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“Good. You’ll have a network for life. If you need a job after graduation—”
“I have a job lined up.”
He picked up the remote.
“Don’t,” I said quickly.
“Why? You want to see your team?”
“Game’s almost over.”
I waited for the camera to pan and give me a glimpse of her. To make sure she was healthy, that’s all. I didn’t want anything to interfere with our time together next week. A cascade of dark hair swirled into view, surrounding her beaming smile.
I couldn’t look away. She was lit up. Radiant. Genuinely happy.
She’d changed since I spent the night in her room.
“So you have a job,” Dad said.
“Financial analyst at a bank. It’s an hour from school. Starts the end of June.”
He nodded. “You always had a head for numbers.”
I stretched out my legs and glanced at my empty wrist. Most of time, I remembered that I’d given my watch away. “Today’s my birthday.”
He turned from his recliner. The sudden eye contact was startling. His eyes were blue, like mine, but foggy. Christina complained that her parents were always in her business, but I’d waited four years for my dad to look at me.
“That so? Middle of March already?” Now that I had his attention, he was pinning me with it. “Twenty-two now?”
I nodded.
“What are you doing for your birthday, son?”
Just say it.I wanted his bitter anger, his accusation. Some display of emotion — any emotion — in reaction to what I did on my birthday four years ago.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Nothing’s fine. You can’t get into trouble for nothing.”
That summed up Dad’s approach. When he wasn’t at work, he lay in this recliner, a shell of himself.
We watched in silence as the game came to a close. I caught one more glimpse of Christina, a tease of her profile, and had the urge to sink into her. After class on Tuesday, when I was facing almost a week without her, I’d buried my face in my pillow to smell her. She was splashed all over my sheets, fresh, sweet and musky.
I’d done the same damn thing with Livia. Rolled all over her pristine thousand thread-count sheets to soak her up while she was at work.
I was trading one obsession for another.
“Dad, the roof’s leaking.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
If I left that leak to my dad, it would spread, eroding the roof, while the floor disintegrated, and sooner or later the whole fucking house would fall down.
I got a bucket from under the sink and put it below the leak. Another expense I didn’t budget for.
Pulling out my wallet, I counted my cash — low. At the back, three crisp hundreds waited for Christina. I wasn’t touching those. A crumpled receipt from a mechanic fell out. My car was on its last legs.
To the sound of water hitting the bucket, I checked my bank balance. My phone’s screen glowed in the dark. I had money left from my internship in Rome, and what I earned this year from researching in the econ department.
