I nodded at him. “Okay, I’ll be right back.” I opened the car door, then stepped out onto Thirty-Seventh Street, looking up at Mallory’s brownstone.
After my dad and I had talked, he’d gone into his room for about ten minutes, while Joy poured me a glass of mint tea and showed me pictures from their most recent antiquing trip and I pretended to be interested in Vermont. Joy was never going to be my favorite person, but maybe she didn’t have to be. She was horrified when she learned what Mallory had done, and had left her daughter a voice mail that made me resolve never to get on her bad side. But I knew that she was also getting mad on my behalf, which secretly made me feel good.
When my dad came back, he was holding his calendar, and his eyes were red, something neither of us mentioned as we sat down with our schedules and figured it out—specific times that we could spend together. I told him I didn’t mind if some of our time was with Matty or Margaux (or Mallory, too, though this was less appealing to me. Though I did want to see Brad again, and if that was how it had to happen, I could accept those terms), but I wanted some time with just him—and it seemed he wanted the same thing.
It took a little bit of negotiating, but soon the two of us had worked out our schedules for the next few months—the ironclad dates we would see each other, when my dad would come to Connecticut, when I would take the train into New York. He told me that his first priority was a do-over of my birthday dinner, and that was when I’d been able to tell him, like it was no big deal, that I knew the general manager at Josephine’s. I slid her card across to him, mentioning casually that I could get a reservation whenever we wanted, and was rewarded when my dad’s eyebrows flew up. Before I could explain, Joy yawned behind her hand, which was when we both realized that it was already ten thirty.
I had just assumed I’d get a train home from Grand Central, but my dad refused. “I don’t want you walking around Grand Central alone this late,” he’d said, already reaching for his phone. “It’s dangerous, and your mother would never forgive me.” I didn’t argue, sensing this would not be the time to tell him I’d been through an attempted mugging earlier that night. In the end, we’d reached an agreement: I wouldn’t tell my mom he’d missed my birthday dinner, and he wouldn’t tell her that I’d come into the city without permission. We shook on it, and something in my dad’s expression let me know that he secretly liked the idea of the two of us having a thing we weren’t going to tell my mother about. And a condition of these terms was that I’d take a car back to Stanwich.
He went down with me to wait for the car, and as we stepped off the elevator and into the lobby, I saw that it was snowing.
“Dad,” I said, pointing outside. I walked up to the front windows of Mayfair Towers and looked at the snow. I’d been through enough winters to know that this version of the snow—when a soft blanket was covering things, everything looking pristine, before snowplows and boots and dogs—was not going to last long. But for the moment, suddenly, it was magical. “Want to go out and see the snow?”
Something softened in his face as I said it. Let’s go see the snow, he’d been saying to me since I was little, and seeing the snow was a very big deal. And then when I’d gotten older, it was treated as a joke, but we still did it. Like we had to joke about it, to pretend we didn’t care, even when the exact opposite was true. And we’d go walking in the snow, just the two of us. One of those things that doesn’t make sense to anyone else, something that’s hard to describe the importance of, but when it’s no longer there, it’s almost unbearable, like the world is a few degrees off its axis. And since the divorce—since we weren’t in the same house anymore—that had been the end of looking at the snow.
Until now. Until tonight.
My dad didn’t even have a coat, just his black cashmere