“It sounds amazing.” My words fell over each other. Was this it? She actually wanted me? “Honestly, usually I seat people at restaurants, so this would be—awesome.”
“Great. I’ll email you the details and some paperwork to fill out, but otherwise sounds good.”
I blinked at her; she stared calmly back. “So…that’s it, then? I’m in? I have the job?”
A laugh burst out of her. “Yeah. You have the job.”
Six
“She was so cool,” I babbled to Dad over dinner. We were at the Jetties Beach bar he’d mentioned yesterday, a seaside restaurant with loud music and lots of bright, frozen drinks. I’d grabbed a poke bowl and badgered my long-suffering father into a salad.
I couldn’t believe I had a job. A cool job. I felt like a little kid in my excitement about space. Memories of lying on the grass, the black night spread above, suffused me. I hadn’t known you could have a job in something youlikedso much. It felt like cheating.
“I went to the library afterward—the Atheneum.” The exterior of the white-columned building made it look alarmingly grand, but inside it had been lined with books and blanketed by comfortable quiet like any other library. I’d gone there for the AC and the Wi-Fi, and because I’d wanted to google Dr. Cora Bradley extensively. I’d ended up googling another woman as well. “Did you know Maria Mitchell—the woman who the science center is named after—was the first American female astronomer? And the Atheneum’s first librarian?”
“I did.” Dad looked delighted. “I have a whole chapter on her.”
“You do?” Shouldn’t I know if he had a chapter on a badass lady astronomer? “But—she’s not a nautical dude.”
He smothered a smile. “No, her family was more academic. Her mother ran a library in ’Sconset, and her father was a teacher and amateur astronomer. He taught all his kids mathematics, Maria especially. By twelve, she was assisting him in calculating a solar eclipse.” Dad settled happily into storytelling mode. “At your age, seventeen, Maria opened her own school. She was progressive for the time—three of the first children who enrolled were Black, though local schools were still segregated. Then she became the Atheneum’s librarian, which was flexible enough she kept helping her father with astronomy. And then, of course, in 1847, she discovered her comet.”
“But I don’t see how any of this has anything to do with your book, and the sea,” I said. “It’s all the sky.”
Dad smiled and leaned forward. “Sometimes, they’re very close to the same. Remember Bache?”
How could I not? Only this time, I was more curious than usual. “Yeah, Ben Franklin’s great-grandson. Who ran the Coast Survey.”
Dad nodded. “Bache hired Maria and her dad. He wanted them to establish a cardinal point for latitude and longitude for the US, to help sailors navigate. Maria was the first woman the federal government ever hired in a professional capacity. And later, she worked for the Naval Observatory’s Nautical Almanac Office, calculating the orbit of Venus. We’ve always depended on the sky to navigate the sea. Since the very beginning.”
“Celestial navigation,” I recalled. Though stars stayed relativeto each other, planets moved between them. If sailors knew where a planet would be at a certain time and place, they could tell their own location. When I was little, my father used to point at the sky and tell me if I could find the planets, I could find myself.
“Right. I’ve got a few chapters on astronomers in this one—Benjamin Banneker, the first Black American astronomer, whose 1790 almanacs charted the sun and moon and predicted weather, and whose tide tables were used by sailors. Tupaia, a Polynesian star navigator trained in immense amounts of knowledge on the cosmos and histories. He joined Captain Cook in the 1760s on theEndeavour.”
“Like the spaceship?”
Dad smiled. “Like the space shuttle, yes. The space shuttle was named after the ship.”
“Oh. Cool.” I scraped a bite of quinoa out from the remnants in my bowl. “How come I didn’t know you had a chapter on Maria Mitchell? Or any of these guys?”
Dad hesitated, then gave me a wry smile. “I guess we don’t talk about my work too much.”
Was that true? We talked about the day-to-day stuff—his agent and his editor and print runs and signing. But maybe we didn’t talk about the content. “Huh.”
He picked at his salad. “I never thought you were particularly interested.”
I felt taken aback. Why didn’t he think I was interested? Okay, maybe I didn’t ask him to recite his chapters verbatim, but I wanted to hear the stories. Was my resentment of the time he spent on Nantucket clearer than I’d thought? I was proud ofthe books, and proud of my dad for writing them—but maybe it didn’t come off that way. “I’m interested.”
Dad nodded slowly. “Good to know.”
Wow, I was a shitty daughter. What if, when Dad told me he didn’t need my help with his research, he hadn’t been pushing me away—what if he’d thought I wasn’t interested and my offer to help wasn’t genuine?
Dad cleared his throat. “On Friday, I thought we’d have dinner with the Barbanels.”
Oh no. Abort. “We could,” I said warily. “But, counterargument—we could also not.”
“Well.” Dad scratched his head, right at the spot his hair began to thin. “They’ve invited us for Shabbat.”
I stared. “Shabbat.”
