“See, that's what concerns me. You say fine and you make that face.”
“What face?”
“The face,” my dad said sagely, as if this explained everything.
“What face? I'm not making a face, this is my face.”
“Ro, I have known your face since before you had teeth. That is the face you make when something's wrong and you don't want to talk about it.” My dad settled back in his chair, arms crossed, looking profoundly comfortable with his own assessment. “It's the same face you made at fourteen when you broke the garage window and tried to blame the wind.”
“The wind was involved.”
“You hit a puck through it.”
“Wind-assisted.”
My mom covered her mouth, but it didn't fully hide the laugh. My dad pointed at me with the air of a man who had been right about many things and planned to be right about many more. “That's the face. He's doing it right now.”
“I'm not—” I stopped, because I could feel the corner of my mouth doing something against my will. “The wind thing was one time.”
“The wind thing was also the story you tried to tell your coach when you missed practice for three days and told him you'd been sick. Wind-related illness.”
“I was sick.”
“You were at Marcus Bellamy's cabin.”
“I was sick at Marcus Bellamy's cabin.”
“Martin.” My mom was fully laughing now, trying to rein it back in and failing. “Don't relitigate the cabin.”
“I'm not relitigating, I'm providing context.” He turned to look at her and then back at me with great seriousness. “The cabin had no wind, Rowan. I drove up there to collect you. It was a dead calm day. I checked.”
“You drove up there?”
“Of course I drove up there. You were sixteen and your mother was worried.”
“You told me you were at a conference,” I said.
“I was at a conference. I left the conference early.”
My mom patted his arm in a way that somehow communicated both fondness and long-suffering simultaneously. “He drove four hours and then turned around and drove back because you were fine and he didn't want you to know he'd come.”
“I knew if he saw me he'd think I was checking up on him,” my dad said, wholly unembarrassed. “Which I was. But a man has his dignity.”
“You have never had dignity, Martin.”
“I have tremendous dignity. Rowan, tell her I have dignity.”
“You drove four hours to check on me and then left without saying anything,” I said.
“Dignified surveillance.”
I laughed for the first time in days, and it surprised me enough that I had to turn away from the camera for a second and collect myself. From the phone I heard my dad say, quietly and to my mom, “There he is.”
“Don't make it weird,” she murmured back.
“I'm not making it weird, I'm observing?—”
“You're going to make him self-conscious.”
