Chapter Twenty-Seven #2
As my dad walked me back, I decided it was the last place on this ship I was willing to go. “Dad?” I asked then.
“Yeah, sweetheart?”
“Let’s stop for a drink.”
MY DAD WASN’T drinking, so he got a water “on the rocks,” but I went ahead and ordered the hardest liquor I could think of: a tequila shot.
But then I didn’t drink it—because when I started to lift the shot glass, I realized my hands were still shaking. And I didn’t want my dad to see. So I sat on them instead.
All he knew, really, was that I’d gotten trapped in an abandoned lighthouse.
Maybe that was all he ever needed to know.
We sat in the shade beside the deck railing for the sake of my lingering sunburn, and I watched Bishop’s Cay float away behind us.
What happened next was the longest conversation I’d ever had with my father in my entire life. Possibly longer than all our other conversations put together.
And it happened mostly because I was stalling.
Because I couldn’t face Cooper’s empty room.
So I opened with a real headline-grabber. “I always worry,” I said, “that I’m too much like you.”
“Too much like me?” my dad asked.
“You know,” I explained. “Not good with people.”
“I’m good with people,” my dad protested.
I gave him a look.
“You’re good with people, anyway,” my dad corrected. “You’re joined at the hip with Ashley and Pete. And your mom, too, by the way. Not to mention that kid Christopher.”
“Christopher?” I asked.
“The kid with the scar.”
“Dad, that’s Cooper. How are you so bad with names?”
My dad shrugged, but now he was thinking about Cooper and me. “In my whole life,” my dad said then, “I’ve never had a friend like that.”
He hadn’t?
My dad went on. “I remember that first summer he moved to our block. You were both so scrawny. And completely inseparable, by the way. The two of you fell asleep playing board games in your room almost every night. He wasn’t even supposed to be there!
He must’ve climbed in through the window.
And I’d be going through the house, turning off lights and checking on everybody, and I’d find the two of you curled up like lambs.
So I’d scoop him up and carry him home to his mom. ”
“You did?” I asked. “I don’t remember any of that.”
“Well,” my dad said. “You were asleep.”
“What were you doing checking on me?”
“What do you mean?” my dad asked. “I checked on everybody every night. And I made sure the doors were locked—and the cars, too.”
“But why?”
“Why?” my dad asked, looking at me like I was crazy. “Because I’m the dad.”
Wow. “Does Mom know about this?”
My dad thought about it. “I don’t know. I guess she was usually asleep by then.”
“You should tell her.”
“Why?” my dad asked.
“Because you’ve really got to start taking more credit for things.”
My dad shook his head, like that really wasn’t his way.
To make my point, I asked, “How’s your second chance going?”
My dad sighed. “I don’t know. When your mom first fell for me, I was younger and better looking. Not sure why she’d want to hang on to this craggy old face now.”
“You don’t have to make her fall in love with you,” I said. “You just have to remind her that she already did.”
My dad considered that.
“Once you love somebody,” I said, “once you’ve decided to let yourself love somebody … it’s hard to turn that off.”
My dad nodded, but then he said, “She’s just been so unhappy for so long.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said.
“No?”
“Cooper didn’t talk to me for four years, did you know that?”
“I didn’t.”
“We both came home after college graduation, and I thought we were going to spend the whole summer hanging out. But Cooper went radio silent for a few days, and then, when I went to find him at his house, his mom told me he’d moved to London to play in a band.
And when I asked her when he was coming back, she said, ‘He’s not. ’”
My dad frowned.
“He just disappeared. He didn’t return my calls or my texts. He completely ghosted me—for four years.”
My dad said, “I thought I hadn’t seen that kid around for a while.”
“Yeah. And then he showed up at my wedding out of nowhere. And then he showed up at this wedding out of nowhere. And he never explained to me anything about why he disappeared from my life. But—you know what?”
“What?”
“It didn’t matter.”
“What didn’t matter?”
“Any of it! His disappearing. His lack of apologies—or explanations, or RSVPs. He just showed up at the front door of my life like he had his own key—and let himself back in.”
“Are you saying that once you love people, it’s hard to unlove them?”
“I’m saying you still have Mom’s key. And if you really want her back, you’d better hurry up and use it.”
Then I demanded he give me his phone and made him take a selfie with me so we could send it to the family group chat with the message Greatest dad in the world.
When my dad saw it, he got all bashful. “Who’s gonna believe that?” he wondered aloud.
But I just raised my hand like I was volunteering. “I do.”
At that, my dad reached over and ruffled my hair—and it felt exactly like we were close, and, more than that, like we always had been. And then, before I even realized what I was doing, I was crying. My throat was thick, and my breaths were shaky, and my face was wet.
“Sweetheart,” my dad said, frowning and scooting closer. “What is it?”
And then everything came tumbling out. All of it. Operation Conquest, and sharing Cooper’s cabin, and my wild hatred for Bridesmaid Two, and Finn Turner turning out not to be the one. Even the whole first-kiss situation.
And I guess I got so caught up in the telling of the story, and trying to connect all the pieces together just right, that I kind of shared some of Ashley’s theories about my father issues without thinking.
“And Ashley says,” I concluded, not even fighting the tears now, “that because you never made it to school to pick me up that day, and then I had to walk home in the rain, and then I got pneumonia, that that whole first-kiss thing is melded in with all my abandonment issues, and it’ll haunt me for the rest of my life—but now it’s even worse because it’s not some random dude on our street I’m forever bonded to, it’s Cooper.
Who just quit. And left the ship. I never got to explain the truth.
I never got to clear anything up. And now he’s given up on me for good. ”
My dad looked totally baffled.
“It’s a lot of details, I know,” I said, blowing my nose with a cocktail napkin.
But my dad shook his head. “What was the part about me not showing up to get you at school?”
Kind of a side detail, but okay. “You know,” I said, wiping my face with a fresh napkin. “That day you forgot to get me at school? So I tried to walk home under the freeway? And then the scraped knees … the rain … the pneumonia … blah-blah-blah?”
But he was still shaking his head. “I didn’t forget to pick you up that day.”
“Yeah, you did. It’s fine.”
“No,” my dad said. “I was there. I was fifteen minutes early, in fact. I parked in that big driveway out front, and I waited until four thirty—and when you never showed up, I got out and started looking for you. I went through every classroom. I asked the cleaning staff. I combed the entire playground. In the rain. I was about to call the police when your mom called me home.”
“You were out front?” I said. “The whole time?”
My dad nodded.
“But car pool,” I explained, realizing he was getting this detail a bit late, “was on the back driveway. Near the gyms.”
“Guess I missed that memo.”
“Did you tell Mom? That you were there—that you hadn’t forgotten?”
“You know, I’m not sure. The whole house was in chaos by the time I got back—and then you got so sick.”
“You didn’t tell her.”
“I didn’t not tell her. Not on purpose. We were just—a little busy.”
“Dad!” I said. “She’s been mad at you about that for two decades.”
“She has?”
“We all have! We developed a whole theory around it—that you abandoning me that day is the seed of all my intimacy issues.”
My dad looked affronted. “But I didn’t abandon you.”
“Well—it would have been nice if you’d mentioned that to literally anybody.”
My dad was taking it all in. “Do you have intimacy issues?”
I burst out with a “Ha!” Then I added, “I faked a faint to get out of my own wedding … so. Yeah. Pretty sure I do.”
“I never liked that guy.”
I nodded, like Good call. Then my dad and I just looked at each other for a minute, taking it all in. How could we all have had it so wrong all this time?
“Dad,” I said after a while. “You have to tell Mom that you came to school that day, okay? She really needs to know that about you.”
“Okay,” he said solemnly. Then he reached out and squeezed my hand. “I’ll tell Mom that about me if you’ll tell Cooper something about you.”
“Tell Cooper what about me?”
My dad made his voice very gentle, like he might be giving me news I hadn’t heard. “That he’s the one who has your key.”
“He does?”
My dad nodded. “Even I can see that.”
My eyes filled up again. “You can?”
“And I’ll bet you something else, sweetheart.”
“What?”
“You’ve got his, too.”