The Unexpected Everything(35)

I hesitated, then typed again.

ME

But we can go to the Crane if you want. It’s pretty good.

I put my phone down and prepared to back out of Clark’s driveway—I didn’t want him to think it was weird that I was just sitting there, hanging out after I’d walked his dog. But a second later, it buzzed, and I picked it up.


ALEXANDER WALKER

Sounds good. Meet there? Or meet at home?

I stared at the last word he’d typed. I knew what he meant, of course. He meant the house we were both currently living in. But whenever I saw or heard that word, I always thought of the farmhouse first. Our house in Stanwich Woods was never the place that came to mind.

ME

I’ll meet you there.

? ? ?

I’d gotten a text when I was merging onto the highway, and so it wasn’t until I pulled into the Crane’s parking lot that I was able to look at it.


ALEXANDER WALKER

Stuck in traffic by East View. There in 15.

I looked at the words on my screen for a moment, trying to get them to them make sense, before I realized that the text had been sent twenty minutes ago, which meant I was probably late.

I hurried into the restaurant, feeling like everything was suddenly backward. I had gotten used to my dad being perpetually ten—or more—minutes late, to the point where I rarely showed up for things with him on time. I’d start getting texts from Peter, or some random intern, usually a minute before my dad would be there, and then get up-to-the-second information about where he was and what he was doing, like he was a plane whose progress needed to be monitored. So it was beyond strange to walk in and see my dad sitting at a table, waiting.

“Hi,” I said, sliding down into the seat across from him. “Uh—sorry. I thought you’d be late.”

“It’s fine,” my dad said, giving me a quick smile. “No problem.”

I reached over and took a sip from my water glass, noticing how strange it was that my dad’s BlackBerry wasn’t on the table with us—that, frankly, my dad was here at all, not jumping up to take calls or sending e-mails while I texted with my friends or played games on my phone.

“Something to drink?” the waitress asked, and when I saw who it was, I sank a little lower in my seat, holding up my menu to block my face. My friends and I had almost been kicked out of here by this same waitress—Wanda—when she and Toby got into an argument about the complimentary mint bowl and how many was considered a reasonable number to take. It had been a few months, though, so hopefully I was in the clear.

“Iced tea,” my dad said, and I piped up, “Diet Coke.”

I waited until I was sure she’d left before lowering my menu again. “You okay?” my dad asked, looking at me with his eyebrows raised.

“Fine,” I said immediately. “Just fine.” I opened my menu, then set it aside immediately, since I always ordered the same thing here. My dad set his menu aside as well, and we looked at each other in silence. I suddenly wished I’d pretended I needed more time with it, just to have a prop in front of me. “So,” I said, after we’d gotten our drinks and given our orders and I wasn’t sure I could stand the silence any longer, “um, how was your day?”

“Fine,” my dad said automatically. It seemed like that was all there was going to be to it, but after a moment he went on. “Yesterday was the last day I could have any communication with the office. The investigation started today, so I’m officially not working.”

“Oh,” I said, a little taken aback. I’d realized, in theory, that my dad would have to stop working when he took his leave of absence. But like all good theories, I’d never seen it put into practice. My dad worked all the time; it was just who he was. Even before he’d been a congressman, I used to hear stories about his public-defender days, sleeping on couches and eating vending-machine dinners, standing up for the people nobody else was going to defend. It looked like he was still working—he was wearing a suit and a collared shirt, but no tie, which was what he wore when he wanted to seem professional but not stuffy. “So,” I said, “um . . . what did you do?”

“I went to the library,” he said, “got some books I’d been wanting to read for, oh, the last decade or so. And then proceeded not to read any of them. Did you know that we have a channel that shows classic basketball games?”

I shook my head. “I did not.”

“Well . . . we do,” my dad said, giving me a slightly embarrassed smile. “I may have watched one from the eighties. One or four.”

I smiled at that. “Even though the outcome was decided years ago?”

“Ah,” my dad said as he unwrapped his chopsticks, separated them, and set them to the side of his silverware, “but there always seems like the possibility that something might change this time around.” Silence fell again, and I was about to take a breath and say something about the decor, or the size of the restaurant, when my dad asked, “So what about you?” He cleared his throat. “I mean . . . how was your day?”

“Oh,” I said, “well . . .” I knew I should probably tell him about my job; with Maya trusting me to work on my own, it seemed likely that I wasn’t going to get fired. But I didn’t want to see his expression when he heard what I was going to be spending the summer doing. I knew I’d have to tell him eventually, but not today, not when I’d just begun to feel like I was getting the hang of it. “It was fine,” I said, and without warning, my mind was suddenly back on the text he’d sent. “Um . . . you texted earlier that you were on East View?” My dad nodded. “Were you . . .” I took a breath and made myself ask it. “Were you at the old house?”