She crumpled up the paper and dropped it in the trash can by the counter. “Who knows? At least it wasn’t a complaint.”
* * *
By the time Kamala got off work and we watched a very unromantic sunset (not a single cloud to paint the sky) it was almost eight o’clock. My dad’s car was in the driveway as I pulled up to my house. He would have gotten home about thirty minutes ago. He’d have come inside, hung his car keys on the hook to the right of the door, sat on the bench to the left of the door and unlaced his shoes. He would have put them carefully underneath the bench. Then he had gone to the sink, washed his hands (which he’d already washed before leaving work but that he somehow thought he could get cleaner). They wouldn’t get cleaner; he was a mechanic, they were permanently lined black. Next he’d watch about thirty minutes of television and finally, he’d go take a shower.
I may have liked a well-planned day, but Dad had fallen into a rut of predictability. It wasn’t a plan, it was just his habits, repeated over and over again. I wasn’t even sure if he realized how predictable he was.
I let myself in the front door. My dad was sitting on the couch watching some nature show.
“Hi,” I said, adding my keys to the hook next to my dad’s.
“Hey, Bird. How was your day?” He was sitting on the edge of the couch, like he did before his shower, worried his coveralls were going to dirty the cushions. The couch was too big for the cramped living room, but it was in good shape, so he would not buy a new one anytime soon.
“Eh, kind of boring. But I did watch a very unromantic sunset.”
“You had a date?” he asked.
“With Kamala.”
He smiled. “How is Kamala?”
I leaned against the back of the couch and watched a tiger on the television stalk a deer. “She’s still way nicer than me.”
“I doubt that,” he said, like dads are required to.
“How was your day?” I asked. Dad worked for a guy named Niles who I hated more than I hated almost anyone. He overworked my dad but didn’t pay him like he overworked him. For years Dad had talked about opening his own small mechanic shop, but he never had the time or money to fulfill that dream and eventually he stopped talking about it. And that was the main reason I hated Niles. He was a dream killer.
“Same old, same old.”
“You should tell Niles that you have a life outside of work,” I said.
“Do I? Have a life?”
I gasped in fake offense. “You live and die for me, Dad.”
“Do I do both at the same time?”
I crinkled my nose. “That’s not the saying, is it? You live and breathe for me?”
“I definitely do that.” He clicked off the television. “I’m going to—”
“Shower?” I finished for him.
“Yes,” he said.
“I’ll make some dinner.”
“Thanks,” he said.
“Is Zoey here?” Zoey was my older sister. She had moved out a year ago with some friends, but she dropped by often.
“No,” he said.
“Okay, dinner for two.”
He headed for his room and I went to the kitchen. The fridge was basically empty. Tomorrow was one of my days off work and, by default, grocery day. In the pantry I found a pack of spaghetti and a jar of sauce, so I started some water boiling.
Twenty minutes later, my dad came downstairs, hair wet from a shower, wearing flannel pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. He was broad-shouldered, with short salt-and-pepper hair and kind brown eyes that always looked tired. We looked nothing alike. I looked almost exactly like my mom in photos I’d seen of her at my age: tall with long brown hair and judgy blue eyes. When I was twelve, I chopped all my hair off because of the similarities between us. Kamala’s mom had to fix my kitchen-scissor massacre. I feared that the impulse to cut all my hair off actually made me more like my mom than the long hair ever did. It’s been long ever since.
“I need to shop,” I said when my dad looked at the plate of spaghetti and canned green beans on the table.
“No, this is good. Thank you.”
“You know, I bet if you owned your own place your boss would let you go home before seven o’clock at night.”
“I have a feeling my boss would be a hardnose.”
I smiled. “True, he is kind of uptight.”
“Do you have fifty grand I can borrow?” he asked.
“I hear the bank lets people borrow money, but I might be wrong.”
He pushed the green beans around his plate before saying, “Yeah, I should look into that.”
He wouldn’t. My dad wasn’t a risk-taker. He was safe, predictable.
“Well, I should go to bed.” And by bed, I meant binge a show on my laptop for a couple of hours.
“Good night,” he said. “Oh, and your mom wants to call this week.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
I didn’t want to talk to my mother. She’d walked out on us seven years ago and never looked back. Since then, she’d been a string of unfulfilled promises. Well, technically even before she walked out she’d built up a nice habit of not following through on her word, of living from moment to moment, spontaneous and impulsive. But leaving pretty much sealed the deal. And so, for my own sanity, I’d put up some boundaries. Talking to her when I wanted to was one of those. But my dad didn’t need to know all that. He already worried enough.
* * *
“He’s rich,” I said, turning my phone toward Kamala. We were sitting in her living room, windows open, fans blowing, watching television. It didn’t get hot often on the central coast. The Pacific Ocean, our very own climate controller, made every day mostly the same. But several weeks during the summer, when the breezes died down and the sun beat heavy, I longed for air conditioners to be standard like they were in other places. Today was one of those days.
“Who’s rich?” she asked, looking at my phone. “Is that…?”
“Dale.”
“Are you cyberstalking him?”
“I’ve been trying to find Asher for the last couple of days. I was hoping to message him and tell him I’m not really Gemma. But he doesn’t exist online.” Between chores and work and a proper trip to the beach, I hadn’t spent much time looking, but the searching I had done led to nothing. “You know people without social media are suspicious.”