“You would?” Natalie is incredulous. Such a bounty of offers! “Are you sure? Caspian is a lot at the beach. You have to watch him every second.”
“I know that,” says Mae. “I didn’t just meet him yesterday.”
Caspian wipes his nose on Natalie’s shoulder.
“What about you, Dad? Care for some role-play?” Natalie cringes, realizing that this came out wrong. “I mean, care to go to a museum?”
“I have a few things I need to get done around the house—” he starts to say.
That’s when Jordan comes in and says, “I call Dad. I’m taking him to Petey’s for lunch today.”
If you’re a Rye resident in search of seafood, especially chowder, you are either a Petey’s person or a Ray’s person. The Shipmans are Petey’s people, though they understand the value of being Ray’s people too. Riding past Rye Harbor, with her father driving, Jordan feels special the way she used to as a kid when she went along on certain errands with Calvin that the other girls were either too young for or not interested in. The hardware store was one of these. Jordan would always go to the hardware store. There was something about the organized shelves, the knowledgeable salespeople (just try to stump them; that’s right, you can’t), the wide assortment of unrelated items that made her feel happy and complete.
They snag the last spot in the parking lot, which is usually full ten minutes before the restaurant opens. Jordan has so many happy memories of going to Petey’s, but most of them involve Theresa. She has to pause before getting out of the car, because she’s picturing her mother ordering her favorite meal, whole fried clams, and suddenly she can’t breathe.
Calvin orders a cup of chowder and a lobster roll. Jordan studies the salad menu, then she chastises herself for being an idiot and turns her attention to the fried portion of the menu (clam strips, oysters, lobster tails, crab cakes). She lands exactly where her father landed.
Without conferring with Jordan, Calvin then orders two beers. Okay! thinks Jordan. We’re doing this! He carries them to a picnic table and sets one in front of Jordan. Jordan can’t remember the last time she had a beer. But this beer in a plastic cup brought to her at a picnic table by her father, it tastes so good. It tastes like college and that feeling where you don’t know what’s going to happen next but all possibilities are on the table. It tastes like youth! They sip the beers while they wait for their number to be called.
“I know you’re upset with me, Jordan. For you it’s not so much about selling the house—”
“Make no mistake,” she says. “I’m upset about selling the house too. I just see where it makes sense.”
He nods, accepting this. “But what you’re really upset about is Kara.”
It’s been five months since Calvin married Kara, but they haven’t had this conversation yet. None of the Shipman sisters have had this conversation with their father. Well, apparentlyMae didn’t need to.But it’s been lurking for Jordan and Natalie, like a monster in the closet, like the stranger on the dark corner. The thing you want to pretend isn’t there. “What I’malsoupset about is Kara,” she corrects. “I mean—Dad!”
Calvin tents his fingers, holds them in front of his face, and looks at her over them. It reminds Jordan of how he used to look at her or her sisters if they got in trouble. Their parents were traditional in that the father did the disciplining. The mother, when asked, listened to the complaining about the disciplining, or clattered pans loudly in the kitchen to pretend it wasn’t happening. Calvin was the master of the stern silence, the disappointed gaze. Natalie scraping up the side of the car pulling out of a parking spot where she’d parked too close to a cement wall. Mae coming home drunk sophomore year of high school, which even Jordan thought was too young to comehome drunk. Jordan throwing the one rager of her life senior year and getting caught for it.
She waits for him to say something but he doesn’t, so she continues. “I mean, do you ever think about what Mom would say?” Her voice gets smaller, more choked. “Do you ever think about Mom at all anymore?”
She watches her father’s face go through a series of emotions: sorrow, bewilderment, a hint of defensiveness. “Of course I do. All the time. All the time, Jordan. Every single day. Before she died—”
Jordan cuts him off. “I swear to god, Dad. If you’re going to tell me that before she died Mom handpicked Kara to be her successor and begged you to promise her that you wouldn’t be alone...”
“Then what?”
“Then I’m going to throw up. That stuff only happens in Hallmark movies.”
Good timing: their number is called. Calvin rises to get the food, and, though Jordan knows she should help him, she remains where she is, stewing in her indignation. She wasn’t prepared for this conversation—she has come to Petey’s under false pretenses!
Then she feels bad so she keeps an eye on Calvin walking from the counter. If he’s struggling, she’ll get up and help. Okay, fine, she’ll get the napkins and the spoons for the chowder.
When they have their chowder and their lobster rolls, and while they are busying themselves opening the little packets of oyster crackers and scattering them across the creamy surface, Calvin continues as though there’s been no break in the conversation.
“I suppose that’s true. Although I’ve never seen a Hallmark movie.”
“Well, don’t,” says Jordan. “You’d hate them.” (She herself, in times of loneliness or heartbreak, especially during the holidays, has been known to quite enjoy them.)
“Anyway, that’s not what I was going to say. Your mother never decreed any such thing to me. Whether she thought it or not, I don’t know. But she didn’t say it. What I was going to say was, before your mom died, I never, ever, ever thought I’d want to be with someone else. Never in a hundred years would I have imagined it.” This, from her father, is an extreme amount of hyperbole, even though most people would have saidnever in a million years.
“So what happened?” She can hear it in her voice, the way she’s challenging him. She should be giving her father the gift of curiosity, but she can’t.
There’s a really long pause next, long enough that Jordan isn’t sure if he’s going to answer or not. She blows on her chowder to cool it and takes a bite of her lobster roll.
“What happened,” he says, “is a fairly simple thing.” He pauses again, and she waits, confident that he’s going to keep going. “What happened is that the afternoons and early evenings became insufferably long. Longer even than I’d ever imagined they could be.” Jordan tries to absorb this. She can’t relate. She finds each day to be far shorter than she needs it to be. She has dozens and dozens of things to fit into each day, especially during a work crisis, and by four o’clock in the afternoon the thing is never to figure out how to fill the next six or seven hours but rather to decide which tasks to complete before bed and which to push off to the next morning.
She’s never thought of this as a blessing. She thought it was just life. But here is her father, telling her something different. Experiencing the opposite. She gives him an expression that she hopes conveysgo on.
