“I’ll be right in.”
Got to go, she told Winston. My dad.
Good luck. Call me and tell me how it’s gone.
K.
Allie silenced her phone, slipped it back into her pocket with the remaining snacks, threw her bottle in the recycling bin, and walked into the coolness of the terminal.
—
May hugged Ben. Allie hugged her dad.
He was gray, his mouth sagging at the corners. He wore an aviator’s leather jacket he’d had stashed in the front coat closet her entire life over a pair of multipocketed safari-style pants she’d never seen and couldn’t imagine the reason for. He looked so terrible that her stomach lurched and she thought she might lose her coffee all over the shiny granite.
“How was the flight?” May asked.
“Interesting.” Ben’s face was hard as stone, and it told her exactly how badly the flight had gone.
Very badly.
“It’s quite a plane Dan’s got there, I bet.” Allie spoke in a hearty camp counselor voice and stepped closer to her dad, patting his arm as if he were the child and she the parent. “Smooth ride.” She swooped her hand through the air, utterly inane. “I’ve never been on a jet. Jean said it costs hundreds of dollars just to land. I plugged the distance into an estimator, and it said it would be six thousand dollars from Wisconsin to New York. And that’s if the plane is paid for rather than financed.”
“Waste of six thousand bucks,” her dad said. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have come. Who’s Jean?”
“Just our driver.” It didn’t seem like the time for full introductions, what with her father obviously not wanting to be here and all.
“Why didn’t May drive?”
“May sucks at city traffic.”
Her sister shot her a look that meant, Eat shit and die. “Thanks for coming, though, Dad,” she said. “Really. It means a lot.”
“I’ve got truckloads of donations to coordinate for shipment to Greece. Nobody else knows the system.”
“I’m sure it will be fine,” May said. “Dan’s got it under control.”
Their father said nothing, and it started to sink in for Allie that she hadn’t made a plan for any of what was supposed to come next. They were supposed to pull together now, as a family, and talk honestly, and be authentic, and…how. How had she thought that would work? She’d strong-armed her sister’s boyfriend into flying her dad from New York to Wisconsin in the private jet of her sister’s ex-boyfriend, wasting fuel, wasting money, wasting everybody’s time to get him here when he hadn’t wanted to come, because it was already over.
It had been over before he got on the plane. She could see it on his face.
Worse, she knew it from the string of texts she’d sent her mother, each of them sitting on her phone unanswered, marked Delivered.
She’d known because her dad already had a way of handling it when her mother disappeared: he declared she was taking time for herself, and he waited for her to come home.
Or not.
That was his strategy, and it had served him for as long as Allie could remember. Who was she to decide he should be doing this instead?
And Ben, Jesus. Looking at his face now, she couldn’t imagine it being even remotely possible, ever, in any circumstance, that this man would accept her as an advisor and investor in his restaurant. She’d invested in sandwich shops and diners in Manitowoc. This was New York fucking City. Probably she didn’t have the money to open an artist’s space even if she wanted to. May was right, she knew nothing about children’s book publishing, or agents, or any of it.
“Where am I staying?” Bill asked.
“We thought you could stay with us,” May said. “We have a pullout sofa.”
She’d made her father fly hundreds of miles to sleep on a pullout sofa. While she slept in sin at Winston’s luxurious apartment. She waited for the question, one, two, three beats…
“Where’s Allie staying?”