He glanced up from his lap, where he probably had his phone open so that he could follow the Japanese stock market or get angry at the news. “Me? Oh, I’m fine. I’m always fine.”
“How did you guys know Conrad again?” I asked. “You didn’t invite him to your galas for years before everybody else stopped doing it.Soahead of the curve.”
“I usually am,” preened my mother. But I didn’t want to hear her prattle off some lie about how they’d met Conrad and his wife years ago at some gala or other where my mother was valiantly trying to save a herd of small children from falling into a fiery cauldron over which Bibi was cackling like a witch.
“Dad?” I pressed him. He looked up. Was I seeing things, or was there a faint sheen of sweat on his face? He licked his upper lip.
“What?”
“How do you know Conrad and his wife?”
He gave an awkward little stutter of a laugh. “Them? Oh, uh, I…” I stared him down, refusing to avert my eyes. He sweated more. Licked his upper lip again. Ugh, gross. “I, uh, it was a…”
My mom sighed. “Oh, stop it, Richard,” she snapped. “She clearly knows.” She turned to me. “How did you find out? Did you talk to that woman about us?”
“Notaboutyou,” I said. “I spoke to Bibi about the murder. We had what was actually a very pleasant lunch, and yes, she shared that she’d previously been married to my father.”
Mom huffed. “?‘Married’ is a generous word for it. Left behind and—”
“Enough,” I said, refusing to look away from my dad. He was literally squirming in his seat. You’d think that, as an experienced businessman who did a ton of negotiations, he’d be used to uncomfortable conversations. “Why did you guys never tell me?”
“There was no reason to,” my dad said miserably enough where I almost felt sorry for him. “We never saw them. Roberta and I had never had kids, so the break was clean. It was before you were born. What would have been the point?”
Fair enough. I didn’t know if I’d want to talk to my future children about the people I’d dated in the past (sure, my ex-fiancé would inherit that ancestral castle, which might be worth mentioning, but there were so many ghosts in it! Also, his mother got to live there until she died and would haunt the place too). “Okay. I understand.”
But meanwhile, as Gabe and Andrea glanced back and forth between me and my dad as if we were players in a tennis match, my mom was narrowing her eyes. “You’re investigating again, aren’t you?”
There was no point in lying. I might be really good at it, but my mom was even better at sniffing me out. So I just kept my eyes on my dad as he slowly, uncomfortably withered in his chair. “Dad, can I see your hand?”
He held up his left hand, the one not covered by the wrist brace. I sighed. Come on, man. “The other hand, obviously.”
“Oh, this is so cute,” Mom sneered. “You think you’re Miss Marple, don’t you? Darling, you stumbled onto the answer to the last one, and now you’re getting in over your—”
I talked over her, eyes still trained on my dad.“Your other hand.”
Mom, clearly seeing that her attempt to shrink me wasn’t working, turned to my dad. “Richard, you don’t have to—”
“Dad, let me see—”
He stopped us both by raising his right arm and undoing the straps that held on the brace. It was kind of anticlimactic—undoing it with his left hand only was clearly a struggle, but nobody wanted to break the spell and jump in to help him. Eventually it fell with a soft thud onto his chicken. I sucked in a breath as he rotated it for us all to see.
There was no carpal tunnel there. Not unless carpal tunnel created fading bruising down the back of your hand, and scabs where the knuckles had clearly split (it didn’t, did it?). “It’s much better than it was the night of the gala,” he said, still holding it in the air as if it were a trophy. “I don’t know how I got out of there without the police stopping me. There was blood running down my arm into the sleeve of my tuxedo. It was totally ruined. I’m going to have to go to the tailor and get measured for a new one, which I’m not happy about.”
I held that breath I’d sucked in. “Was it you?” I asked. “Did you kill him?”
He gazed back at me, his eyes vacant, his jaw set under his trim beard. Which was graying, I was somehow surprised to see. Had it always been that gray? “I’m not going to lie and say I’dnever thought about it,” he said. “But it had been years since I’d come face-to-face with him. Seeing him there, it was like it was thirty years ago again. All those same emotions washed over me like a tidal wave. Of fire.”
My dad never had been one for metaphors, but I shot my mom a warning look before she could point that out. She sat back in her chair and scowled, stuffing another lettuce leaf in her mouth and grimacing as she chewed. Andrea and Gabe both sat totally still, rapt, as if the slightest movement might stop my dad from confessing. “I realized I’d never actually spoken to him about what happened. Or Roberta, aside from a bit there at the end.” The begging, I assumed. “So when I saw him heading up to the second floor for a cigar or something, I thought I would follow and talk to him. Just talk. It had been a lot of years, after all. Maybe he would apologize to me.”
Not to get off topic, but this might have been the longest string of words my dad had spoken to me in… well, ever. We weren’t much of a talking family, and my dad and I had never had many interests in common. I had no idea what all the business numbers meant or what a golf handicap was. He had no idea what the difference was between a cowl, butterfly, or petal sleeve, or why I would want to dedicate my time and resources to helping the less fortunate.
Dad went on, his eyebrows drawing together. Had he always had so many wrinkles in his forehead? “We went up the stairs and around the corner to a nook in the hallway with pillars in the way of the staircase. He stopped at the railing and looked down at the party below, but he turned around when he heard my footsteps. He looked surprised to see me. ‘Oh, it’s you?’ he said.
“How dare he. ‘Oh, it’s you?’ As if he was surprised to see me there. It was the same thing he’d said at our table. This was my daughter’s first gala. Of course I’d be there.”
The genuine bafflement in his voice almost made me feel a little bad about purposely not inviting him. Almost.
He went on. “I didn’t beat around the bush. None of us have time for that, not at our age. I asked him, ‘Why?’ And can you believe it?” He shook his head. “He had the nerve to squint at me and ask, ‘What are you talking about?’?”
