you’re puttering in the garden, you’re tending children in a preschool, which, come to think of it, is probably the last place on earth to…I’ve been selfish. I should have made you go back to school.”
“I don’t want to go back to school,” Kate said. She really didn’t; she felt a flutter of dismay.
“There are other schools, though, if that was not the right one for you. It’s not as if I’m unaware of that. You could finish up at Johns Hopkins! But I’ve been indulging myself. I told myself, ‘Oh, she’s young; there’s plenty of time; and meanwhile, I get to have her here at home. I get to enjoy her company.’ ”
“You enjoy my company?”
“It may be, too, that that was another reason I thought of pairing you off with Pyoder. ‘I’d still get to keep her around!’ I must have been thinking. ‘No harm done: it’s a marriage only on paper, and she would still be here in the house.’ You have every right to be cross with me, Kate. I owe you an apology.”
“Oh, well,” Kate said. “I guess I can see your side of it.”
She was remembering the evening she had come home from college. She had arrived unannounced with several suitcases—all she had taken away with her—and when the taxi dropped her off at the house she’d found her father in the kitchen, wearing an apron over his coveralls. “What are you doing here?” he had asked, and she had said, “I’ve been expelled”—putting it even more baldly than need be, just to get the worst of it over with. “Why?” he had asked, and she had told him about her professor’s half-assed photosynthesis lecture. When her father said, “Well, you were right,” she had felt the most overwhelming sense of relief. No, more than relief: it was joy. Pure joy. She honestly thought it might have been the happiest moment in her life.
Her father was holding the wine bottle up to the window now, plainly hoping to find another drop or two in the bottom.
She said, “When you say ‘On paper…’ ”
He glanced over at her.
“If it’s just a formality,” she said, “if it’s just some little legal thing that would allow you to change his visa status and after that we could reverse it…”
He set the bottle back down on the counter. He stood tensed, possibly not breathing.
“I suppose that’s not that big a deal,” she said.
“Are you saying yes?”
“Oh, Father. I don’t know,” she said wearily.
“But you might consider it. Is that what you’re saying?”
“I suppose,” she said.
“You really might do this for me?”
She hesitated, and then she gave him a tentative nod. In the very next instant she wondered what on earth she could be thinking, but already her father was pulling her into a fierce, clumsy hug, and then thrusting her away again to gaze exultantly into her face. “You’ll do it!” he said. “You really will! You care enough about me to do this! Oh, Kate, my darling, I can’t even put into words how grateful I am.”
“I mean, it’s not as if it would make all that much difference in how I live,” she said.
“It will make no difference at all, I swear it. You’ll hardly know he’s in the picture; everything will go on exactly the same as before. Oh, I’m going to do all I can to arrange it so things will be easy for you. This changes everything! Everything’s looking up; somehow I feel certain now that my project’s going to succeed. Thank you, sweetheart!”
After a moment, she said, “You’re welcome.”
“So…” he said. “And…Kate?”
“What.”
“Do you think you could finish my taxes for me? I did try, but”—and here he stood back to spread his spindly arms comically, helplessly—“you know how I am.”
“Yes, Father,” she said. “I know.”
Sunday 11:05 AM
Hi Kate I text you!
Hi.
U r home now?
Spell things out, for heaven’s sake. You’re not some teenager.
You are home now?
No.
The ballerina doll and the sailor doll were getting married. The sailor doll wore his same old uniform but the ballerina doll had a brand-new dress of white Kleenex, one sheet for the front and another for the back, held together at the waist with a ponytail scrunchy and billowing out at the bottom because of the tutu underneath it. Emma G. had made the dress, but it was Jilly who’d donated the scrunchy and Emma K. who knew the rules about walking down the aisle and meeting the groom at the altar. Apparently Emma K. had been a