Chapter Thirty-Four
Cait
Her father came to Chicago in the third week of March.
He drove up from Bridgeport on a Saturday afternoon with a casserole dish in the back of his car, which was his standard approach to visiting: arrival with food, no warning required.
Cait met him at the door of her building and he looked at her the way he had looked at her since she was seven, with the particular attention of someone who had made it his business to notice the difference between what she said and how she was.
"You look good," he said.
"I'm fine, Dad."
"I didn't say fine. I said good." He carried the casserole up the stairs. "Those aren't the same thing."
They ate at her kitchen table, which was where all significant conversations in her family had happened, at kitchen tables with food between them.
Her father asked about the restructure. She told him: City College cohort, Kelleher renewal, pension recovery ahead of schedule.
He listened with the thoroughness of a man who had spent thirty years at the table himself and knew what the numbers underneath numbers meant.
"And the board thing," he said. "The acquisition attempt."
"Resolved. Board voted against the sale."
"Because of Knox."
"Because of the financial argument and the ESG angle and one board member who made an observation about methodology." She looked at her plate. "Knox presented the case."
Her father was quiet for a moment. He was sixty-three years old and had the patience of someone who had waited out many silences across many tables and understood that what a person said into a silence was often more accurate than what they had planned to say. "How long does he have left," he said.
"Six-week term ends in May."
"And then."
"New York." She looked up. "That's where his firm is."
"I know where his firm is. I asked what happens then."
She set her fork down. Her father watched her with the grey-eyed patience that she had apparently, without realising it, been finding in another person for the past four months. "I don't know yet," she said. "We haven't decided."
"We," her father said. Not a question.
"Yes."
He looked at her. He picked up his fork.
He ate in the comfortable way of a man who had made his assessment and was not going to rush the rest of the conversation.
"Your mother was in Evanston when we met," he said, after a while.
"I was on the South Side. Forty minutes by train, which in 1987 with the Union schedule was more like an hour.
We did it for fourteen months before she moved. "
"She moved."
"She had the more flexible situation. It made sense." He looked at Cait. "We didn't make it into a bigger question than it was. We figured out what made sense and we did it."
She looked at him. "It's not that simple."
"I know it's not. I'm saying it doesn't have to be as complicated as you're making it either." He put his fork down. "You like him."
"Yes."
"More than like."
She looked at the kitchen table, which had held thirty years of her family's significant conversations and was holding this one with the same equanimity. "Yes," she said.
Her father nodded. He picked up his fork again. "Good," he said. Which was all he said, and which was enough.
She thought about it after he left. She washed the casserole dish and put it by the door for him to collect and stood at the kitchen window looking at the alley in the March dusk, which had the first green thing in it, some indestructible weed pushing up between the concrete and the fence, the first green thing she had seen since November.
More than like. She had said yes to that without hesitating. She was noting the absence of hesitation as its own kind of information.
She had hesitated, in the past, with people she had cared about less.
She had maintained the distance and the professional precedence and the careful reserved portion of herself, and she had told herself this was discipline rather than fear, and she had been approximately right about that.
It had been discipline. It had also been, in at least two cases she could identify in retrospect, a way of not finding out whether the thing would hold if she let it bear weight.
She was letting this one bear weight. She had been letting it bear weight since November, since the plant floor and the parking lot and the birria on 18th Street, and it was holding. She did not have a category for that yet. She had the fact of it, which was enough to work from.
Her phone buzzed. A text from Garrett: Sunday. Dinner. Six o'clock.
She looked at it. He cooked. She had not known that about him. She was still finding out things she had not known.
She wrote back: I'll bring wine. And put the phone down and went to finish the dishes, and outside the alley the first green thing pushed up between the concrete and the fence in the last of the March light, patient and specific and not interested in being anything other than what it was.