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“Why not?”
I scramble for something that sounds like a legitimate reason. “Well…if you ask, he might feel obligated.”
My father scoffs at that. “Either he’ll be interested or not. Nothing else to it.”
“Okay.” My voice is quiet.
If my father knew me better, knew me at all, he’d hear the uneasiness and the unhappiness lodged between the two syllables. But he doesn’t know me, and he doesn’t hear it.
The rest of dinner is mostly silent, except for the sound of utensils scraping plates.
It’s strange—the lack of sirens and waves and all the noises I’m accustomed to hearing outside in LA.
The quiet here allows you to imagine you’re anywhere. But I’m not pretending. I’m soaking in all the details I forgot about this dining room—the blue-flowered wallpaper and the display of my grandparents’ wedding crystal and the curved doorway that leads to the front hall.
I don’t want my dad to sell, I realize. I like that this place exists. That I know I can come visit even though I haven’t chosen to.
But I don’t say any of that. Because I don’t have any right to ask my father and Lily to stay here on the off chance I’m able to visit once a year. Because it will inevitably lead to them wondering, if I like this farm so much, why I haven’t been back since graduation.
I help with the dinner dishes and then trudge upstairs.
My room here hasn’t changed at all. Same white walls. Same green bedspread. I never decorated much, always viewing this space as nothing but a stop along the way to something else.
I take off the navy dress I changed into before the service, take a quick shower, and then curl up on the bed in a pair of sleep shorts and a T-shirt.
The side table has a stack of paperbacks on it that I can’t remember being here before. I page through one—a murder mystery that takes place on a cruise. Until the television shuts off and I hear the distinctive shuffle of steps coming up the stairs and down the hall. They halt right outside my door.
“Sutton?”
“Yeah?”
“Lily and I are headed to bed. You have everything you need?”
“Yep,” I chirp, cheerful as all heck. “Good night.”
There’s a pause. Between me and my father, there are often a lot of pauses.
“Good night,” he says before his footsteps continue to thump down the hall.
It’s after eleven by the time I finish the book.
The house has been quiet for at least an hour. Rather than turn off the light and try to fall asleep, I climb out of bed. Pull on the oversize Ohio State University sweatshirt I wore on the plane this morning and tiptoe down the hall and downstairs.
The peeling paint on the porch scrapes at the bottoms of my feet as I walk across it and descend the stairs until I touch the grass of the yard. I walk the perimeter of the dirt driveway until I reach the barn, then veer to the right, toward the lake. The moon is close to full. Every detail of my surroundings is lit up, bright and bathed in luminous light.
Ripples of white-yellow light refract across the smooth surface of the lake.
Water laps quietly against the shore.
I make my way to the rock that sits in the sand, climbing up onto its rough surface with only a couple of missteps. It makes me sad for a second, feeling every day of the eight years I’ve been gone. I used to be able to scale the side of this boulder effortlessly.
The body of water in front of me doesn’t stretch all that far. It’s probably more of a pond than the lake it’s referred to as. I huddle in the cozy confines of my sweatshirt, watching as a pair of Canadian geese cut smoothly through the water, spreading ripples that eventually reach the small strip of sand.
I’m not sure how long I’ve been sitting when I hear, “Wasn’t sure if you’d be here.”
He climbs up on the rock next to me. I don’t turn to watch.
I’ve seen it happen enough times that I can picture it perfectly. “Ditto.” I glance over in time to catch the corner of his mouth curl up.
