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She shrugged. She still wouldn’t meet my eyes but at least she was talking. “We did sunflowers this week. Like Van Gogh. Mine were all wonky so…”
“His were all wonky too, weren’t they?” I said. “So, like, isn’t that a sign of artistic genius? If you wanted them life-like you’d just take a photo, right?”
I was messing with her, of course, but I got a little smile. “Dad, you total philistine! Art is about so much more than just replicating the object in front of you. It’s about expressing how you feel, or saying something about life, or about politics, or war, or pain and sorrow.”
“Or happiness and joy…” I chipped in.
“Whatever,” she mumbled.
We drove in silence for a while. “I’ll go to Guiseppe’s with you,” she said then. “But I don’t want to sit in the place with everyone and get talked to the whole time. Let’s get it to take out, okay, and eat in the car.”
I smiled. We used to do that sometimes, when she was little, just her and me. It was our thing.
“And get Cokes,” she added.
“In a bottle,” I said.
“Obviously,” she said imperiously. ‘It has to be in a bottle, or it’s not the same at all.” That was something my dad used to say, God rest his soul. He passed away a few years ago, of liver cancer, but Kayla remembered him fondly.
We smiled at one another then, remembering Grandpa Harper. “I miss him every day,” I said aloud, my voice breaking with emotion, just a little.
“Me too,” said Kayla. “And Gran-gran.”
My mom had died of emphysema not long after Dad had passed. Well, of that and the grief – that was when she just stopped fighting and gave up. I’d almost forgotten that I’d lost two parents in the past two years too. And that Kayla had lost two beloved grandparents.
Yeah, me and Kayla had been through a lot the last couple of years. We still had a lot of healing to do. And for that we needed focus, and stability.
She did look at me then. ‘”Love you, Dad, but I’m still mad at you.”
“I love you too, and I know you’re mad at me,” I said, as we pulled into the parking lot at Guiseppe’s. “And I also know that treating you to your favorite Vegetarian Feast on thin crust with a side of garlic bread and Coke in a bottle is not going to change that. But it’s a start.”
I called our order in by phone, wanting to avoid having to chat with anyone or pose for selfies. Of course, usually I was more than happy to please the fans – they were one of the reasons I was still on the field, after all - but it wasn’t the moment for it. Lorenzo in the kitchen must have prioritized our order, because in only about fifteen minutes, Guiseppe’s sixteen-year-old grandson Milo ran out with it.
He handed the pizza boxes and drinks through the window and I was interested to note that Kayla blushed a little and got tongue-tied around him. And she wouldn’t look at me when she handed me my thin-crust pizza margherita. I’d managed to resist the pepperoni, thinking of what Erik would say when we went over my nutrition plan and reviewed what I’d eaten at our weekly meeting.
“Someone got a little crush there?” I asked gently.
She blushed bright red at that. “Dad! No, I don’t!”
“Milo’s too old for you,” I said.
She fixed me with a glare. “You should talk.”
I wanted to get into things, about me and Mary-Beth, right then. It was the perfect in. She was pretty much inviting me to talk about it. But somehow I felt completely tongue-tied and the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth.
When did I get so damn awkward around my own kid?
Kayla opened her pizza box and the delicious smell filled the car. I opened mine and inhaled deeply. Then I tore a bit off her garlic bread and put it in my mouth.
“Hey, that’s mine!” she cried.
“If you’re gonna do it wrong, do it right,” I said, and went for another piece. She swatted my hand away and we had a little wrestle, like when she was younger.
We ate in silence for a while, demolishing the pizzas, washed down with long swigs of the delicious cooling Coke.
I knew it was time to talk about me and Mary-Beth then. “Look, about what you heard the other day…” I began.
She didn’t shut me down, so I took a deep breath and waded in. “I’m so sorry that you found out like that, sweetheart.”
