and tried to never use it herself, but she understood in occasional moments why other people liked it.
Her dad, of course, was delighted to have a visit, and when she pulled up a little after six, she saw him standing behind the screen door before she even got out of her car. Paper bag in hand, she climbed out and walked up the cracked stones to him. “Hey, Pop.”
“Hello, sweetheart.” He opened the screen door, and she leaned in and kissed him on the cheek.
“I got soup,” she told him, holding up the bag.
“Well, I got an appetite.”
He still ate at the kitchen table in the same house where she grew up. He wasn’t much of a decorator, so his house was a collection of old things, new things that replaced old things when they finally gave out, and new things that he sometimes allowed Eveleth to give him without objecting. He’d said nothing to her as often as he said “Keep your money” once Tim became a doctor.
“Did you have fun at the game yesterday?” Her dad had been with buddies in a row of lawn chairs by left field.
“Are you kiddin’ me? Best Dance I ever went to. Weather was perfect.”
“The weather was perfect.”
“Won the game.” He waited for her to nod. “Didn’t expect to see Dean out there throwing.”
She smiled as they sat down across from each other. “No, that was sort of a surprise. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you. It’s tricky, with all the attention, and with the press and everybody. He wanted to give it a shot and see how it went.”
“He’s feeling good about it?”
“Sure, yeah.” She was trying not to smile too much. And not in too telling a way, not that her father was especially likely to notice.
“Well, he’s lucky he’s got you rootin’ for him. And I’m glad you’ve got company in that big house. I don’t like you being by yourself so much.”
She blew on a spoonful of thick, salty chowder and popped it into her mouth. Sophie’s had opened only a few years ago, but it was already in all the magazines that wrote up the region for summer tourists. “Well, you know, I don’t like you being by yourself so much either,” she said.
“I’m an old man,” he said, opening a plastic packet of oyster crackers and dumping them into his bowl. “You’re a beautiful girl. I don’t want you rattling around that place forever. And if you pardon me saying so, Tim wouldn’t want that for you either.”
She stopped with her spoon in her hand and looked at her father’s freckled hands, decorated all over with little scars. Over his shoulder, on the counter, she could see a tray with his bottles of pills for back pain, for blood pressure, for high cholesterol. Her own hand was soft and pale. “Pop, did you ever think about getting married again? After?”
“Married? No. I met people, of course.”
She remembered no one. “You did?”
He looked at her and raised his eyebrows. “Your mother left when I was thirty-three years old. What’d you think I did? Talk to the lobsters for twenty-five years?”
“But nobody special?”
“I didn’t say nobody special. I said nobody I thought about getting married to. You gotta remember, sweetheart, I was working on a boat every day. We didn’t have a lot, and it didn’t leave a lot of time for dates.”
Eveleth smiled, but then her mind flashed on a picture of herself and her dad that had been taken when she was about nine. She was holding a fish, her hair in pigtails, while he crouched with his arm around her waist. “And you had a daughter.”
“Sure,” he said. But then he looked up at her expression. “You listen, though, that had nothin’ to do with it. You were my best part. You still are. Don’t get any ideas.”
“Still,” she said, “it would have been a lot for anybody to take on, probably.”
“You’re talking crazy,” he said. “What kind of a nut would want to live with me and not you? It’s more likely my fault you never got a stepmother.” He took a bite. “I’ve been happy. Lucky and happy my whole life. That’s how I want it for you.”
“I know, Pop. I’m trying.” She put down her spoon. “Can I ask you a question? It’s a little personal.”
“All right.”
“How did you know what to do after she was gone?”
He got quiet. Eventually, he folded his hands in front of him and looked