“It’s a beautiful day,” the older woman said as they drove on. “I hope you’re going to enjoy it?”
“I’m from Florida,” Minnie said. “This is cold for me.”
The woman laughed. “I never wanted to move down South. But now that I’m older? I imagine the sun would do me some good in the wintertime.”
It was a meaningless conversation. But it calmed Minnie, if only a little bit. During the eight-minute drive, she allowed herself to imagine this was an ordinary day, that this woman was maybe her grandmother, eager to talk about boring things and to drive Minnie where she needed to go. When Minnie got out, she thanked the woman, raising her hand.
“Take care of yourself, sweetie,” the woman said before driving away and leaving Minnie in the parking lot.
Now, it was half past seven, which gave Minnie too much time. She decided to loiter in the hotel restaurant, where sheate a bowl of ice cream and watched tennis on one of the seven screens. Back and forth the yellow ball went, taunting her.
To make matters worse, Viggo texted her a picture of himself at the beach, where he’d made a bonfire.
VIGGO: Wish you were here. See me tomorrow?
Minnie got up from her table abruptly. She had half a mind to leave the hotel and ask Viggo to pick her up. She had half a mind to abandon her father, who waited for her upstairs. But she knew she couldn’t.
A few minutes before eight, she took an elevator to the third floor and walked to her father’s room. It didn’t surprise her that nobody in the hotel asked where she was going or what she was doing. She looked young for her age, and people probably thought she was staying here with her parents on vacation. That, or they didn’t think about her at all.
After a soft knock, the door opened. Minnie took a deep breath and stepped into the hotel room, which was dark save for a lamp in the corner. The curtains were drawn, and there was a strange smell to the place, as though it hadn’t been cleaned in a while. Minnie shivered, searching the darkness for her father’s face.
“Dad?” she whispered.
It was then that Kendall turned on another lamp, which spilled light onto his face. Although she’d just seen him, slinking around the gas station parking lot and also outside the burger place, it both terrified and shocked Minnie to see her father here. He looked thinner than he had back in Miami, and his hair was long and slightly greasy. She’d never seen him like this.
“Dad,” she breathed, love for him beaming out of her. “Dad, what are you doing here?”
Kendall was wearing a pair of sweats and a baggy T-shirt. “Did you tell anyone you were coming?” he asked, his voice low. “Are you wearing a wire?”
Minnie didn’t really understand what wearing a wire meant. But she shook her head. “I didn’t tell anyone.”
“Good,” Kendall rasped. “Because people would get the wrong idea, Minnie. People have the wrong idea about everything. Do you get that?”
Minnie took a small step away from him. Her nostrils burned, maybe from how he smelled. She’d never known her father to miss a day of showering. “Do you have any food?” she asked, because she was becoming more and more panicked, and she needed to be able to think.
Kendall rolled his eyes just the slightest bit, then walked over to open the mini fridge. He removed a plastic container of caramel-flavored high-protein pudding. This was not exactly Minnie’s idea of nutrition, but she accepted a plastic spoon and sat on the edge of his mussed bed.
“Take a bite,” Kendall ordered.
Minnie did as she was told, trying not to wince at the gross preservative taste. The omelet her mother had made for her this morning felt like a completely different species from whatever this was. She took another bite, watching as her father relaxed the slightest bit.
“You know your mother set me up, right?” he asked suddenly.
“I know that.” Minnie felt her shoulders tighten. “I can’t believe she did this to you.”
“Have you told her that?” Kendall asked. “Have you told her how angry you are?”
Minnie nodded, thinking it best that she didn’t mention that she and Hannah had been growing closer as of late, that she’dbeen thinking of forgiving her. “I can’t believe it,” she repeated. “Where have you been?”
Kendall let his eyes flicker into the back of his head. “You don’t want to know. I’ve been through the worst days of my life. Nobody should have to go through this. And it’s all because of your mother. I never should have married her. I should have listened to my own mother. She told me, ‘You’ll never be happy.’ And she was right.”
Minnie remembered the wedding portrait of her mother and father. It had hung in one of the rooms that nobody really used in their massive Miami house. As a little girl, she’d loved looking at it. She’d loved imagining herself as the flower girl at her own parents’ wedding.
“But through it all, I missed you, honey,” Kendall said, his eyes returning to Minnie. “I knew I couldn’t leave you with her. Not for long. So that’s why I’m here. I’m here to take you with me.” He offered a smile that very nearly brought Minnie back to the days before Nantucket, to the days when she’d been a total daddy’s girl.
She was still a daddy’s girl. Wasn’t she? She took another bite of pudding and felt the silence collapse onto her shoulders. Tears filled her eyes, and she blinked them away.
“Of course, things are different from what they were,” Kendall said. “Because of what your mother did, I can’t be myself anywhere we go. I’ve had things set up for a long time, just in case something like this happened. I created separate identities for myself and built different lives all over the world. Around a year ago, I had another identity made for you, too, sweetie.” Kendall dropped to a squat and rifled around under the bed to find a folder, within which he kept a passport. He handed it to Minnie, who opened it to find her own photograph, plus the name STEPHANIE HITCHINS.
