How to Cut a Date Short #2
After Riley places her order and the server takes off, my dad turns his attention back to us.
He’s dressed for travel today, so he’s wearing a charcoal suit with a light green tie that Riley and I gave him for Christmas last year.
All his ties come from his daughters. “So now that you’ve mocked me for ordering the same thing—”
“Which you do every time,” Riley interjects.
“It’s breakfast. Breakfast is supposed to be the same. Mornings are for routine. You get up, exercise, eat a healthy breakfast,” he says, like it’s a mantra.
“And you already ran three miles, right?” Riley asks.
He rolls his dark blue eyes at her—we get our eyes from him. Our mom has brown eyes. I can’t say it bothers me that Riley and I look more like him than the woman who barely wants to know us.
“Yes, Riley. You saw me come back from the run. You still live with me, you sass monster,” he teases.
That’s mostly true—that she lives with him.
She also stays with his parents, who live next door to them.
When our mom left nearly a decade ago to ostensibly focus on her handbag line, but actually to shack up with Dad’s agent, he became our primary parent.
He built a house for his parents on his property in Mill Valley so they could help raise us.
I was fourteen then, Riley was six, and Mom had moved to Miami.
She did launch the handbag line with the money she protected in the prenup, and she’s still running the wildly successful Simply Grace.
But Michael, the guy she cheated on Dad with?
Pretty sure he’s been out of the picture for a long time.
Well, she always loved accessories more than anything so I suppose her exit strategy worked out for her.
It also taught me a valuable lesson—it’s best if I depend on myself.
I focus on the most important people in my life—my father and little sister. Dad, however, is already focused on me. “So, what’s on tap for today, Leighton?”
“I’m assisting a fashion photographer,” I say, then tell him about some of the work I’m doing with a local designer. “And later this week I’m taking some dog pictures for a Bark in the Park event.”
“Nice,” he says, his tone proud. “And you had a shoot yesterday. How’d it go?”
I mentioned it when I last saw him, so it’s only natural he’d ask. Only now, I feel like a complete traitor lying to him, maybe for the first time. “It…sort of fell apart.”
“What happened?” he asks, and I’m sure he’ll be ready to dole out advice, too, on work and how to handle setbacks. Normally, I like his advice. He knows what it takes to collaborate, manage big personalities, and work with a huge team. Obviously.
Think fast.
“The model canceled, and then the client canceled,” I say. Since he’ll never know Miles stepped in, I add, “So it was a bust.”
He sighs. “What did you do instead?”
Got absolutely wrecked on a chaise longue by one of your fifty-goal scorers.
The guy you saved after an injury. Filthy mouth.
Big heart. Smart too. Basically, a perfect date.
“I just shot some self-portraits,” I say, knowing nothing will shut Dad up faster than the thought of me in lingerie.
He knows I’ve been playing around with that type of shot, but not that I want to build a business shooting boudoir.
Riley sits up straighter, then nudges me, her gaze drifting pointedly down to her hands. They’re below the table. She signs, What did you wear? Can you take me shopping for something pretty?
I laugh, then say out loud to her, “Anytime.”
Dad clears his throat. “I do know ASL too.”
We all know American Sign Language, even though I don’t need it now—I can hear them all well enough and everyone else—clients, friends, neighbors, strangers.
I don’t know if I’ll ever truly have to use it.
But my high school offered it, so I took it just in case.
Riley and my dad decided to learn it too.
Someday I might need or want to use ASL to communicate with them, even though I know I could also use conversational captioning tools on my phone.
Either way, the future can barrel down on you. So I choose to be practical.
I turn to Riley, smiling as I say to my father, “You know it, but only if you can see it.”
He rolls his eyes. “That’s just mean.”
I shrug. “You’re a girl dad. We’re going to have secrets from you.”
“Get used to it,” Riley adds.
“Daughters,” he says with an over-the-top sigh then he moves on, turning to Riley. “And you have a chemistry test today.”
“Which she’ll ace,” I add because she’s a genius STEM girl.
“I don’t know about that,” Riley says.
“You kind of ace everything,” I say, grinning.
“You do,” Dad agrees, and when the server returns with his coffee, he thanks him. We chat more, carefully sidestepping any mention of hockey until Dad studies me for a long beat, then says with a chin nod, “Where’d you get that locket? Is it new?”
Oh. Right. I’m still wearing it. I stupidly couldn’t bring myself to take it off. My cheeks flush as the lie slips out. “Oh, this? Just grabbed it at a thrift shop.”
“It’s pretty,” he says.
“Yeah, I might have to steal it sometime,” Riley teases.
I smile, but beneath it, guilt knots in my stomach.
The food arrives a minute later, and I’m grateful for the distraction.
Before everyone digs in, I take a picture of Riley and my dad—a candid here at the table.
They’re so used to me snagging pics like this that they just keep talking as I frame the shot and snap it.
Then, it’s selfie time for all of us. They lean in close and I take the pic.
I want to capture all life’s moments, big and small.
I want to experience everything, and sometimes that means being able to look back and remember a moment that’s passed you by.
“The camera eats first,” my dad says, faux grumbling.
“And the camera is very hungry,” Riley adds with a huff.
“Please. You both love my pics,” I say. “I’ve seen your smart hubs.”
Riley rolls her eyes but bumps my shoulder—her subtle acknowledgement.
As for Dad, I get his acknowledgement nearly every day.
I gave them both digital photo frames for Christmas last year and they eagerly display the pics on them that I upload to our family album.
And nearly every day my dad takes pics on his phone of the pics the frame scrolls through and texts us notes like “Remember that day?” or “That was fun!”
It’s so meta, I love it. But I love, too, that the pics make him happy.
When breakfast ends, I have some time before I meet the other photographer, so I make a quick decision—I can’t hold on to this necklace.
It feels like it belongs to someone else.
I take a bus to the Presidio and hike along Tennessee Hollow Trail until I find the lockbox I visited yesterday with Miles.
I try to remember the code, but he found it through an app. Dammit. I don’t even know what app he used. Crouching by the stream, I go to the app store and search for geocaching apps. There are five.
I sigh, downloading them one by one, and after ten minutes of setup with the first one, I plug in the location and find the cache. Well, lucky me on that count.
I click on the info and there it is—the code. I punch it into the lockbox as a curl of hope rises up in me. Maybe he left something for me this morning. A note? A trinket? A small token that would show yesterday mattered to him.
Stop it, Leighton. This is so ridiculous. I’m not that girl—the one who hopes for gifts from guys.
“Just move on,” I mutter.
I yank the box open…and it’s empty. The bracelet is gone. My heart sinks heavily, but really this is fine. This is so fine. The bracelet didn’t matter that much to me anyway.
But the necklace? It feels like it could have meant a lot.
Like yesterday did. It’s a day I don’t want to forget.
I have pictures of Miles and me in the studio, but none geocaching of course.
That would have been too much to capture.
I don’t want to forget it though—how I felt when we were together.
Effervescent, hopeful, heady. Like everything was possible.
I run a finger over the heart locket, tracing the grooves and ridges of the metal before I take my phone out and snap a picture.
Something to remember yesterday.
Then, I let it go so someone else can have it.
I take off the heart locket and set it inside the box, its weight lifting from my skin. I close the box, leaving the necklace—and Miles—behind.