The Unexpected Everything - Morgan Matson Page 0,89
have dinner with me every night. I ask for more than I know I’ll get, you offer less than you know you’ll end up with. That’s how this works.”
I smiled as I flashed back to a memory of a rainy day years ago, on some senator’s campaign bus, my dad stumping for him, while he taught me (and three members of the press corps) how to play poker. “Okay,” I said, making my voice more serious, trying to take any tells out of it. “Dinner once a week.”
“Twice,” my dad countered, and I looked up at him and nodded. Twice a week sounded good. Twice a week sounded like something we could handle. “And we’ll talk,” he said, his gaze level with mine. “You can’t just sit there and be a moody teenager.”
“Ugh, when am I a moody teenager?” I asked with an exaggerated eye roll, and my dad smiled, like I’d been hoping he would.
“Seriously,” he said, tapping his pen twice on the table. “This won’t work unless you tell me things. Like that you’re going on dates with fantasy novelists.”
“Well, I didn’t know that either,” I pointed out, but my dad was still talking, overlapping with me.
“I need to make up for lost time. So you have to fill me in. Deal?”
“Deal,” I said, and my dad gave me a nod. Dinner twice a week. We could do that. “But you have to too,” I added, the words coming out fast. It was what I’d realized when I’d been lying upstairs in my room, going over all the things I’d shouted at my father—like how he didn’t know anything about me. But I had been retroactively embarrassed to realize I really didn’t know anything about him, either. Peter and the press corps and the random rotating interns knew much more than I did. “Tell me things about you. Okay?”
My dad nodded. “It’s a plan.”
We finished our ice cream after that and started to head to my dad’s car with every intention of going home. But Paradise Ice Cream was right next to Captain Pizza, and we both stopped in front of the door as the heavenly pizza smell drifted out. We looked at each other, and without discussing it, headed inside, where we ate slices of cheese (extra for me, regular for my dad) at the counter while the guy tossing the dough showed off for us, only occasionally losing control of the dough when a toss went wild.
When we were walking to his car in the fading daylight, I tried to pick the right moment, when he was distracted by pulling out the keys, to ask about the consequences for the thing that had started all of this—my staying out all night. “So we’re good with everything now, right?” I asked, adjusting my purse on my shoulder, attempting just the right amount of casual in my voice. “Like, with the whole thing from last night. We’re okay?”
“Oh, no,” my dad said, looking across the hood of the car at me. “You are so totally grounded. I thought you understood that. A month, at least.”
I started to protest, then bit my lip. This was really bad—that was most of the summer. But I also knew there was the chance he might increase it if I started complaining. “All right,” I said with a sigh. I looked over at my dad, who was shaking his head at me.
“Andie,” he said, sounding pained, “we just went over this. Am I supposed to negotiate with myself?”
“Right,” I said quickly, trying to regroup. “Um . . . two days.”
“Please,” my dad scoffed as he beeped open the car and got into the driver’s seat.
“Four days?” I tried, getting into the passenger seat and buckling my seat belt.
“A week,” my dad countered, and I nodded.
“But I get to go to work,” I said, “and the grounding doesn’t start at night until seven p.m.”
“Call it six and you’ve got a deal,” my dad said, starting the car. He glanced over at me. “I realize that things might have gotten a little lax with Joy,” he said, and I just nodded, deciding that he probably didn’t need to know I’d been without a curfew for years now. “But that’s going to have to change now.”
“There’s a new sheriff in town?” I asked. My dad smiled, and it hit me how rarely I’d seen it—not my dad’s candidate smile, but the one that was meant just for me.