motions—“Making the best of it,” he often said when people asked how he was, before he’d look off at a point in the landscape, the periphery that nobody else could see.
And then her sophomore year, Christmas break, Dr. Pinter suddenly sold the house, following Ann, a forty-year-old doctor he had met at a rotavirus conference, to her practice in Seattle. Chloe’s stepmother is six feet tall, chestnut-haired, and horse-toothed, medically brilliant and socially awkward. But she adores Dr. Pinter, and their twins seem to keep him frenetically busy. If Chloe never feels at home in their McMansion outside Seattle with its carpeting of pink plastic toys and half-dressed dolls, if she poked around enough to realize she resents Ann and Alice and Abby just a little bit, she is also happy to think of her father there, up to his eyeballs in Pull-Ups and adoring females.
When she called her father from Tarifa two years ago, the fact that the adoption agency job was in Portland, driving distance from Seattle, hung unspoken in the air. The next day he sent a fax to her apartment at Beaterio, a photo of a Jeep Cherokee with a For Sale sign on the windshield, the subject line: “For the drive between Portland and Redmond (183 miles). Happy Birthday. From Dad.”
EVEN IF SHE COULD leave her job, if they moved to Hawaii, Dr. Pinter would never come. Chloe saw her vague back-burner plans for a new, adult relationship with her father and his family disintegrate. They can’t leave Portland, she thinks, sipping her tea. Or at least, she can’t.
“Can you imagine the twins on a six-hour plane ride?” she says, but Dan doesn’t answer. He has left her to review the business plan and is humming a Jamiroquai song as he cleans the kitchen, the tune mixing with the clinking of him washing the mountain of dishes that has piled up during the McAdoo adoption.
“When would you want to go to Maui?” she asks, louder.
“I already bought a ticket. I’m leaving the week before Christmas.”
“What? How?”
“Kurt loaned me some cash; that’s how confident he is. It’s going to be huge, Chlo.” He puts the cloth down and crosses to her. “I really hope you’ll come.”
Thankfully, Chloe’s cell phone rings. When she answers, the line is connected, but there’s nobody there. In the background, she can hear daytime television, the faintest breathing. She hangs up.
It happens again.
“Wrong number,” she tells Dan when it happens the third time, but she can’t concentrate on the business plan she had been pretending to read anymore.
“So what do you think?” Dan grins at her; he is now cleaning the underside of the inside of the microwave.
I wish we’d talked about this…, Chloe thinks, but she knows this has always been Dan: impulsive and enthusiastic when he’s getting his sporty fix, sulky and miserable when he’s landlocked or rained in.
When her phone rings again, she jumps, ready to call Jason Xolan out.
“Hey, Chloe, I’m so sorry,” Beverly from work drawls, “but Judith is freaking out in here. She wants you to come file the paperwork for the McAdoo case this morning, in case the birth parents start up any trouble.”
“Mmkay,” Chloe says to Beverly, the phone tucked in the crook of her shoulder. “Tell Judith to hold it together. I can jump in the shower and be there in about an hour.”
“And you’ve had four calls on the service from our favorite Francie McAdoo. She hasn’t called yet this morning, but I’d bet my candy jar it’ll be ringing any minute.”
“Okay, thanks, Beverly.”
When Chloe looks at the history on her cell phone from the previous day, a day she spent mostly sleeping, waking only the one time Dan had spooned up behind her, the hands around her waist sliding purposefully north and south, she sees that there are indeed voice mails she hasn’t listened to from Francie.
Dan has moved on to whistling and taking apart the stove burners. “So you have to go in?” She is amazed he refrained from a told-you-so about them calling her on her day off; that’s how good his mood is.
“Judith wants me to file the paperwork for the McAdoo adoption before things get hairy with Penny and Jason.”
“Have you heard from them?”
“No,” Chloe lies. “Not since I left the hospital. But apparently Francie’s been using up some tape on the machine at work, and I see she called my cell a bunch of times yesterday.”
Dan rolls his eyes good-naturedly, and Chloe, much as she is