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“For me. Hold on.” She slowed down, taking in each of the parts, and Tibby’s scribbled message at the bottom. “Oh, my God. She bought each of us a ticket to Greece. She planned a trip for us.” Bridget felt tears fill her eyes and bend the words on the paper. “Can you believe that?”
“Wow. That’s a big deal. To Lena’s family’s place? When?”
“Twenty-eighth of October. I can’t believe this.” She felt herself bouncing on her feet.
“For how long?”
“Just about a week. I guess it’s a reunion.”
Eric saw her tears and her uncensored joy. “That’s great, Bee. I’m happy for you. I’ll miss you, but I’m happy.”
She nodded. God, how unexpected this was. The answer to a wish she hadn’t let herself articulate in a long time. “I think this is what we really, really need.”
Suddenly her legs took root,
and her arms grew into
long and slender branches.
Apollo reached the laurel tree,
and,
still enamored with Daphne,
held the tree in
a special place in his heart.
—Encyclopedia Mythica
On Friday night, after she finished work, Carmen went directly to the SoHo Grand to meet her father. It was a forbidding lobby, all right angles, muted surfaces, and minimal cheer. She was a successful actress in New York with a big loft in Nolita, a closetful of enviable clothes, a boyfriend—make that fiancé—who was a network executive. This was her world, and even she felt constrained by the coolness.
“Albert Lowell,” she said to the brittle, long-nailed woman at the front desk. “Can you tell him Carmen is here?”
The woman conducted her brief conversation with Carmen’s father in hushed, proprietary tones, as if he belonged to her and not Carmen.
“He’ll be down,” the woman informed her.
“Thanks,” she said.
She settled into a chair with a view of the elevators. She quickly checked her three different email accounts on her phone.
She realized she had an idea of the man who would emerge from the elevator, and though the one who appeared in the blue Izod shirt was certainly recognizable, it wasn’t him. Her father was tall, and this person was sort of bent over. Her dad had light brown hair, whereas this man was mostly gray. Her father was confident, where this man looked slightly bewildered. When her dad was in her apartment, she didn’t need to see these things. Leave it to an elevator in the SoHo Grand to make you change everything you thought.
She stood. “Hi, Dad.”
He came over to hug her. “Hi, bun.”
She held on to him for longer than usual. She felt sad. “How’s the room?” she asked when she let him go.
“Great. Great. It’s got everything. In the minibar there are these fantastic nuts. Kind of spicy nuts.”
She was glad Jones wasn’t there to hear her father talk so eagerly about the nuts. Her dad seemed sophisticated to her in places other than here. And then she wondered why she let Jones judge her dad when Jones wasn’t even around.
But it wasn’t Jones, really; it was her, wasn’t it? She could blame Jones because she didn’t want to be the one questioning or judging her dad. She preferred to stay innocent.
“That’s great,” she said. “So do you want to go somewhere and get a cup of tea? Or a drink? Or we could just sit here in the bar. Jones is meeting us at eight at a restaurant on Bond Street.”
“Is that nearby?”
“Pretty near, yeah. Maybe a ten-minute walk.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I know a place around the corner. Let’s go there.” She didn’t like what the SoHo Grand was doing to either of them.
She realized as they crossed the lobby that her dad was wearing jeans. He almost never wore jeans. It broke her heart to think of him choosing his outfit, thinking this would be good for the chic hotel in SoHo.
They settled into an Irish bar on Grand Street. She waited for her dad to grow back into himself.
He ordered a whiskey sour, which came with a maraschino cherry, and she ordered a glass of white wine. She still felt a little weird ordering a drink in front of him.
“How’s Paul?” she asked. She actually knew how Paul was, because she exchanged emails with him almost every week, but Paul was such a hero to them all he seemed like a safe subject to talk about.
“It’s good to have him back from Afghanistan. He’s doing well. He always asks about you. What a life, you know?”
“Yeah,” Carmen said. She thought of Paul as her stepbrother, but was he still her stepbrother, since his mom had died? He was the only one in the family Jones hadn’t met yet.
“He sent me a video of F16s taking off from the aircraft carrier. One of them was his. Pretty incredible.”
In the old days, Carmen might have felt threatened by her father’s obvious pride, but a year and a half ago Lydia had died of breast cancer and all she felt was sad. And anyway, Carmen was an actress on TV. She knew her dad was proud of her too.
“How’s Krista?”
This was a little more complicated, and her dad was smart enough to know it. Krista, Lydia’s daughter, was the one whose house he went to for dinner every Sunday night. “Good. The baby is … almost one, I guess.”
“Is that Tommy?”
“No, I think the middle one is Tommy.”
She wasn’t sure whether this confusion was for her benefit. “The baby is … Joey?”
“Yes. And the oldest is … he’s gotta be five.”
“Jack.”
“Right, Jack.”
Krista was younger than Carmen, and yet she’d already managed to produce three children. Sometimes that seemed kind of thrilling to Carmen and other times grotesque. But it was good, really, that Krista was stocking the family with grandchildren, because Jones was adamant about not having any.
“Have you babysat recently?” He and Lydia used to do it together every Friday night, and now he sometimes volunteered to go it alone. He was brave that way.
He nodded and raised his eyebrows high. “There’s a handful for you.”
Carmen nodded too. She was glad Krista was still in Charleston, living in a house with a proper dining room just a few miles away, giving her father grandchildren and keeping an eye on him. Carmen was grateful for that. Whatever else she might feel, gratitude was the main thing.
There was pathos in the way it all fit together. When Carmen was growing up, her dad had been more of an idea than a father to her. Now she was more of an idea than a daughter to him.
“How’s your mom?”
Her dad always felt the need to ask that question at some point. It used to seem dutiful, but now it had a different cast.
It was amazing, the reversals you could see if you only kept track. It used to be that her dad was in the middle of a happy marriage and a boisterous family and her mom was single and uncertain. It had been her mom who would ask in that wistful way, “How’s your dad?” Now her mother was happily married to a successful lawyer, living in a big fancy house in Chevy Chase with Carmen’s eleven-year-old half brother, Ryan, and her dad’s face was the one that betrayed longing when he asked about her.
“So, I have something exciting to tell you,” Carmen announced. She couldn’t hold it in any longer. Her father, of all people, was the right person for this news.
“What?”
“Tibby sent me a plane ticket yesterday. To Greece. To Santorini.”
His eyebrows lifted. “Santorini? Where Lena’s grandparents lived? Where you all went when you were in college?”
“Yes, exactly.” Her dad was always good for remembering the facts. “She sent tickets to Lena and Bee too. We’re going to have a reunion.” She felt the tears spring to her eyes as she said it. Nobody could want this, need this, more than she did. She hadn’t known how much until it was presented to her, and now she felt she would perish without it.
“That’s wonderful news.” Her d
ad was nodding. “Tibby must be doing well for herself.”
“I think Brian’s doing well for the two of them. That’s the impression I get. He’s got his software company going. He’s kind of a genius.”
“Well, good for them. When do you go?”
