The Mother's Promise(12)

As David reached for his iPhone on the bedside table, Kate spun around. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going to have a game of Pokémon Go with the kids. What?”

Kate was glaring at him. “You’re not playing now! Dad’s coming to dinner, remember?” She looked at her watch. “Any minute.”

Right on cue the doorbell rang.

Grumbling, David returned the iPhone to the bedside table. Kate glanced in the mirror. She looked calm and together, the opposite of how she felt. Strange as it was, she always felt uncomfortable—nervous even—around her father. Almost as uncomfortable as he seemed around her.

By the time they had walked downstairs, Jake and her father were having an awkward handshake, and Scarlett was attempting to answer a question about her “studies.” Kate’s dad had no idea how to talk to teenagers, and he had a habit of deferring to interview-type questions about college that kids always hated. Jake and Scarlett were polite and they endured them, but Kate knew they found her father hard work.

“Hi, Dad,” Kate said. She raised her arms to give her father a hug, but at the same time he dipped to kiss her cheek. Finally they both stepped back and he thrust a bunch of flowers at her. “Oh, these are nice,” she said, taking them. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Her father nodded brusquely at the floor.

“Nice to see you, William,” David said. His friendly voice seemed to warm the air around them. He shook her father’s hand and this time the connection worked out. “Come on, let’s get you a beer.”

Kate trailed behind them to the back room. Every time she saw her father, like a fool she hoped it would be different. Even now as an adult, long after the proverbial ship had sailed, she hoped for some kind of connection with her only living parent. And every time she was left bereft when it didn’t eventuate. Whenever people heard that she’d been raised by a single father, they always said the same thing: “You must be close.” And Kate always responded, “We are,” because what else could she say? He was a perfectly nice man. He wasn’t abusive or neglectful. How could she admit that she rarely had anything to say to him? That he seemed to have even less to say to her.

According to her grandma—his own mother—her father had always been aloof, even as a baby. “Didn’t suckle well,” her gran was fond of saying, and also, “William never talked much.” That was perhaps the hardest part. When her dad was uncomfortable, he went quiet. When Kate was uncomfortable, she talked. It baffled her, how different they were.

“You’re like your mother,” her gran had always told her. Kate had no idea if this was true (her mother had been hit by a car while cycling to work when Kate was only two) but Kate liked the idea that they were similar, even if it made her absence a little harder. Tonight, especially, Kate longed to have her mother present—the night she was going to announce that a grandchild was on its way.

“Where should I sit?” her dad asked when they reached the dining room.

“Wherever you like,” Kate said. She was used to his habit of immediately sitting at the dining table when he arrived—even though part of her always wondered if it meant he was eager to get the evening over with. She fetched two beers and a platter of dips from the kitchen, where the kids were already hiding out, side by side, staring at their phones. Scarlett looked up guiltily but Kate just smiled at her. When she returned to the dining table, David and her dad were sitting side by side. Her father kept his eyes down, running his fingers over the table’s surface as though admiring something new, even though he’d sat at this very table a dozen times.

“So … how was your day?” Kate asked, sitting down at the head. “Did you do anything special?”

“Read the papers.” Her dad took a cracker and dipped it. “Drove Arthur to pick up his truck from the shop.”

“And how is Arthur?” Kate persisted. Arthur, her father’s oldest friend and another Stanford professor of artificial intelligence, was perhaps the only person on the planet who had less to talk about than her father (other than artificial intelligence, of course). Still, you never knew. Perhaps Arthur was more interesting than she thought.

Her father frowned. “He’s … Arthur.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I guess he is.”

They drifted into silence once again. Kate was racking her brain for another topic of conversation when her dad turned his back on her and launched into conversation with David. And that, she supposed, was the end of that.

When her dad visited, he often spent the entire evening talking at David about something dull and intellectual, which wasn’t a problem exactly, apart from the fact that generally David had no idea what he was talking about. David had gone directly to work from high school and then started an office-cleaning business that had, over the last thirty years, grown from him and a mop to a national organization—one of the top twenty in the U.S. “You don’t need brains to be a success” was one of David’s favorite sayings, which always made her father bristle. “Just common sense and hard work.” Sometimes Kate wondered if her dad had anything to talk about other than his career. If he cared about anything else.

She hoped he might care about one thing.

“Well,” Kate said, when conversation came to a natural pause. “We invited you here tonight for a reason. We have some news.”