. And if something wasn’t working, they came up with a new plan. It was like they didn’t allow for failure, only course correction. I just hadn’t known that it could be applied to things like this. “What were you thinking?”

“The way I see it,” my dad said, and it was like I could practically hear the relief in his voice as he started to write, like he was able to grab on to some hard-and-fast facts, “we’re dealing with a lack of quality time spent, right? So we’ll spend some more time together.”

“How?” I was noticing, to my surprise, how comfortable it felt to be able to discuss something like this, to break it down into manageable pieces.

“Well,” my dad said, writing on the napkin, “maybe we have dinner together every night.”

I drew back in my chair. “Every night?” I echoed, the words coming out strangled. Most of my friends had dinner with their families during the school year—and I was usually at Palmer’s house, having dinner with her family, at least once a week—but this was the summer. How was I supposed to go from hanging out at the beach to a party at the Orchard to pool-hopping if I had to be home in the middle of it to have dinner with my father? He looked up at me and I tried to hide what I was feeling, nodding quickly. “Well . . . um . . . sure. That sounds . . . fine.”

My dad shook his head. “Andie, we’re negotiating here,” he said with a half smile. “I know you don’t want to