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I get to work transferring the impatiens from the carton to their new pots, filling in the empty space with extra soil and packing it down with my fingers. Dad dumps soil in the flower beds along the driveway while Lilly follows behind him, evening it out with a hoe. I don’t think the three of us have ever done this together before. The gardens were always Mom’s thing, and we all took turns helping her, but it was never a whole-family project.
When the beds are filled and the impatiens are potted and arranged on the porch, Lilly announces that she has to get showered and changed for plans with a friend. She heads inside, leaving me alone in the garage with Dad.
It’s awkward for a few minutes, and then he sighs, like he’s decided to make the great sacrifice of speaking to me. “Are you gonna watch later?”
I wasn’t sure he remembered. “Not tonight. I’ll watch tomorrow, for Grant. He’s supposed to go between the fifth and eighth rounds.” That’s about when I was supposed to go, too.
Dad nods. “That’s good of you.” He lifts the neckline of his shirt, using it to wipe sweat off his face. “So what’s next for you, Mav? Still gonna be an accountant?”
I can hear the doubt in his voice, and I can’t even blame him. I’m not fooling anybody—not even myself—with the whole accountant thing. When people ask, I usually feed them some bullshit about how I’ve always been good at math—and in my defense, up until now, I had believed that to be true. Turns out, getting a B in high school algebra doesn’t translate to being good at calculus.
There’s no way I’m going to tell my dad that, though, so I just say, “That’s the plan.”
Dad nods stiffly and turns away, heading back out to the driveway. I’m too lazy to get up, so I watch as he throws away empty soil bags and puts away tools. After a while, an unfamiliar dark SUV pulls into the driveway. It looks so much like the one that ran me over, my breath catches in my throat for a second.
Dad waves at the lady in the driver’s seat, then sticks his head inside the house. “Lilly! Emma and her mom are here!”
“Whatever happened to Heidi?” I ask when he comes back, referring to Lilly’s best friend from elementary school. “I feel like all I ever hear about is Emma now.”
“Oh, God,” Dad says, settling onto the edge of the card table. “Don’t ask. Big drama.”
“What happened?”
“Hell if I know. She tried to explain it to me and I guess I was asking too many questions. She cried and ran upstairs. I haven’t brought it up again.”
Silence falls, and I know we’re both thinking about how Mom would have handled that situation seamlessly.
“You know,” I say slowly, “Azalea’s dad raised a teenage girl by himself.”
Dad narrows his eyes a bit, unsure of what I’m getting at. “Yeah. I guess he would’ve.”
“Maybe he…” My fingers twitch in the mesh of my shorts. I’m trying to bridge a gap here, to be helpful to my family for the first time in way too long. But I’m clumsy, unsure if I’m doing something good or just making things weird. “I don’t know. Maybe he would have some advice.”
“Have you seen him since the accident?” Dad asks. “Or Azalea, for that matter?”
Pounding steps from inside the house get closer to the door, and Lilly emerges before I get a chance to reply. I’m relieved, but only briefly. I nearly recoil when I look at her and see that she’s dressed much like the girls I go tocollegewith. It makes her look older than she is. And is her hair curled? Just to go to the mall? How does she even know how to do that?
“What—”
“Bye, Daddy.” Lilly cuts me off. “Bye, Mavvy.” She kisses us both on the cheek. “I’ll be back before dinner.”
She doesn’t wait for an answer, just jogs out to the SUV and climbs inside like she’s done it a million times before. I stare after her, completely disoriented. “Why was she dressed like that? Was she wearingmakeup?”
Dad smiles sadly. “She’s growing up, Mav. Happens to the best of us.”
“Well, it shouldn’t be happening to Lilly.”
He laughs quietly. It’s good to hear, and some of the tension between us evaporates.
“You know,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck, and I can tell that he’s about to delve back into uncomfortable territory. “Your mom really didn’t want you to play college baseball. I talked her into letting you accept the scholarship.”
I jerk my head up. Mom was always very vocal about what she believed my priorities should be, but she never told me that I shouldn’t play baseball at all. “What?”
“It wasn’t about you. Not really.” He clears his throat and stares down, arms crossed, scuffing the concrete floor with his toe. “When you were first born, I was a workaholic. Really, really over the top. Hell-bent on proving some theory I can’t even remember the details of now and winning a Nobel Prize. When we were dating and even when we were first married, it didn’t bother your mom. But that first year after we had you, she was basically a single mother. I was a horrible father. And a horrible husband.”
This is the first I’m hearing of any of this. Growing up, my dad was always home at five-thirty sharp. He was usually the one to cook dinner, and afterward he always helped Lilly and I with our homework. I’ve never known a time when he was uninvolved in our lives.
“Eventually,” he continues, “she told me that if she was going to live the life of a single mother either way, she’d rather actuallybeone than stay in a marriage with someone who put his job above his family.” He ducks his chin. I can tell it’s hard to talk about. “That was like Scrooge seeing the ghost. I got my ass in gear and straightened out my priorities, and we never had such a rough patch in our marriage again.”
