“No, you can’t. The weather is awful. Have a great evening, Brenna.”
Jess planted her feet, more stubborn than the dogs. “Dad—”
“Move!”
“All right! Sorry for being alive.” Sending him a sullen look, she jammed her feet back into her boots and stomped to the car, a vision of injured innocence.
It was a four-minute drive to his mother’s house, and Jess used every second of those four minutes to tell him where he was going wrong in his life.
“Why are you letting her do this? She likes you, Dad!”
“Sure she does.” Distracted, he drove too close to the side of the road. The snow was piled in deep mounds, and he felt the wheels spin. “That’s why she’s going out with Josh. Makes perfect sense.”
“You are not allowed to do sarcasm. That’s my role. I’m the teenager, you’re the parent.” Jess clenched her fists in exasperation. “You didn’t see her the other night. We were watching you ski. She kept staring at the screen.”
“If you were analyzing skiing then of course she was staring at the screen.”
“That wasn’t what she was doing. She had this look on her face. Sort of faraway. And now she’s going out with Josh! Why are you letting this happen?”
“Last time I looked, I wasn’t in charge of who Brenna dates.” He turned the wheel to the left and steered the car skillfully out of the deeper snow. The surface was slick. Dangerous. “That is a whole lot of snow. We need to get this road cleared again.”
“Stop changing the subject. Brenna isn’t interested in Josh, Dad!”
“Then why is she going out with him? If you’re such an expert, perhaps you can tell me that!”
“I don’t know!” They were both yelling, and it struck him again how similar they were. It was like dealing with himself, and it wasn’t a comfortable situation.
“In my experience a woman doesn’t dress up in heels and a killer dress to date a guy she doesn’t like.”
“That’s the only dress Brenna owns. It’s not like she bought it specially or anything.”
“How do you know that?”
“I was with her when she unpacked, remember? She is a jeans-and-ski-pants person.”
“So why is she going on a suit-and-tie date with Josh if she isn’t interested in him?” He almost laughed at himself. He was so messed up he was asking advice on women from his thirteen-year-old daughter.
Jess stuck her feet on the seat and then caught his eye and put them down again. “Probably because you never asked her out yourself, and she wants to have a life. She doesn’t want to die old and withered without a sex life.”
Tyler almost swerved across the road. “What do you know about—”
“Don’t start, Dad. We are not going to have that conversation.”
“Fine!”
“Fine isn’t an answer.”
He gritted his teeth as she threw his words back at him. “I see her all the time. Every damn day.”
“You said damn. And seeing her around isn’t the same as asking her out on a proper date and giving her a chance to dress up and look cute.”
“Brenna doesn’t need to dress up to look cute. She looks cute in jeans.”
“Listen to yourself. How have you had so much success with girls? I don’t get it.” Jess bashed her head with her fist. “Dad, you need to do something. Go back there now and talk to her before Josh arrives.”
Tyler pulled up outside his mother’s house. “Look, I appreciate your interest in all this, but I can’t have a relationship with Brenna just because you like her.”
“You like her, too. You love her.”