Chapter 7
“Oh, my goodness!” The receptionist stood up from her desk just inside the front door and stared at me. “Grace Curran?”
The cold wind that had blown in with me settled back down as the building’s door closed. “I’m Grace,” I acknowledged.
“I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve seen you,” she said. “Years! Some of your sisters stop by but I never see Patrick, either.”
Yes, the last place my brother would voluntarily come would be here, our father’s office.
The two of them had never gotten along and mostly didn’t speak to each other.
“I don’t remember ever visiting very much,” I agreed.
My older sisters talked about playing here on Saturdays when they’d gone out with our dad, but maybe I hadn’t been born yet and when I got older, he hadn’t done much with me on weekends.
I didn’t remember him being around very much at all.
But he’d wanted to see me now, and the receptionist smiled and told me to go ahead, that she’d also let him know that I was on the way back.
Her eyes swept over me but she didn’t stop smiling as I walked toward his office.
The desk just outside his door was currently empty, but there were plenty of other people here who were working hard.
I had just been at work, too, but I’d showered before coming here.
I was glad that it was over because while I had been there…
it was bad. “Where the fuck have you been?” my client had asked me angrily, when I’d finally arrived.
Yes, I’d shown up late, but at least I had shown. I had forced myself to do it.
I’d only shrugged as an answer and put down my bag.
“Should I start?” I had asked him. Unlike the heat in the cabin that barely limped along, the steam in his house had been going hard enough that the windows were foggy.
He had watched as I’d slowly gotten ready, taking a lot of time because I hadn’t wanted to start.
But now I told myself that it had been ok.
I’d picked up the money on the table as I left so I had some cash in my pocket, too.
“Grace.”
I came out of my thoughts to see that my dad stood in the door of his office. He wasn’t smiling or looking happy to see me, though. I wondered what he thought I would do at this point, with the divorce almost final. Was that why I was here?
“Hello,” I answered. “What did you want?”
“I thought we could go to lunch,” he said, and I had the idea that it was right around a normal time of eating.
Regina had been texting a lot, which she did when she and Pinar had their midday break and she could look at her phone.
She’d wanted to know if I was coming to their New Year’s office celebration, which she was already planning.
They usually had lunch together at a Chinese restaurant but Theo had specifically requested another type of cuisine.
“I’ll go eat,” I said now, because I was hungry but I was still wary. “Where?”
He meant at a Coney Island, which I was perfectly happy with.
It wasn’t that far of a walk but it was freezing today and I really, really hoped that the furnace was still going at the cabin.
The temporary repairs on the day after Thanksgiving seemed to be failing.
Anyway, there was no point in putting in a new furnace until the holes in the walls, the floors, and the roof were all plugged, so the contractor that Nicola had hired—
“Are you off in Grace-land again?” my dad asked.
“Grace-land” was a joke he’d liked to make. It was the world he said I entered when I wasn’t paying enough attention to what was happening around me. I guessed that it did happen more than it should have.
“No, I’m here.” I was cold, too, and I realized that it would have been a smart idea to put on something other than these basketball shorts. “What do you want?”
He wanted to wait to talk until we were seated in a booth inside the delicious-smelling restaurant and until I’d ordered a pop to drink and he’d gotten water. “I’m on a health kick,” he explained.
I studied him and decided that he did look healthier.
After he and my mother had separated, Sophie had gotten really upset about his decline.
She’d thought that he was haggard and she kept reminding us that he was old, things she had blamed on our mom.
“He’s falling apart after all those years of putting up with her tomfoolery!
” my sister had seethed in our group chat, which I remembered because that was a great word and I’d decided to use more often myself.
But now, maybe due to more time away from the tomfoolery (which I realized I hadn’t used as much as I should have), he was looking a lot better.
He was holding his shoulders straighter and he had walked fast to the restaurant, too.
Of course, it was cold and even if he wasn’t wearing shorts, he would have felt it and wanted to hurry.
Still, he was different. “Why are you on a health kick?” I asked.
“I’m not getting any younger. I have grandchildren that I’d like to be around for, even if I don’t get to see with them as much as I’d like.” He frowned. “I wish that wasn’t the case.”
It was because of the family factions and how my siblings had divided their loyalties.
I doubted that he spent much time with Esme, my brother Patrick’s daughter, and I bet that he wouldn’t have a large role in the life of his next grandson, Juliet’s baby.
She and Beckett weren’t telling anybody, but Theo and I had decided that we agreed with Dion and she was having a boy.
That was mostly because I insisted and Dr. Winter was ignoring his own medical opinion that it was basically fifty/fifty.
“But do you even like kids? I didn’t think so,” I said, and now my dad looked very surprised.
“Grace, I’m the father of seven!” he told me.
That was true without a doubt, no matter how many times I’d had to swear to strangers that there really were that many of us. But it didn’t make me any more convinced because I’d heard him say that they should have stopped having kids. I didn’t believe that he liked all or even most of us.
“We were mom’s idea,” I pointed out.
“I don’t want to be crass, but I also figured into the equation.
I know Sophie thinks that I was coerced by your mother in every decision, but I had the opportunity to speak my mind.
And to act differently,” he added. Then he looked at me for a long time.
“That’s exactly why I wanted to talk to you today. ”
But first we had to order, because the waiter came.
I got a lot, figuring that it was a while until dinner and there was plenty I wanted to accomplish at the cabin.
I found that work was easier on a full stomach and I liked to wait to have dinner until Theo got home, which could take a long time.
We often didn’t eat until ten or later, and depending on how much physical labor I’d done, I sometimes nearly fell asleep in my Kung Pao chicken.
My dad selected his lunch more carefully and although he got less, his order took longer.
He asked for a salad with the dressing and feta on the side, a pita sandwich with grilled chicken but none of the sauce that make it taste good, no fries, and another glass of water.
“Healthy choices aren’t always the tastiest,” he acknowledged, smiling, but then he sighed when I only nodded back. “I see that you’re still angry at me.”
“I was angry for a while,” I answered. “Now I feel disappointed in you.”
He winced. “That’s difficult to hear.”
Well, it had been difficult for me to hear that he hadn’t wanted me or Brenna. It had also been hard to hear that he didn’t think I had a logical thought in my head, which he’d repeated a few times over my life. He was probably correct, though.
“When I married your mother, I believed that it was for life,” he told me.
“She thought so, too. So did everybody who heard you promise it, like the priest and your parents.”
“Grace, I’m trying my best! Would you have had me stay with her, with how things were?”
“Why should I have an opinion on that? You were the ones making the decisions, not me and not Nicola, or Patrick, or Addie. You made the decision to leave and now Mom is upset and so are the rest of us, even if we do understand.”
He started nodding. “You understand,” he said, and he sounded happy about that.
“No, not really.”
“You just said—”
“I understand that Mom is hard to deal with sometimes, but I don’t understand saying that you love someone and then going out and trying to hurt her on purpose.
I never cheated on any of my boyfriends, not even the guy who was married.
I didn’t know that at the time, not until Sophie found the records and showed me. ”
“So you made a mistake,” he said. “You can also understand how that can happen.”
“You didn’t clean out another woman’s gutters by mistake,” I scoffed.
“What?”
Those texts about his assistant’s gutters were how I’d first known that there was a big problem in my parents’ marriage.
I had been living at home back then, after things had gone wrong at the third college I’d been attending, and I had picked up his phone thinking that it might be mine (it turned out that mine had been gotten under the fender liner of my previous car, but that was a long story).
I had seen the messages about cleaning her gutters and it had been obvious.
“I mean that you didn’t go have sex with your assistant by mistake,” I said. “You were married to Mom, but you made a decision to take out your—”
“Grace Michaela Curran!”
I stopped talking about that, but I decided that I didn’t want to talk anymore at all.
“Where are you going?” my dad asked me as I stood and put on my coat. “Let’s at least discuss things.”
“No, I don’t want to. I’m not going to talk to anyone else about it, either,” I said. “I think that was why you wanted to see me.”