"As in forty-five minutes from now?"
I nodded.
Bella was quiet for a second. "That doesn't sound like the version of her you described."
"It isn't."
"What does it mean?"
"I don't know yet." I pocketed my phone. "But it means something."
She didn't push. She turned back to lift Rosalee’s bridle off the post and walked it into the tack room. I heard her hang it on the peg. Then she came back and stood at the edge of the aisle, waiting for me to look up.
"You don't need me here for this," she said.
"I don't need you anywhere. That's not the same as not wanting you here."
She held my gaze for a beat too long. Then she nodded. "I’m going to get cleaned up. You know where to find me if you need me."
She climbed the stairs. I stood in the barn with the saddle still in my hands and listened to her boots cross the floor above me to the kitchen, and then to the chair by the window, and then nothing.
I had forty-five minutes to figure out what Dana was setting up by being unexpectedly competent.
My daughter came through the door at quarter past ten with a paper bag in each hand and a brightness in her eyes that I’d spent years hoping to see.
“She took me to an art festival last night,” Rory said, dropping the bags on the kitchen table and pulling things out one by one. A small turquoise bracelet. A set of colored pencils in a tin. A paperback with a horse on the cover. “And we had dinner at this place with the good bread. You know the one, Dad, where the menu's all on a chalkboard. And she paid for everything, and she didn't even check her phone until dessert.”
I sat down at the table. “That's good, Ror.”
“She asked about my photography.” Rory looked up, the bracelet already on her wrist. “Like actually asked. She wanted to see my phone, and she looked at every single one.”
“Good.”
She set the pencils down and looked at me. “You could try not to sound so disappointed.”
“I’m not. I'm glad you had a good time with your mom.” And I was. I just didn’t know what kind of fallout there would be yet. Because with Dana, there was always something.
Rory was quiet for a moment, turning the bracelet on her wrist. “She said she might come to the Father's Day thing. The rodeo.”
There it was. I kept my expression neutral. “Might?”
“She said probably. She said she'd try to make it work with her schedule.” Rory watched me. “Don't do that.”
“Do what?”
“That thing where you get all quiet and moody and I can tell you don't believe her.”
“I didn't say anything.”
“You didn't have to.” She picked up the tin of pencils and moved to put it on the counter, her back to me. “She's trying, Dad. That's what you always say I should do. Try.”
I pushed back from the table. “I know she's trying.”
“Then why does your face look like that?”
Because I'd watched her try eleven times in the last four years, and nine of them had ended with me explaining to a thirteen, fourteen, fifteen-year-old girl why the person who was supposed to show up hadn't. Because I knew what Dana’s probably sounded like, and it sounded like a beginning, not a commitment. Because Rory was standing in my kitchen with a bracelet on her wrist and light in her eyes and I already knew the distance between here and the Father's Day bleachers was a long way to fall.
I didn't say any of that. “Just don't rearrange your whole day around it. Help with the junior registration first, and if she makes it, she makes it.”
