I shake my head, putting the glass down before my straining fingers can shatter it. “You left me here alone.”
“Only because you prefer to hang around with your friends.”
“An excuse that’s been off the table for months now.”
There’s a long silence and I feel the misery building as I wait for him to turn me down again. Definitively, this time.
“Okay.”
The switch is so unexpected, I don’t know how to react. Before I can say anything, he holds up a warning finger. “This is only a promise to look at her work, not my final answer. If I don’t agree with your assessment, I don’t want you bitching at me about it.”
“You’ll like it. You’re not the only one in this family with taste.”
“Oh, yeah?” He rubs a hand over his face again, this time looking more his age. “Tell me about her, then. She goes to Tiaki?”
I nod. “She started partway through the year.” My mind sifts through all the things I know about Avon. What I can tell him. What I can’t. “It’s just her and her mum. She’s a hairdresser and rents a place from you in the Western Heights strip.”
He settles back in his chair, rubbing his eyebrow where it twitches when he’s stressed. I try not to think about how he can sit through board meetings and negotiations all day, every day, and never have a problem but somehow sitting at home with his son makes it spasm like he’s being subjected to a series of small electric shocks.
“Her surname’s Larsson? Is that the one?”
“Yeah.” That he remembers the name surprises me. It’s not like he’s hands on in the rental markets. Monthly totals on a spreadsheet at most, and even that is the province of his accounting team. “You know her?”
“A little. If she’s the one I’m thinking about, she’s a widower, too.”
“Yeah. Her dad died when they were still up in Auckland. He was a pilot.”
“Mm. Sounds right.” He snorts out a small laugh. “We stuffed up her initial rent somehow and sent her a bill for arrears that weren’t owed. She bypassed security to reach my office and started waving her arms, getting right in my face. When Ioffered to wipe her debt, she got even more aggravated. It was… memorable.”
Just the idea makes me laugh. I’ve not yet met her, but I’ve seen pictures of her on the website for her salon. “She and Avon look a lot alike, but I don’t know about them having the same temperament.”
“I hope for your sake she doesn’t. That woman was a right firecracker.”
The conversation has gone in a wildly different direction than I expected and I’m still not sure what to make of the quiet smile on my dad’s face.
In the years since Mum died, he’s never mentioned another woman. And jokes to my friends about him finding comfort in ladyboys while overseas are just that. Jokes.
It suddenly hits home that not talking about women doesn’t mean there haven’t been any. He could just be practising discretion.
“Yeah. It can’t hurt to get to know her a little. Do you want to ask her around to dinner next weekend?”
“I—” My face creases as I try to think. If I ask her to meet him like that, she might bolt, thinking I’m escalating us straight into a formal relationship. “That sounds a bit rigid, but she’ll probably be here, working on a painting in the studio.”
My dad goes still, frowning at me. “You’re using the studio?”
Colour heats my cheeks as I think of how we used it yesterday.
And Friday.
But he doesn’t need to know those details. “She can’t paint at home and time’s running out, so we’ve been—”
“Wait.” He holds up his hand. “You’re painting again?”
I nod.
“Because of her?”
“It was… I wanted to share something with her, spend time together, and it’s been good.”
