Page 20 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

At the house they don’t get out.

I pull in behind them, and June’s engine goes off, and then nothing. The two of them just sit there in the driveway. I stand at the kitchen window and watch my daughter sit in a parked car with the nanny for sixteen minutes. Nobody’s mouth moves. At some point June passes her something from the console — a napkin, I think. Margot holds it without using it, and they keep sitting.

I want to go out there so badly my hands hurt. I don’t go out there.

When they finally come in, Margot walks past me, stops at the bottom of the stairs with her back to us, and says, “I’m not sorry.”

“I know,” I say.

She goes up. June hangs the backpack on its hook, comes into the kitchen, and pours two glasses of water like we’ve both been running.

“You want to know what we talked about in the car,” she says.

“You didn’t talk. I watched.”

“That’s what we talked about.” She hands me a glass. “Everybody’s going to want words from her — the counselor, the school, probably Carol. She should get to have one person who doesn’t make her talk about it at all. I’d like to be that person.”

“You have the job.” It comes out rougher than I mean it to. I drink the water. “Her mother would have—” I stop, because I don’t finish sentences that start that way, as a policy. June waits, not helping me, not rescuing me. “Nora would have gone through that principal like a plow,” I say. “And then cried in the car where Margot couldn’t see. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do instead. I’ve got the not-crying part down.”

“You asked her if she warned him first,” June says. “In an office where everyone wanted her to feel like a criminal, her dad’s first question assumed she’d had a good reason and her own rules about it. She’s going to remember that longer than the suspension.”

I hadn’t thought of it as anything. It was just the question that came. This woman is standing in my kitchen holding a water glass, handing me the one good thing to come out of the worst meeting of the fall.

“Thank you for getting there first,” I say.

“I’ll always be nine minutes away,” she says. “It’s the whole point of me.”

Dinner is quiet but not bad-quiet. I cook five portions, the way I have every night for three years, and the fifth goes into the fridge with the others. Nora’s portion. I know that’s what it is. Knowing has never once stopped me. Teddy, who has absorbed today’s events through the walls the way little kids do, conducts his own inquiry between bites.

“Did it hurt your hand?”

“A little,” Margot says.

“Good,” Teddy says, with feeling, and then, because this is how his mind sorts the world: “Does Brayden have a favorite dinosaur?”

“I didn’t ask him, Teddy.”

“I asked everyone in my class.” He lowers his voice like he’s reporting something serious. “The kids who don’t have one — those are the ones you have to watch.”

Margot doesn’t laugh. But half a laugh escapes her nose before she stops it, and it’s the closest this table has come to it in a year. June looks hard at her plate. I look hard at mine.

Later, after the dishes and the reading and the lights, I stop outside Margot’s door the way I do every night. For the first time in months, the door isn’t all the way shut, and her voice comes through it.

“Dad?”

I open it six inches. She’s in bed, book closed on the nightstand, looking at the ceiling.

“Was Mom in fights? When she was a kid?”

I stand in the doorway and give it to her straight, because she’s my kid who wants things straight. “Once that I know of. Seventh grade. A boy said something cruel about her best friend, and she broke his glasses. Grandma Carol had to pay for the frames, and she never once made your mom apologize.”

Margot takes this in with the ceiling. “What did she say? About it. When she was old.”

“She said she’d learned better ways than hitting.” I hold the doorknob. “And then every single time she told the story, she looked a little proud, and if you tell Grandma Carol I said that, I’ll deny it.”

Something in my daughter’s face unclenches, just for a second.

“Goodnight, Dad.”