But then a few more seconds passed, and he said nothing at all. I went back to building a small structure out of butter packets and then, when I ran out of those, began adding a third and teetering level of nearly expired blackberry jams. Minutes went by.
“I saw Tyler,” I said.
My dad looked up from his plate. Something, finally, flickered across his throat. Not a gulp—but almost.
“He’s still sober,” I said. “He’s a teacher now.”
Silence, but more movement. His jaw. His mouth. Twitching. Tightening. I kept going.
“We’re writing a book together. For work.”
Now, a nod. One that traveled all the way to his eyes. A memory flashed. A tangle of us—me, six; Mikey and Tyler, eight—burying my beach-buzzed, sleep-feigning father in an ungodly amount of wet, clumping sand. His mouth slipping into the slightest smile as Tyler, shovel in hand, smeared the last of a ketchup packet across his scruffy, thirtysomething face.
I could still taste the sunscreen on my tongue.
“Don’t you ever miss him, Dad?”
He looked right at me. His eyes, screaming and sorry, and, for another second, right there. And then he blinked, and it was over. The moment was gone. The film, erased.
Something cracked between my ribs, then attempted to leave my body in a wail. I swallowed before it could make a sound. I wanted to let it out. I really did. I wanted to crawl under the table and into his arms. I wanted him to hold me. I wanted him to letme snot into the shoulder of his shirt, to tell me I was his baby, that I was the most perfect, lovable thing that had ever been born. I wanted him to beg me to stay another night, to ask me about my crazy fucking boss, whether I was hanging in there. Whether I was drowning without a mother. Without a father. Whether the past eleven years had been too hard.
Instead, he set two twenties on the table and said, “We’re going to miss your train.”
Too-Convenient Displacement
Willa returned home from the Inn one evening to find her parents’ house completely flooded. All ten thousand square feet of it, and the guesthouse too. This, her mother had muttered, was the problem with historic properties—those cedar roofs, those yearslong permitting processes. But it made no difference why or how the flood occurred. What mattered was this: Willa Pearson didn’t know how to ask for help. She didn’t want to burden her parents with so much as a squeak. And, because of that, she had no idea where she was supposed to go.
20
Tyler
On Monday, we were back to work at the café. Katie, for the record, was wearing the green dress again, but this time, her hair was half up and secured with a massive matching bow. She’d lined her eyes with something shimmery and smooth and baby blue.
“Okay, so,” she said through a slurp of iced latte. “This displacement event. How long, realistically, do you think that sort of damage would keep Willa out of her house? At least the summer, right?”
I typed her question directly into my browser’s search bar and laughed. “I think we may have over-displaced her. The sheer size of the home. It’s—”
Katie’s phone rang. Lola, who wasn’t working today. According to Katie, she was in Jersey for a second interview—an all-of-a-sudden teaching position at the state university’s Camden campus that started in the fall.
“Hi! How was it!? Did they love you again?” Katie’s smile, at once, turned. Her forehead creased. Her posture stiffened. “Wait, slow down. What do you mean, uninhabitable? What did Maria say, exactly?”
I leaned forward a little. Mouthed,What’s wrong?But Katie never answered. Instead, she hung up the phone, shut her laptop, and rose to her feet.
“I have to go,” she said, stuttering. “There was a gas leak at my apartment. The fire department went to fix it, and they found, like, a dozen other code violations. Our neighbor told Lola they’re saying nobody can go inside. That we’re all lucky to be alive.”
“What? You mean you’re beingdisplaced? Like in our book?”
“Yes! No! I don’t know!” She was already halfway out the door. “I’m not fucking Willa, though! I’m real! And all my stuff’s there! I don’t know where I’m going to live! I need to go, I—”
“Katie, wait,” I said, throwing my shit in my backpack. “Slow down. I’ll come with you.”
Fifteen minutes later, we were standing in Katie and Lola’s clearly Katie-decorated Thumbelina-themed studio apartment, packing up every last thing Katie owned. She and I’d raced the three blocks north to get more details, only to find her street overflowing with firetrucks and her sidewalk barricaded with yellow tape. Desperate for entry, Katie batted her eyes at a fireman who suddenly became very interested in making her life easier, and the rest was history.
“This is insane,” I said.
Katie shoved what must’ve been her seventeenth stuffed animal into a trash bag. The fireman had given us thirty minutes. He’d also given Katie his phone number. “Not helpful, Tyler.”
“I’m just saying it doesn’t make any sense. It’s too big of a coincidence.”
