“Missed you too.” He’s thin in her embrace, his bones too near the skin after a year of postsurgical complications. Yet he still feels like love and comfort personified. Herdad—the best man she’s ever known. The man who turned his life plans upside down for her.
It’s almost painful how much she loves him.
Steve’s arms tighten as he looks over Ripley’s shoulder in the direction of the Charger. And the passenger sprawled messily in the front seat.
In the time it took Sally Gunderson to misbutton her shirt, James has most definitely passed out.
“Huh,” Steve says, pulling back. “I see I’m not the only one with an unexpected guest. Well, you’d better bring him in.”
21
July 5:
Fifty-Four Days Until the End of the Summer Excavation Season
If Ripley opens the red-and-white-checked curtains in her childhood bedroom, she’ll see the same view from the small sliding window she saw every summer morning as far back as she can remember: the fir trees ringing the Golden Acres Cemetery and the low chain-link fence she’s vaulted a hundred times on a hundred dares to touch a tombstone.
But that might be the only thing that’s the same around here. Her dad seems determined to get up to risky shit in her absence—secret assignations, boozy get-togethers. Yesterday, Ripley barely had time to make up the beds, pour a drowsy James into the lower bunk, and explain that this very large, very impaired man was a colleague before Steve left for his weekly poker game. His buddy Ronnie dropped him off late enough last night that she didn’t hear him sneak in. It makes her feel old before her time, like she’s the parent and he’s the truculent teenager.
She turns back the faded, generously pilled dinosaur-print comforter—a tenth-birthday gift she refuses to let her dad replace—and climbs down from the top bunk. Though she tries not to look at the lower bunk, it’s kind of impossible to watch where she’s putting her feet and not see James.
He’s thrown off the blanket and, at some point, the shirt shegave him to sleep in. His limbs sprawl at wild angles, his bare back rhythmically rising and falling. In the humid air after the storm, his hair pops up in short, glossy curls against the tan that ends abruptly at the base of his neck.
He’s so soft when he’s asleep. So different from the rigidly controlled, slightly tragic Brit he is when he’s conscious.
Ripley imagines a world where he isn’t James Smithson, renowned paleontologist, but just James. Just a man overflowing the bed she’s slept in countless times. A man who could have gone back to his nice Berkeley apartment anytime in the past month but instead kept showing up for her, over and over again. A man who doesn’t seem to want anything from her that he doesn’t give back twice over. Who kissed her like he’d die if he didn’t.
Her rules are no match for a man like that.
But James Smithson has rules of his own.
She grabs a pair of socks to ward off the floor’s permanent chill and heads for the living room, closing the bedroom door behind her as soundlessly as she used to when she thought her dad didn’t know she was sneaking out. Or in.
On her way through the living room, she looks away from the long beige couch. Ripley doesn’t want a vision of Sally Gunderson’s freckled cleavage to overwrite the memories of her and her dad lying at opposite ends of that couch and throwing popcorn at the TV when the Jurassic Park movies strayed too far from reality.
In the kitchen, the cupboard doors gleam with fresh off-white enamel. A month ago, Steve was crowing to her about a batch of flooring ends he scored from a buddy at the hardware store; now the kitchen floor sports a pale gray pickled-wood look. Aside from the scorch mark Ripley put in it with a pot of macaroni, thebeige counter is clean and empty, her dad’s lonely plate and mug the only dishes in the drying rack.
On the far side of the kitchen, the door to her dad’s bedroom is closed, but Ripley can picture his tidy bed and wonky sliding closet doors. He quit trying to fix them because “sliding doors are an inherently bad design and will always break,” but he won’t replace them because “do youknowhow much mirrored doors cost these days?”
Determined not to think about ways her dad might be enjoying his bedroom mirrors, Ripley reaches into the cabinet where Steve keeps the coffee.
Her fingers find a stack of dinner plates.
“The hell?” she mutters, frowning. She was here three weeks ago, and everything was normal.
She opens cabinet after cabinet. There are cans where there used to be glassware, neatly labeled canisters in place of rerolled bags, and new shelf liners everywhere.
She finds the coffee above the coffee machine along with a tidy ceramic creamer set and a few boxes of tea, the herbal stuff. It’s supposedly healthy, but Ripley doubts it cancels out the cigars, booze, and whatever else her dad’s been doing.
Steve Adams pads into the kitchen and grins when he spies his daughter.
He’s still heart-piercingly handsome, like a craggy Cary Elwes with the confidence not to play comb-over games with his slightly receding hairline. His old plaid pajama pants sag around his newly thin waist, and he no longer plays for the softball team whose name is emblazoned on his black-and-white raglan shirt. His oxygen tank and humidifier follow him in a hands-free wagon he built himself after declaring the standard-issue cart “a pain in my cancerous ass.”
He grabs two mugs, sets them next to the burbling drip machine. “You like the new layout? Smart, right?”
“You have to give advance notice before rearranging someone’s childhood home, Dad. Technically, I could sue you for emotional damage. Coffee? Or are you drinking tea these days?”
“Tea!” He clutches his chest. “My own daughter asks me if I wanttea.”
