“Where’s his number? I’ll call,” my father offered.
“Dad! You can’t call him; that would be even weirder than me calling.”
My father seemed to think it was funny how I was so worried about him calling. He jumped up from the couch and went to my room. He quickly found the number I had pinned on the bulletin board and started to dial it.
“I’m just going to give him a quick call and tell him he’s invited over for the Fourth of July picnic,” my dad teased me.
“Dad, he’s not going to come help with your ski resort summer picnic. Put the phone down.”
I knew he was bluffing. Ever since I had first started to date in high school, my father had always made sure to try and embarrass me as much as humanly possible with the boys I dated. He did it out of love, and I knew it. I was lucky to have a father who cared so much about me and took an interest in the boys I had in my life. But he certainly wasn’t going to call Erik and invite him to our resort Fourth of July event. That would be totally crazy.
“Hello,” my father said into the phone as someone appeared to answer.
“Hang up!” I yelled at him.
“This is Bob Conrad, you spent Christmas at my house,” my father said into the phone.
I was mortified. Did my father really just call Erik? Did Erik answered? Oh, how I wanted to just shrivel up and hide in the corner somewhere. There was no getting out of this if Erik was on the phone.
“Yeah, yeah,” my father replied to whoever he was on the phone with. “I wanted to invite you to our big Aspen Fourth of July picnic. There’s going to be fireworks and music… Oh, yeah, I understand. I just wanted to make sure you got invited.”
There was another pause, and I fell onto my bed and pulled the covers up over my head. Erik must have been talking to my father as my father was quiet and listening on the phone. I opened my eyes to see what was going on.
“Sure, here she is,” my father said as he handed me the phone.
“No,” I whispered and refused to take it.
“Well, he knows you’re here now. You can’t say no.”
My father put the phone into my hand and then walked out of the room. I held it up to my ear but didn’t say anything at first. I desperately hoped my father had been playing some sort of cruel joke on me.
“Cassidy?” the voice said.
Damn it! It is Erik; what the hell am I going to do now? I couldn’t exactly just sit there and not talk. I took a deep breath and tried to figure out what I wanted to say.
“Hi,” was all that came out.
“How have you been?”
“Good.”
Words weren’t forming. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t even make a full sentence. I felt like a schoolgirl who had her crush dial her number by accident. I had thought about this moment for months, but in my head I hadn’t been nearly as nervous as I was at that moment.
“Did you find a new job?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m working with my parents for now.”
“That’s good.”
“How are you?” I ventured to ask him, although by the looks of the television clip he was doing very well.
“I’m getting along. It’s tough, but things are good. I told your Dad I wouldn’t be able to come to his party. I’m really sorry.”
“It’s all right. I know you’re busy with your life out there in the movie biz.”
I didn’t know what to say to him. It felt so weird to finally have him on the phone, but I didn’t want to let him go yet. I wanted the conversation to feel like it did when we had been together. I desperately wanted him to just burst out and say how much he missed me or that he wanted me to come see him. It felt like torture to try and have a conversation with him, though, and nothing seemed to be going the way it should have been.
“Actually, I had already promised my father and brother I was going home to visit them again for the holiday weekend. It should be good.”