I frown over at Danica. She’s on the couch holding her phone to her ear with one hand and tugging on the ends of her Afro with the other. “Okay, Daddy,” she says, using her usual happy-happy-joy-joy Dad voice.
I don’t have a voice like that for Dad anymore. If Danica knew the truth of why Mom and Dad got divorced, she wouldn’t either.
I spin on my heels, trying to escape upstairs and avoid talking to him.
Mom halts my escape. “Evie, your father needs to speak with you.”
I start to protest, but she looks so blindsided that I stop. “What’s going on?” I ask.
“Your father will explain.” Her Jamaican accent is so thick, she sounds like she just immigrated yesterday.
Danica holds her phone out to me.
I take the phone but don’t hold it to my ear right away. It always takes me a few seconds before I can say anything to him. Inside me are two Evies: the one that used to love him and the one that still does but doesn’t want to.
“Hi,” I say, using my flattest voice.
“Hi, sweet pea.” He has me on speakerphone. I hate speakerphone.
“I don’t like it when you call me that,” I say.
He sighs. I can picture exactly what he’s doing: pinching the bridge of his nose with one hand and rubbing his palm across the back of his neck with the other. “I have some news,” he says.
I don’t say anything.
“I wanted to tell you in person, but—”
He stops talking. What he wants to say is that since I refuse to visit him, he can’t tell me anything in person.
Mom has stepped completely out onto the patio now.
Danica’s big, dark eyes are scouring my face.
“It’s about Shirley,” he says.
For a second I think he’s going to say they’ve broken up. For a second, I see us all back together at our house having blueberry pancakes for breakfast.
But that’s not what he says. “We’re getting married.”
There was a time when he would’ve used an obscure phrase likeplighting our trothinstead ofgetting married.He’d have made me geek out over the etymology with him, and I would’ve teased him about his word nerdiness even though I’m a word nerd too. We were so close before the divorce. We have the same sense of humor: slightly quirky, slightly cynical. We have the same outlook on the world: halfway between amused and bemused.
It’s still hard for me to believe how far apart we are now.
He sighs into my silence. “Sweet pea, say something,” he says.
“Don’t call me sweet pea,” I say.
“I know you’re having a hard time with everything…,” he says, sympathy in his voice.
His sympathy just makes me angry. If it wasn’t for his duplicity, I wouldn’t need his sympathy. “Don’t act like you care, because we both know that—”
“Stop,” he says. Speakerphone makes his voice echo back on itself.
I sit down on the bottom step of the staircase. Now I understand why Mom was unsteady before.
Danica’s frowning and shaking her head at me in disapproval.
“I want you to come to the wedding,” he says.
