wasn’t working, a horrible farce with stilted lines that we were all performing at the dinner table and on holidays. It was like they were saying they thought so little of me—what I could pick up on, what I could understand. When they finally came out and told me, on vacation in a rented vacation condo in Colorado, there was a big part of it that was a relief. That at least we didn’t have to go on pretending any longer.
But they’d argued a lot about the hours he worked. My dad telling my mom that he was a partner in a New York firm, that it was an hour for him to come back and forth from Stanwich each day, and if he’d missed dinner with us anyway, it was just easiest to stay in the city so that he could keep working. My mom protesting that he was missing everything, missing things with me, and I’d had to grip my legs hard so I wouldn’t jump up, burst in, and promise that he wasn’t missing anything, that I was fine, that there was no point in fighting. And it was the worst kind of fight to overhear, since it was the kind that went around and around in circles, the facts of the case never changing. My dad’s work was in the city; my mom’s was in town. She couldn’t change that and neither could he. All they could do, it seemed, was have the same argument over and over again, sometimes dressed up in different clothes, but always the same thing underneath. Until, finally, they’d decided that they’d rather not have it at all anymore. And they’d both walked away.
As I walked into the office, I stopped short—shocked by how different it looked. The color scheme was different, the font on the sign with the partners’ names had been changed, and all the décor was new. Had it really been that long since I’d been here? I knew everything had gotten busier in the last few years—school, rehearsals, my dad’s work… but I wouldn’t have thought it had been that long.
I was hoping his office would be in the same place—back in the corner suite, with windows that looked out onto Fifty-Third. As I got closer, I could practically see it in my mind—what it had always looked like when he worked late on something. And even though it had been a while, I knew what to expect, because it never changed—all the lights in his office blazing, the opera he always played when he needed to keep his energy up. The scattered Coke cans spread out over his desk, the candy bars he would pretend that someone else had left there for some reason he couldn’t explain. I felt myself smile as I got closer. He was going to be so surprised to see me. And it had gotten almost impossible to surprise him, now that we didn’t live in the same house together, and everything always had to be so scheduled.
As I rounded the corner, I saw his assistant, Carla, looking frazzled, sitting behind her desk, the one just outside my dad’s office. She had three stacks of paper in front of her, and she was pulling pages from each of them and sorting them together. “Hello,” I said quietly, trying not to disturb her and make her lose track of whatever it was she was doing. But even so, she jumped and looked up at me, her annoyed expression turning confused for just a moment before she smiled.
“Stevie?” she asked, standing up. She shook her head. “Look at you! All grown up.”
“Oh,” I said, giving her a smile back. I never knew what to say to that. Thank you? “It’s so good to see you again.”
“Likewise. It’s been too long,” she said, giving my hand a pat.
“I was just going to say hello to my dad,” I said as I started to head around her desk.
“Oh, I’m sorry hon,” Carla said, sitting back down and glaring at the piles of paper. “He’s gone already, I’m afraid.”
I paused, blinking at her for a moment. “Gone?” I took a step around the corner and there, sure enough, was my dad’s office. But it was dark and quiet, the desk clean—no piles of paper, no soda cans, no Turandot. But maybe he was working at home, back in his apartment—
“Yeah, he took off around seven. Said he was going to have dinner with Joy.”